Friday, March 19, 2010

How you accept payments online could be costing you sales!

This topic came up at the Network Circle so I thought I would create a blog post about the negative effect your chosen method of payment processing could have on your sales.
Did you know that you could lose sales based off of how you process your online transactions?

Are you losing sales because your only method of collecting payments is via Pay Pal?

There are huge benefits in having more than just Pay Pal as a payment option for your online sales! The major one, an increase in sales!

How you accept payments could possibly have a negative effect on your sales. Website owners and online sellers have grown to love and trust Pay Pal. Well, most have grown to love and trust Pay Pal for collecting website payments online. Pay Pal is a payment processor who became popular by Ebay users and is now being used on websites all over the world today. 

As business owners we know and recognized the logo as soon as we see it and use it while shopping online for our personal enjoyments, but did you know that not everyone is familiar with the company or logo!? 

I know you are probably thinking, Now how is that possible! Well, think about it. If you were not in the online website business or online sales business and you had no connection to the online world of sales would you be familiar with a company that processes online payments? If you visited a website and found a product or service that you wanted, got to the checkout page and saw a button to make a payment that said Pay Pal instead of pay via credit card. Then you clicked on the button and it took you to a page that looked like you had to sign up for an account in order to pay for your order. Would you feel comfortable with completing the sale or would you start to worry because the checkout does not say pay by credit card and looks like you have to have an account with Pay Pal in order to buy something?

Human beings are creatures of habit and those that shop online are use to seeing a standard set up for checkout. They expect to see the words "Credit Card" as a payment option. If you are only using Pay Pal for your payment processor regardless if you can still take credit card payments with that option, you are setting yourself up to lose a lot of business. Most buyers do not know what Pay Pal is or have never heard of it. When they are directed to the Pay Pal payment screen they may think that they have to either have an account with Pay Pal to order on your site or do not see the very small link at the bottom of the Pay Pal checkout page that says something like : Don't have an account? Pay with credit card or debit card.  So unless you state somewhere in your checkout that you accept credit card payments via Pay Pal then you will have a lot of buyers that will end up abandoning their shopping cart. 

Now don't get me wrong, having Pay Pal as a payment processor is perfectly fine, but you may want to consider investing in a credit card processing company. It's a small investment that could really boost your sales. You could provide two payment options for your customers : Pay Pal and Credit Card. That way those who are familiar with Pay Pal can use their Pay Pal account to complete the sale and those who feel more comfortable with using their credit card will have that option to do so.

I have spoken to so many website owners who have seen an increase in sales as soon as they switched or added a credit card processing option to their checkout. So many that it's just a subject that can not go unnoticed or ignored as an option to increase your sales.

Below is a list of suggested credit card processing companies that you can look into for your online business. Some charge a monthly fee, some charge an annual fee, and some charge a monthly fee plus a per transaction fee. Make sure you read all of the fine print and even contact any company to ask questions before considering signing up to use their services. 
Here are some questions that you can ask:

Is there a monthly fee? If so how much?

Is there a annual fee option?

Do you charge a per transaction fee? What is the percentage per transaction?

What is your minimum sales amount per month? Some companies require you to make a certain amount in sales in order to use their services. 

How soon will I have access to my payments?

What credit cards can I accept? You may have to pay separate fees if you want to accept AMEX or Discover. Always better to ask to make sure.

If you are a service provider company, you may want to find out if they have a recurring billing option.

Here is a list of some companies that you can look into. I am familiar and have used some of them below but not all, so make sure you look into each one and read over their terms before making a decision:







If you find that you can not afford to work a merchant processing fee into your budget right now and all you can do at the moment is use Pay Pal or Pay Pal Website Standard. That's okay too, just make sure you let your customers know somewhere on your checkout  pages or on your site that you accept credit payments through Pay Pal and they do not have to have an account in order to complete their online order. As soon as you can afford to, definitely consider signing up with a credit processing company.

Your online success may depend on it!

Carla Phillips


Posted by My SEO Gal at 10:44 AM 7 comments
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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Product Optimization : Your Products Need Optimization Love Too!

I got a question in a thread about optimizing products so I wanted to create a blog post about optimizing your products and the importance of it. I hope you enjoy!



A lot of website owners always concentrate on optimizing their website categories, sub categories and information pages on their site, which is absolutely great but what about your products?

Your products need some optimization love too!


Products are important when it comes to converting traffic into sales. One reason being is because if you have a person searching for a specific type of product based off of colors, prints, patterns, size etc. and your product is optimized for that keyword phrase that they type in to find your product, then you are more likely to convert that visitor to a sale. Reason being, people that search for a specific type of product color, product brand, product name etc.. those people are usually looking to definitely make a purchase and not just window shopping or website browsing. So wouldn't it make sense to make sure your product is optimized for those customers who are actually looking to buy!?

For example:

A person goes to their favorite search engine and types in "brown and white baby bedding" the fact that they typed in a color let's you know that this customer is most likely not just internet browsing or what I like to call internet shopping instead of window shopping. This customer has actually included a color so they pretty much have in mind what they are looking for and most likely will be ready to purchase a product within minutes of visiting a site.

What you have to do is make sure you have your colors or prints, brand name (if popular or searched for) and what type of product it is in your meta tags as well as in your description. You want to make sure you say exactly what your product is within the first 20 words of your description. Include colors, sizes, and your main keyword. If you can it also helps to include a price.

Visitors will read the small description that search engines provide in their search results, so take that opportunity to post sell your product. Use it as a mini billboard ad.

Some of you have the ability to add a meta description to your products, take advantage of this but limit your meta description to under 255 characters, but be enticing enough where someone will be more likely to click on your link instead of your competitors.

For those of you who don't have a meta description, don't worry, you can just use the area where you enter in your product description. Do the same but in addition to your first 20 words, make sure you include a header tag. You can do this by choosing Heading 1 in your drop down menu of your description editor, it may start off with the word Normal or Paragraph, or you can add it manually if you don't have it in your tool bar: 

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By adding header tags, you are letting the search engine spiders know that this is the keyword it wants to focus on. Use your main keyword for the header 1 tag and secondary keyword for the header 2 tag (optional).

The key is to make sure you pay attention to your product pages as well. These are your landing pages, and a good landing page is not only important to SEO but definitely important when it comes to converting your traffic into sales.

Buyers are impatient, if they don't see the product that they are looking for right away, the likelihood of them, clicking on your categories to find it is very small unless you have a design that is just that appealing to them.

So go ahead and show your products some love! Your online success may depend on it.

Carla Phillips
Posted by My SEO Gal at 11:16 AM 0 comments
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Sunday, March 14, 2010

How To Make Your Site More User Friendly

Here are a few tips on making your site more user friendly for your visitors:

  • Have a search box. People like to be able to enter in a search term on your site so they don't have to click on each category to find what they are looking for. Make sure you have a search box to make this easy to do.
  • Have a way to get back to the place where they last visited. For instance, make sure you have links that were visited in a different color than your links that have not been visited. Most go with a dark purple color for links that have been visited. This makes it easier for them to know which pages have already been seen
  • Make sure you make it easy for your visitors to easily get back to your home page. If there is no visible Home page button or link for them to click on they may become frustrated and leave the site. Having it at the top is a very good place.
  • Have easy to understand content. If you want someone to click on a link. Make sure the words or link is highlighted. Most internet users recognize the color blue as a link that is clickable to another page, but if you have other colors that you use, that is okay, just make sure you let them know that I want you to visit this link here in your on page content Your visitors like to be told what to do next, so make it easier for them in plain english.
  • List the benefits of your products or services in the first paragraph of your product or website pages. Tell them how this type of product will improve their life or situation. Or how you can change their circumstances with your services or product. If your product or service can change a negative situation or something that they are having issues with then a customer is more likely to buy. Don't make it difficult for them to what what the benefits are of our product or service. Put in understandable text, bullets always work.
  • Make it easy for them to be able to contact you. A visible contact button or link is always best at the top of your site.

These are just some suggestions you can take to help make your site easier to navigate and convert your traffic into sales!.

Carla Phillips
Posted by My SEO Gal at 4:14 PM 2 comments
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Take Advantage Of Google Webmaster Tools! It Really Can Help

Did you know that by setting up and verifying your site with Google can help you with ranking!?

Google has a great tool that you can use to check the following:

  • What keywords people are using to find your site
  • Check any crawl errors
  • Check duplicate content on your site.
  • See what sites are linking to your website pages
  • See if there are any No Found or broken links on your site and where they are coming from.
  • Submit a sitemap to maximize the number of pages that can be crawled on your site
  • Set your preferred domain : with www's or without (very important way to cut down on duplicate content issues.
  • Set your targeted geographic area.

These are all great tools that you can use to increase the amount of traffic to your site and your ranking. By keeping yourself up to date on any crawl issues like 404 errors or broken links and duplicate content, you will not only increase your chances of ranking well in the search engine result pages but you will also create a better user experience for those who visit your site.

So make sure you set up a Google Webmaster Tools account at the link below and get your site verified with Google so you can see all of the data that they are collecting about your site and they will also give you any messages that they have about your site if applicable.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools


Carla Phillips
Posted by My SEO Gal at 4:04 PM 0 comments
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Does Speed Effect Your Ranking?

This post is going to be quick and we can go over this more as you have questions but I just read about Google's new project Caffeine which should be effective soon.  They want to make the internet FASTER. So in a nutshell if your site is fast then you may get a "little bonus" as far as ranking is concerned as Matt Cutts put it in the interview he did in November at Pub Con in Vegas about how speed could effect your ranking.

"it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus."

So if your site is loading slow this could cause your site to perform bad for users and in return your site may have a negative effect on how your site is ranking.

In saying that, I know your next question must be: How do I know if my site is slow?

Have no fear, Google is here!  icon_killbill 

Google has a page that list a lot of resources you can use to check your site's speed. They also provide links to sites that you can use and there is also a Firefox add on that you can use to check your site's speed called Page Speed. .

Visit the following to find out which tools are available:

http://code.google.com/speed/


Now is the time to start getting serious about your site ranking possibility. With personalized search and now Google Caffeine just keep in mind that Google will always be making changes so don't let that discourage you. Just make sure you are keeping current with the changes and making sure that your site is relevant to the keywords that you are trying to rank for.

So whip out that to do list and put search engine optimization at the top and give your way of thinking a major make over. Especially if your goal is to get more traffic from being listed on Google's top search engine pages.

Take a peek at the link below to find out more about this and tell me your thoughts:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/state-of-the-index-2009/


As Google changes, you can change too ...... and for the better!
Carla Phillips

 

Posted by My SEO Gal at 3:56 PM 3 comments
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Saturday, December 19, 2009

Image Optimization : Optimizing for the Search Results

I've touched on this topic before but it was a brief tip in an overall topic. I wanted to actually focus just on the topic of Image Optimization this time around.

I did some keyword research on image optimization a week ago as I am planning on updating my site and adding new products and packages and getting rid of some that are no longer beneficial to what I want my customers to achieve as far as success is concerned online.

I found out that the majority of keywords using image optimization only pertained to resizing images in other words optimizing images to add to your site so your web pages can load quickly. There were some searches that included keywords like search engine image optimization and seo image optimization but I was overwhelmed at how little this keyword was searched for as far as seo was concerned.

The reason why I was so shocked is it is a big factor in achieving targeted traffic to your site and a HUGE way you could possibly see an increase in sales as well.

Images are showing up in Google's search results for a lot of keywords. In most cases these images show up at the very top positions of their search results and in other cases they show up under a couple of website listings in their search results.

To get your images to show up in the image results you must have images properly optimized with your keywords in mind.

Below are a couple of tips or suggestions on how to do this:

If you are just starting your website this is the perfect time to perform this type of optimization., as you are resizing your images or getting product images ready to add to your site. When you save your image onto your hard drive. Make sure your image name includes your actual keywords and maybe a color or type of product name.

Here are two examples:

Don't: Don't save your image as the file name that you get from your digital camera or by the name that your vendor or manufacturer has named the image that you are getting from them.

For example: Here is the wrong way: IMG102697.jpg or FEA415441253644_ID1258.gif

Do: When you save your image to your pictures folder on your hard drive. I'll use my pet site as an example.

Here is an example of how you should save it: pink-studded-dog-collar.jpg

Naming your images with your keywords in mind increases your chances of showing up in Google's image search results. Thirty percent of my website traffic to my new pet site comes from my optimized images that show up in their search results. This is especially important for new website owners who are waiting for their site to start to rank for their targeted keywords.

Once you optimize your images, create a sitemap and upload it to Google. Make sure your sitemap includes your images. If you upload your products to Google Shopping your images will be included in your feed, so this is also a great way to get your optimized images added to their image index.

This task may take a while if your website is already established or if you already have tons of product images on your site that are not optimized but if you do some each day that will make all the difference as far as image optimization is concerned.

Google is now showing an array of different results in their search engine directory. These results are called "Universal Search". They return news feeds, blog feeds, videos, images and organic search results, and adwords campaigns.

Just imagine the amount of traffic you can achieve if your site is properly optimized for the search engines as well as having your images optimized, blog posts listed, articles, and videos.

The possibilities are endless and the search engines are giving you every chance to achieve your website traffic dreams.

The opportunities are yours for the taking!

Carla Phillips

 
Posted by My SEO Gal at 12:56 PM 0 comments
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Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Tips On How Blogging Improves Your Ranking

Did you know that blogging can improve your search engine rankings for your targeted keywords?

Blogging is an important factor when you are trying to rank for your targeted keywords.

The search engines love new content and I know you have heard that content is "king". The more new content you add to your site or blog the more the search engines will reward you.

If you just add one or two post to your blog each week and be consistent with the amount of blog post you do per week the search engines, Google especially will love you for it.

Blog posting doesn't have to be complicated either. I always get emails from website owners asking what to blog about and how uncreative they are and how they are not good writers.

To be honest you don't have to be an experienced writer when it comes to blog posting. It's okay to be natural and your self and your posts don't have to be long and detailed.

Here are some things you can blog about:

1. Reviews: Products that you have used and like or dislike that are related to the type of products or services you offer.

2. New products recently added to your site.

3. A product that you really want to increase exposure for you.

4. Small how to guides

5. Coupon codes that you have found online and want to share with your readers

6. Sales going on at your site or contest

7. Post a list of things that you love on your site. Doesn't have to be things offered by you. If you link to other's websites,they may see the link in their traffic stats and do the same for you.

8. Recipes

9. Interviews with others in your niche

10. If you get comments on your blog that may be questions from one of your readers, you can take those questions and create blog post about them. 


There are so many little things you can blog about to increase your exposure online and get the search engines to pay more attention to you.

Here are some SEO tips that you can use to help increase ranking for keywords you want to target:

1. When blogging about a product or service that is being offered on your site, make sure to have your keyword in your blog post title, in the first 25 words of your blog post and in your blog post labels.

2. Link your keyword to the correct landing page on your site. So if your blog post is about your fabulous tutus for girls. Make sure that you take the keyword phrase tutus for girls and link it to your page that is about your tutus for girls. Keep in mind not to just link all of your keywords to your home page. So a little love to your inner pages, categories, sub categories and product pages.

3. Add a list of your categories to your side navigation bar and link them to your categories on your website. This will help with keyword ranking as well.

If you find a really good keyword that you want to rank for, create a blog post using that keyword phrase in the title and link to a website page on your site and overtime you will see that your blog post are being indexed within  hours and start showing up on the first page of the search engine results over time.

Carla Phillips




Posted by My SEO Gal at 12:03 PM 2 comments
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