Look at this video from Matt Cutts. Unless you are super niche, you are just duplicate content and are asking to get pandadized (Panada came much later but it did kill these ecommerce sites with no value add, large companies can afford the money and time to recover from Panda. Many small businesses were killed.).

The first thing I’d do is make sure my site is perfect. Do a lot of user testing and make sure the conversion funnel is perfect. If you can up your conversion rate from say, 2% to 4% you’ve doubled your revenue. Make sure you have analytics installed, conversion funnels set up and multi-channel attribution. With out that, you’re working blind. Google analytics is the gold standard nowadays so may as well use that.

Make sure you do have unique content. Google can penalize your whole site if you have not enough useful content. This can be difficult if you are using a manufacturers’s feed. Doing it manually is time consuming and costly. Google can detect manually spun content nowadays so even a rewrite might not stop you from getting pandadized. Its a tricky one this, maybe get some user generated content. That has its risks but if you can seed the comments right, I’d rather have comments than no comments.

For the main SEO, I’ll share the best video I have ever seen on ecommerce SEO. Its from Patrick Altoft from Branded3. Click here to view it. It pretty much covers the textbook off site stuff to do for ecommerce. There was a recent algo change that devalues anchor text so thats probably not right any more. My tool of choice is Majestic rather than OSE but apart from that its a solid strategy. If you really want compete with the big boys you’ll probably need to do more than what he suggests but that’s a whole another blog post. You need to spend a lot of time on keyword research too and think about where the user is in the overall conversion funnel. That’s a whole new blog post too.

I’d would recommend reading Rob Snell’s site. I saw him at Pubcon and thought that he was someone that knew what he was on about and he specialises in ecommerce. He was talking about cross selling stuff and using free gifts to boost the average order value. If you can perfect your site, then you’ll be able to buy traffic straight from Google via Adwords and not have to worry about SEO.

I have noticed quite a major change buried in that list though.

Improvements to ranking for local search results. [launch codename "Venice"] This improvement improves the triggering of Local Universal results by relying more on the ranking of our main search results as a signal.

I am guessing this will upset quite a few national players. Basically, google now blend in local results in to the main serps if they believe there is some relevance to local results. For example,

The query ‘seo company’ for someone located in Sheffield shows this,

You can see 3 local results which would rank for the local equivalent, seo company Sheffield. I’ve played around with a few search queries which trigger local results and it looks like they are inserting 3 local results in to the SERPS in positions 5-7.

The people that probably are the most annoyed about this are people that used to rank 8-10. They’re pushed on to page 2 now, so will get no traffic. As search is a zero sum game, there will be some winners. I am not convinced that the people receiving the boost will win that much. The biggest winners will be the top 3. The competition is now pushed further down. Search has always been a winners takes all market and this makes it even more so.

In terms of how I am going to change my strategy, I’ll have to modify my mental model of how much the traffic is distributed. The higher up the better but there should be a big jump in potential clicks if you can make it from position 4 to position 3. Given the higher reward it makes sense to invest a little more in links. I just need to be careful not to hit a filter.

Certain niches monetise better than others. For the newbie internet marketer, it can be tough to decide. Follow your passion sounds like good advice but my advice is follow the money. You’ll become passionate about a topic if you are making £5 a click!

So where to start? Obvious topics are PPC and FIRE. PPC is Porn, Pills and Casino. FIRE is Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Big money in those niches but it’ll be hard to rank for those types of terms.

You can piggy back on someone else’s research quite easily. Just find a parked domain and see what ads they show. eg

Put these in to the Google Keyword tool to see how much approximately the click prices are.

You’ll be able to see if you want to make good money, you are better off writing a blog about accident claims than leadership. If you put Adsense of your site, you can expect to get around 65% of the click price. I am actually surprised how much leadership and motivation terms cost. Maybe there is an opportunity to make money in that niche after all.

The takeaway from this post is never listen to a man in pub.

Unicef is one of the charities I donate to anyway (the others being Save the Children and Amnesty). I think its very worthwhile and they do a lot of good.

UNICEF is the world’s leading organisation protecting the rights of children and young people. UNICEF is present in more than 190 countries protecting children’s right to be educated, healthy, protected and treated fairly. UNICEF works with families, local communities, businesses and governments to ensure that these rights are upheld.

Your donation is vital as UNICEF is entirely funded by voluntary contributions and doesn’t receive any money from the UN budget.

Purchase your colour here. Its only a pound and a lot of the good colours still haven’t gone.

Being a publisher SEO can be easier too. You can look at a SERP for a keyword and decide not to tackle it. If you are doing it for a client then its harder to just dismiss that keyword and move on to the next one.

Good client SEO work doesn’t scale very well. Its time consuming to research the ‘money keywords’. Any idiot can use the Adwords keyword tool to find some keywords but usually it takes some domain knowledge to know which ones will make the money. The smart SEO will spend his time researching these for his own sites rather than yours.

Marketing Infographic by SEO Book

The first thing I noticed about this site is that its properly designed. The code is so clean, unlike some of the bloated wordpress sites I look at on a daily basis. It is so refreshing seeing a nicely designed but also functionally friendly website.

The only problem I saw with the functionality is that when you add a cheesecake to the basket, the visual cues are not there. It took me a while to work out that the cheesecake had been added to the basket. On a giant monitor, this isn’t much of a problem but 90% of people won’t be able to see the basket section being updated. I’d be tempted to have a bigger visual cue than the add to basket button change subtlety from red to green.

In terms of google rankings, it could struggle to rank due to the lack of indexable content. If you view as a bot, there isn’t much there to index. A lot of e-commerce sites struggle from this. I’d look at getting some type of review system implemented. This could provide content as well as social proof.

As its a brand new site it’s got no backlinks. Looking at the competition they don’t have many powerful links (in terms of Majestic’s AC Rank). Its not a big money vertical so ranking shouldn’t be too hard. As always, if there is enough budget for it, I’d test with Adwords first to get the site converting properly.

In terms of the cheesecake quality, I am fortunate enough to have eaten a fair chunk of the award winning raspberry cheesecake. I would recommend getting them for really special occasions. I don’t think I could justify paying the premium prices for just eating on an ordinary day but if you have something to celebrate, why not splash out?

Link to site Very Delicious Cheesecakes

Google Adwords is possibly the most effective form of advertising there is. When people are on Google searching, they are looking for things at that moment in time. If you are an accountant, someone searching for, say, “chartered accountants sheffield” is almost certain to be looking for an accountant at that moment in time. If your site appears high up on the SERPs then you will get a targeted visitor to your site. Other than word of mouth marketing, I can see no other more effective system of advertising. Word of mouth doesn’t scale that well though. With Google Adwords, you can buy as much traffic as Google can send.

Rich Skrenta of Blekko search explains why search traffic is the best type of traffic you can get.

• Question: It seems like you’ll never match deep-pocketed companies like Google or Bing, so what’s the endgame? How do you turn this into a profitable business?

  Answer: Search is one of best businesses on the Web. Search traffic monetizes really well. It can be 50 to 100 bucks per 1,000 page views (CPM).

  When I was the CEO of Topix, a local news aggregator, we were doing pretty well monetizing local page news, about three or four bucks per thousand. We were getting one dollar even on forums, and those ads are generally worthless.

  If you go to a social network like Facebook, CPM can be 15 cents. People aren’t in buy mode. They don’t possess intent to buy. But if you go to a search engine and type in “Palo Alto Real Estate,” you’ve declared your intention to buy a house in Palo Alto. So real estate agents buy as many clicks as they can possibly get.

  Our intent is to put search ads on the site. We can be a profitable company with far less traffic if you were running a local news site. $50 is much higher than $3.

If you are interested in trying out Google adwords please fill in the form for a free £50 Adwords Voucher.

Anyway, I recently did a SEO review for Have a great Stay. Most of these errors should be fixed now but it should give you an idea of the things that Copperchunk looks out for when doing client SEO work.

Problems found

• No analytics installed. I always recommend getting some type of analytics installed on a website. Looking at server logs is OK for a quick look at what keywords are sending you traffic but if you are serious about your website, you need a professional analytics package. I recommend Google analytics or getclicky. I use both on this site.
  
• Search engines blocked in the meta tag. If you have this in the meta tags of your site, you are basically telling Google not to include your site in it’s index. It’s a schoolboy error but I’ve made that before and seen some other seo professionals do the same.
  
• Company details not displayed properly. Its a legal require for companies to list their registered address on their website.
  
• Magic quotes in the copy. Not much of a problem in modern browsers but it can look nasty in older browsers.
  
• Title tag not descriptive. After links and anchor text, the title tag is the most important part of your SEO.
  
• Need to 301 the old site. May as well get that google juice flowing to the new site.

I have actually used the service to book a hotel room too and can recommend it. You can spend ages on lastminute.com or skyscanner booking a hotel. With Have a great stay, you just tell them your destination and dates. They’ll do the lookup for you and give you a list. You have a look at the reviews on Trip Advisor and decide which one you want to book. Have a Great Stay take care of it all. The price for the hotel I was looking at was cheaper than anything I found online myself. They have special deals with some hotels so you won’t be able to get the deals any cheaper even at the same hotel online.

Get in touch with them here

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