So, I decided to do a little more investigation and create a list of some of the most popular fashion websites and their important metrics.

Enjoy!

PS. The list has been compiled using Alexa, Whois domain tools, Ispionage and an inhouse created SEO tool we use.

Here are some staggering facts about WordPress:

• In the top million high-traffic sites, at least one-sixth of them are powered by WordPress [Source]
• There are sixty million WordPress users
• Built by volunteers and is free and open source
• More than half of the top million high-quality sites that use content management system operate on WordPress
• With Fantastico and other third-party installers, WordPress single-click installation is allowed by most hosting providers
• Better security and functionality is provided through constant WordPress updates
• To customize better backend functionality and front-end appearance, WordPress helps integrate plugins and themes with ease

Is WordPress good for Ecommerce websites?

WordPress can be a robust platform for your Ecommerce website with the right plugins, themes and other add-ons.

Here are a few more reasons why WordPress can serve your Ecommerce needs well:

• An impressive variety of themes – WordPress offers users a stunning range of themes to choose from. Though only certain themes can be used for Ecommerce sites, there are enough to choose from. The best aspect is that you can modify the themes on this open source platform and customize depending on your specific preference.
• Plugins allow you to add functionality – Just like Apple claims “there’s an app for that”, for any Ecommerce functionality you wish to add there’s a pretty good chance “there’s a plugin for that”! This is one of the major reasons for the widespread use of this platform. All plugins are offered free of charge, at least the base version and integration in most cases isn’t too difficult either. Some of the popular extensions offered by WordPress include Google XML site maps, WP-polls, Akismet and Yoast SEO .  While some of them help your site rank high on popular search engines, others are designed to help minimize or even completely eliminate spam comments. Certain extensions enable you to engage site visitors through interactive polls while certain others allow you to back up vital website data to be retrieved later when you want to.
• Enhance the sidebar contents using widgets – Widgets can help you change the WordPress sidebar content with ease. Using widgets, you can also include gizmos, HTML, images and text for ecommerce site side bars. Many useful purposes are served by easy tools such as text widgets. You can add notices on special deals and rebates, add HTML lists that link directly to categories of products and create featured products using this excellent WordPress tool.
• WordPress offers enhanced product customization options – One of the most important aspects of an Ecommerce site is continuous addition and removal of products. WordPress allows you to add and customize your products using simple setting options. All you have to do is to follow a simple process to add weight and shipping settings, price, stock control, voucher codes, downloads and merchant notes.

So, are there any disadvantages of using WordPress for Ecommerce?

Actually, yes there is.

Whilst WordPress is a great platform for small Ecommerce websites, for larger online stores we usually prefer using Magento or a custom-coded Ecommerce platform.

Whilst WordPress has many advantages, essentially you are using a piece of software which means that to a certain extent, you are limited by what you can and cant do.

A custom-built Ecommerce platform has many advantages such as complete flexibility and customisation which can be especially important if you are selling niche goods, where the products themselves require a certain level of customisation before purchase (E.g., made-to-order goods).

If you aren’t sure which platform to go with, Flow20 can help you decide. Drop us a line at create@flow20.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Content generation

By now, you’ve heard it all too often – “Content is king”. What’s often missed out 2 important keywords – “unique” and “quality”. And, I’m probably using the word “unique” here differently to how you think..

If you are hoping to improve your rankings with the help of content, there are 2 things to keep in mind :

1)  Don’t publish content for it’s own sake

As important as it is to regularly publish content on your website, it’s (almost) equally important for your content to be unique.  When I say unique, I’m not talking about taking an existing piece of content that already exists, spinning (rephrasing) it and then running it by copyscape.com to make sure it’s unique.

What I’m talking about is thinking about new ideas and topics for your articles, something that does not already exist in some way and then writing the content for it from scratch.

Up until 2 years ago, I followed the very method that I described initially (spinning content). And that works too. However, since I have changed my SEO strategy when it comes to creating content and forcing myself to come up with unique ideas, whether that’s for our own site or that of a client, I have found the effects to be significantly better, advantages far outweighing the cost.

Another significant advantage of this approach is that there’s a decent chance that your content will appear within the first page, probably within the top half of the search results which has the potential to bring a lot of long-tail traffic to your website.

So how do you go about generating unique content?

If you’re carrying out SEO for your own website, this is easy. Once you begin the process, you’ll usually find that a lot more ideas come to your mind when you begin writing your first piece. Make a note of these which will serve as a ready list for your content ideas (remember to hyperlink them within the articles for additional benefits).

If you’re optimising a client website, this is initially a little more time-consuming but gets much easier later on.

To start with, you could ask your client for ideas. Chances are, they’ll have a long list ready but they just didn’t know it. Giving them a few examples usually helps.  Or, it’s possible they have subscribed to some industry newsletters – ask them to forward those to you.  I have been doing this for some time now and find it an instant way to help me think of ideas.

Another way to think of unique topics for your client is to draw inspiration from industry specific news.

2) Quality is important

For a long time, I believed in quantity over quality when it came to generating content. And I think the reason simply is that it worked.

However, ever since my focus changed to quality, limiting the number of pieces I wrote (for our own site) or our copywriters wrote (for client sites) and trying to make the content ‘authoritative’, the results have been amazing.

So how do you improve your content quality?

Here are some of the guidelines I keep in mind:

1. Minimum word count of 500 words
2. Use h and bold tags
3. Using images where possible (alt-tag them)
4. Citing references where possible
5. Hyperlinks within text to related content
6. Not ‘afraid’ to link to external sites

Once you achieve a certain level of quality, the level Google wants, you’ll regularly find your content achieving decent rankings which over time can significantly improve traffic numbers to your website

3) Making your content “rich”

Take a closer look at the pages appearing within the top 5-7 results for a competitive search terms and what do you see?  There’s a pretty good chance that the webpages you’re finding don’t have “thin” content. You’re noticing a lot of text, hyperlinks within the text, images and perhaps some external links as well?

I studied this extensively during our first few super-competitive SEO projects and do this occasionally even now and have found this to be the case almost always, especially when it comes to law, insurance and health sectors. You may have already noticed this in articles published on Search Engine Land or SEOmoz.

Adding content like this helps improve the authority of your article which will ultimately help your rankings. I have already mentioned the list for this above (the points under ‘…guidelines I keep in mind’).

4) Update old content

When was the last time you updated old content on your website? If you are like most people, including me until not so long ago, the answer is probably never.

Until now, I have talked about content generating ideas and the structure of your content. This is the easy one.

Whilst getting yourself generating content in a way that benefits your SEO may take some time, one place where you can immediately start “practicing” is with the existing content on your website. The guidelines in terms of how to increase content quality and richness remain the same. However, even adding more content without any of the elements to increase quality can help your rankings.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to add a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). This is easy to think of and not only can it help your rankings but also has the additional benefit of helping your website visitors take an informed decision and improving conversion rates.

Over the last 6 months, I have been updating the existing content on our client sites, some of which is over 2 years old and have noticed some good improvements to the rankings of these individual pages. A positive side-effect is that it helps the rankings of other pages closely linked to the one being updated and usually the home page as well.

That’s it for now and I hope this helps. On a sidenote, you may find the services of a professional copywriter useful in helping your SEO efforts.  Usually, it’s not lack of ideas but time which keeps us from publishing content and a professional SEO copywriter can help.

It may not be easy finding one with in-depth knowledge of generating content for proper SEO benefits, like the ones mentioned above so start by sharing an example with them.

Learn more about generating SEO-effective content.

I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. Send me an email shirish@flow20.com

Having spoken with countless clients over the last 6 years that I have been carrying out SEO, I have found this one of the most common complaints from clients who have either carried out SEO themselves or used a SEO company that they weren’t happy with.

Getting to Google’s page 1 is only winning half the battle. The other half is being able to monetize the newly found visitors – whether that’s an immediate sale or a lead which has some prospect of ultimately converting into one.

So how do you ensure that you make any money from your SEO efforts? By taking a very close look at your SEO strategy and your website.

Let’s take a closer look!

Reason #1 – your SEO efforts isn’t going to give you any return if you are ranking on page 1 for the “incorrect” terms.

The keyword here is incorrect. Not irrelevant.

Time and time again, new clients come to us saying that they are ranking on page 1 for some very appropriate terms but it isn’t generating any enquiries.  Upon further investigation, I usually find that although the client may in fact be on page 1 for relevant search terms, there is a disconnect on the level of relevance by the client’s point of view vs. the website visitor.

Take the example of a window cleaning company that came to us recently with this problem. They were ranking on page 1 for ‘window cleaning london’ but not generating many enquiries.  Now you may think why is that since this search term seems pretty relevant. However, once I looked at their website, I found that the site was heavily focused towards serving the needs of business customers rather than private individuals.

Their home page hardly had any mention of serving private clients and the design as well as the text and images was all geared towards generating enquiries from businesses which was alienating private clients.

So what’s the solution here?

The “correct” search terms in this case would be commercial window cleaning, window cleaning contractors, commercial window cleaning company and so on.  These are the kind of search queries that would be used by companies, the kind that the client in question is seeking and the look and feel of the website would much better resonate with these corporate clients.

The takeaway here is that take a good look at the search terms you are currently ranking for and whether it is generating the right kind of traffic as per your business needs.

A scientific way to do this would be to look at your keyword data within Google Analytics – by looking at the quality of traffic, in terms of Bounce Rates, time on site and exit rates of the various search terms generating traffic; you should have a better idea of which search terms are suitable for your website.

Reason #2 – you are expecting too many enquiries from search terms that aren’t competitive enough.

When I say ‘competitive’ I’m talking about the search volumes of each search term generating any traffic for your website. And I’m talking about short-tail queries not long-tail.

Each search query usually has some search volume – the number of people each month that type out that search term (you can get an idea using Google’s Keyword Tool)

To estimate just how many enquiries your SEO efforts should be generating in the first place, you should take into account, each search term’s search volume (I usually use the ‘Exact’ match option in Google’s keyword tool as that’s the worst case scenario), the expected Click Through rate % depending on your ranking  and the possible number of enquiries depending on your website’s conversion rate.

Once you know these numbers, you can safely make some assumptions on what the realistic number of enquiries is.

Reason #3 – your website may be letting you down, not the SEO

If you are sure that you are ranking for the correct search terms and being reasonable in your ROI expectations from the SEO, another reason may be that your website is letting you down.

Earlier I gave the example of the window cleaning company’s website tailored to corporate clients whilst the SEO strategy wasn’t. The website just wasn’t saying the right things to encourage a conversion.

Take a closer look at your own website and think about whether it’s making similar mistakes?  If you are offering a service, are you providing enough essential information to help encourage users to get in touch with you? If you are offering a product for sale, are you giving all the necessary information and/or specification about that product to convince a user to part with their money? This is especially important where you are selling non-mass produced or own-branded goods.

When was the last time you compared your website to that of your competitors and made any improvements to yours?

Although the list of improvements you can make to your website is almost endless, for the purposes of this discussion and to improve your ROI from SEO or generate more enquiries, some should be more obvious for your website than others.

For example, in highly specialised business 2 business services, it’s common for business to have a section dedicated to the publication of blogs, resources, whitepaper and so on as it demonstrates the company’s ability within that field – important for securing new business.

Whilst this may not be the case with you,  if some sort of value-added offering is commonplace in your industry, whether that’s publication as mentioned above, training or something else, then you should consider offering this if you aren’t already.

As small business owners, we are often too close to our website to be able to evaluate objectively which is why the help of a family of friend can be invaluable in improving your website.

At the very least, you can ask them to use your website and tell you what they like, they don’t and what they would change. Or, you can try out an inexpensive usability testing service such as usertesting.com or feedbackarmy.com which can give you insights into weak areas of your website and suggestions for improvement.

I hope you find this post useful and helps you in growing your business from your SEO efforts. Here’s another good article about why you may not be getting any enquiries even though you have rankings.

If you need help or have a question, feel free to contact me at shirish@flow20.com

Here are some metrics that I recommend most Google Analytics newbies get the hang of to begin getting the basic understanding of their website performance and visitor behavior.

Bounce Rate

This is perhaps, one of the most important metrics for your website. Simply put, Bounce Rate (BR) refers to the number of single page visits. In other words, if the user didn’t click any further into your website upon arrival then that counts as a Bounced visit and Bounce Rates are expressed as percentages.

A high Bounce Rate is usually indicative of design (as opposed to usability) issues of a website. With just under 3 seconds to convince a new visitor to remain on your site, being able to tell your new visitors what your site is all about and what they can expect there needs to be an intuitive process.

For most small business websites, a low Bounce Rate can be anywhere between 20 – 40%.   However, for the purposes of evaluating your website’s performance, it’s important to take other metrics (talked about below) into account as well, because Bounce Rate % on it’s own can be sometimes misleading. For example, news websites and blogs usually have a BR as high as 80% as most users visit the site to get an update on news headlines with only a minority staying to read further.  A high BR in this case isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Similarly, your own website’s contact page may have a high BR but this could simply mean that visitors leave that page once they have the necessary contact information.

For more on Bounce Rates, check out – What is your website’s Bounce Rate?.

Referral data

Another important metric to watch out for is the referral traffic – where your visitors come from and who sends them (If you are involved in any form of Search Engine Optimisation, this is perhaps the most important metric in that case).

To get here, click on Traffic Sources > Overview  from menu on left. You’ll see a list of keywords towards the bottom right of the page. Click on ‘view full report’

If you are using Google Analytics, you’ll generally find 3 types of referral data

• Keywords  - this helps you understand the search terms visitors have used to find your website.  Not only can this be invaluable in directing your SEO efforts, by combing your knowledge of Bounce Rates with keyword data, you can begin to determine the quality of keyword traffic and which keywords and search terms are bringing you the highest quality of traffic
• Referrals – another useful piece of information is to know which other sites, blogs and online properties are sending traffic your way
• Direct  - the % of direct traffic can also be an indicator on how well your marketing efforts are working.  Generally speaking, direct traffic is good – these are visitors who have most likely entered your URL directly (or clicked on your URL elsewhere). Quality of direct traffic and visitors is usually high

Time on site

Once you have taken the necessary steps to reduce your bounce rate, your next focus should be on how you can increase the amount of time a visitor spends on your website.   Similar to the offline world, the longer a visitor spends on your (virtual) shop, the higher the chances of a sale or enquiry being made.

For ways on increasing time on site, check out How much time does your website visitor spend on your website? Or check out our related presentation on Slideshare – Why average time on site is an important analytics metric

Site content > All pages

If you use Google Analytics, then this is a metric I use quite often for client sites as well as ours. All pages gives you the overall performance of your website pages.  From Bounce Rate to time on site to keyword data and exit % , I find this to be a very easy way to find bottlenecks within websites, which pages aren’t working and which one needs improvement.  The sort function is especially useful for this.

So what’s the difference between mobile and responsive web design?

Let’s take a look…

A few advantages and disadvantages of each design:

Conclusions:

A responsive web design is a more advanced way to make your site mobile-friendly and makes your website look great no matter the device it is being viewed on.

Because more and more people are using mobile web  to access email, social networks, search and more, creating a browsing experience optimized for mobile makes sense.

For further reading, check out the 10 Facts about Mobile SEO article,  or our websites pages on Mobile, Responsive and Web Design.

Here at Flow20, we have invested a significant amount of time and resources into building and refining our mobile SEO offerings so your business can be seen by a larger audience.

If you are new to the world of Mobile SEO, here are some facts to help you get started:

1. Mobile SEO ensures that your visitors readily find your listings or mobile website while browsing from their smartphone for your niche keywords.
2. The top industries currently benefiting from mobile search are: Travel, Business and Entertainment industries.
3. Mobile searches are largely local in nature (3 out of 5 mobile searches are for local businesses)
4. Google has a separate index for mobile content so if your site isn’t mobile optimised, chances are that it isn’t indexed. (Here’s a useful post on this from the official Google Webmaster blog)
5. The bounce rate for sites that don’t have a mobile version or an optimised mobile version landing page is over 75%.
6. Be aware that when you set up your mobile SEO campaign that Google considers iPads as mobile devices.
7. A mobile app does not have the SEO value and benefits that a mobile website can.
8. Effective mobile optimisation ensures your website is mobile ready.
9. Standard search engine optimisation is very different from mobile SEO in the length of the title being less than 55 characters plus there are fewer keywords used.
10. Mobile SEO does not require significant changes compared to your desktop SEO.

If you are interested to learn more about how Mobile SEO can help grow your business and increase your market share, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

Mobile users visit your website with a very clear goal in mind and nature of the visit tends to be short and thin.  Whilst website copy writing can make or break any website, this is not true anywhere else more than for mobile websites.A well written mobile website copy can have a significant impact on your mobile website’s conversion rate and ultimately, on your mobile protery’s Return on Investment.

Before you begin generating your mobile website content, whether yourself or via the help of a profesisonal copywriter, here are some tips to bear in mind:

1.  Start with identifying the purpose of each mobile page

Unless you’re an E-commerce business, you’ll only need a few pages for your mobile website. The obvious ones are Home, About us, Contact/Location. This will of course vary depending on the nature of your business. For example, if you’re a restaurant, you’ll want to have a menu page and perhaps, an online ordering page and maybe, even a online reservations page.  If you’re a builder, you’ll also want a Services page and perhaps another one for prices. You get the picture.

Once you have a sitemap in place, identify the reason(s) a mobile visitor is likely to visit that page and how their intentions will vary for the same page, depending on whether they are visiting your mobile vs. desktop version. For example,  in the event of a desktop visit to your Services page, its likely that the visitor wants to know which services you offer,  get  a little more information on what each one is and whether its suitable for them and perhaps get an idea of prices.  If they find this appealing, they’ll visit other pages on your website and ultimately (hopefully) get in touch.

A mobile visitor to the same page will most likely have a different goal in mind : Get an overview of the services you provide, an idea of prices if possible and get in touch.

2. Create website content (text) to help fulfil goals. As quickly as possible

As with the example above, it should be immediately clear that there’s absolutely no need to bombard the user with tons and tons of text as a) its very unlikely that they are going to read it all and b) this can have a very real negative impact on your mobile conversion rates (unlike desktop websites, its a little more difficult or the user to simply go to another page on your website in the hope that they’ll find something there more useful).

On a mobile website, Less is almost always More. Try to limit your content to 75 – 100 words.

3. What’s above-the-fold?

In the age of varying mobile handset screen sizes, orientation (portrait or landscape) and resolution, its difficult to determine what areas of your content will display above the fold.  This will almost vary depending on the handset, user view settings and even browser. However,  80 – 90 words is usually a good indication as to the amount of text that will display above the fold.

With this in mind, you should aim to prioritize the textual content of your mobile website and ensure that the most relevant information is within the first 90 words.

4.  Headlines and headings are very important elements of mobile website copy writing

Mobile users will often scan the text on a mobile website so its important to keep your headlines and headings as descriptive as possible. The more meaningful information these can convey, the less time the user has to spend trying to fulfil the purpose of their visit.

I hope you find this post useful.  My most important recommendation would be that if you want to produce the perfect copy for your mobile website,  start first with a clear understanding on what the goals of your mobile visitors are.  Once you know this, you can implement writing best-practices, like some of the ones mentioned above to determine the best way your mobile website content can serve their needs.

If you don’t have a mobile website yet and thinking of getting one built, check out our Mobiile Website Design in London page.

We recently started using the services of a professional IT support company and wanted to share my experiences and the benefits I found in using one.

First and perhaps most important is the safety of your data. In our case, we have two types of data, security of which is absolutely essential.  Client data such as websites, database and so on and our own work data held in our office machines. Whilst the former is stored online with multiple backups in different locations, our own work data isn’t as securely stored.  For example, a few days ago one of our work computers got hacked and infected by a nasty malware even though the computer was protected by Norton Internet Security.  Usually, removal of malware isn’t very difficult but this was especially tough to get rid of no matter what we tried. After spending hours trying to remove it without any success, I decided to call our IT firm tech support.  And, what do you know… within minutes they seem to resolve the issue and the computer was back up running again.

This made me realise the second benefit – time saving. I used to spend a few hours every Saturday backing up all our computers, then making multiple copies of the data in different location. Even though some of this process is automated, some isn’t and that took time. Over the last month, this is done by our IT firm not once a week but every hour! And the best part is, it’s ALL automated. And, it’s being done whilst we continue working.

Of course, there’s a cost involved to all of this but I am pretty sure that the savings in time alone, our service is paying for itself.

You may just be managing everything perfectly in-house but if not, give a IT support company a try.

Based in Portsmouth, PSouth is one of the biggest installers and distributers of Permaroof roofing solutions.

At the time of initial contact with client, the business had been growing rapidly mainly by the way of repeat business and referrals from existing clients. PSouth wanted to take this one step further by adding E-Commerce capabilities to the existing website and increase traffic to the website via Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google AdWords.

Analysis

Further to client discussions, competitor research and a review of the type of products that would be sold online, flow20.com identified the following that would play a key part in the campaign:

• Due to the bespoke nature of the products sold, the E-Commerce platform should allow users to customise the product in size depending on their individual needs
• Identification of the correct search terms which would generate traffic to website not just from the trade but from private customers as well
• Just like any other project we take up, to maximum Return on Investment from SEO,  having the essential lead-generation tools would be very important

Results

Within 9 weeks of the E-Commerce functionalities going live and within 12 weeks since the start of SEO and Pay Per Click campaign the website began seeing a healthy uplift in traffic levels.  As importantly, the visitor engagement rates had gone which meant less Bounce Rate (single page visits) and time on site increased.

• Pages per visit average increased from 2.92 to 3.85, an increase of 30%

• Average visitor time spent had increased from 2min 54 seconds to 3min 25 seconds

The above metrics help understand website performance and are especially important for E-Commerce websites.

• SEO accounted for 80% increase in visitor traffic levels
• Pay Per Click accounted for 130% increase in visitor traffic levels
• Total increase of traffic by 210%

Please note – flow20.com was not responsible from the design of this project but only the back end development and SEO.

We hope you find this post useful in understanding the incredible power of Search Engine Optimization and good web design in helping Ecommerce websites succeed.  If you have a project you’d like to talk to talk to us about,  call 0208 1500 294 or email create@flow20.com.