Best Ecommerce Platforms for 2015 – Pt. 1 – WooCommerce
Google “eCommerce platforms,” and you’ll probably find a lot about WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. Dig a little deeper, and you might find a longstanding platform called Miva. Each of these platforms has its strengths and weaknesses. For some businesses, the weaknesses of any given platform may heavily outweigh that platform’s strengths. In this in-depth series, we’ll take a look at the benefits and drawbacks of 5 major eCommerce platforms. We’ll also look at what kind of business each platform is most suited for. As one of the Top WooCommerce Developers, we’ll be kicking things off with our analysis of the WooCommerce platform.
WooCommerce: Great For Startups With Small Budgets
WooCommerce is an online shopping cart plugin for WordPress. As such, WooCommerce can only run on WordPress installations. WordPress is the web’s most popular blogging platform and content management system, and it’s only gotten better in the last few years. With the WooCommerce plugin installed, it’s a great option for anyone just starting out in online selling.
The WooCommerce plugin itself is free, making it even more optimized for startups with low budgets. However, the free plugin lacks some extensions. Certain shipping options, payment gateways, extension of product fields, and other functions require add-ons. Some of these plugins are free, but most require a purchase. For more complex online stores, WooCommerce isn’t free at all, due to the number of plugins that must be licensed.
Because WooCommerce was developed by WooThemes, it allegedly runs best on one of their WordPress themes. Most of those aren’t free. Because the plugin is open-source, WooCommerce users do not have access to phone or social media support. However, users who purchase a WordPress template from WooThemes do have access to the company’s support forums.
For simple operations, and for entrepreneurs with simple requirements and zero budget, WooCommerce can’t be beat. However, for larger stores and established operations, WooCommerce can’t provide the full functionality and flexibility of Miva or Magento. Magento requires extensive 3rd party development to reach the level of functionality that larger ecommerce firms will require. Miva requires less development to get a new store to market, but it may still require some, depending on the new store’s business model. Though development costs more than plugins, larger stores see the value in having storefronts, checkout procedures, and product features optimized to their exact market needs. Because WooCommerce is WordPress-based, WooCommerce users depend on existing plugins to modify site functionality. In Miva and Magento, the possibilities are almost endless.
The Bottom Line:
WooCommerce is great for simple operations and low-budget startups. However, it doesn’t have the extensibility of larger and more expensive platforms like Miva and Magento. As such, it may not be suitable for low-budget startups with complex storefront needs. But for bloggers who already use WordPress and want to start a basic online store on the same domain as their blog, WooCommerce is perfect.
In this week’s Digital Marketing Round-Up we’re going to analyze ways to improve your social media marketing along with taking a look at SEO from a local perspective.
Local SEO has some of it’s own rules compared to national SEO and it is important to recognize the difference.
When you’re talking local business, even when it is SEO, you always want to think about the people. If your business has a positive reputation in your area, then that alone can drive traffic to your social media or blog.
Join local directories and engage reviewers online. If your area has a local business directory make sure you are listed!
Make sure your logo is on point. Google pulls logos of local businesses and lists them along side of regular search results accompanied by phone numbers and hours.
LinkedIn is a great platform for sharing your content with your target audience because of the B2B nature of the social media.
When sharing content on LinkedIn use words to grab the readers attention. If you convey the benefit of the link to the reader, they are more likely to click through. You can also mention (or tag) a person in the post that the information might be relevant to, or tag an event you are attending.
Timing: avoid spamming, the landscape of LinkedIn is different than Twitter. You should only be posting to LinkedIn 1 to 3 times a day.
Long- Form Publishing: while this option is not available for publishing from company pages, if you promote your content from your personal LinkedIn this is a great opportunity. Long- form publishing has a larger reach than normal posting.
There is a Facebook ad functionality called multi- product ads (MPAs). These ads allow users to scroll through items before clicking to a landing page.
With these MPAs you can do more than offer a line of products, which is great news for Digital Marketing. These ads have the ability to show case multiple offers, multiple locations, or multiple pieces of content!
What is great about the multi-content ad is that people don’t share ads, but they do share content. So with one ad you got the visibility of 3 ads.
The pieces of content that your promote should relate to each other that way your target market is seeing all relevant information and not just 1/3 relevant information.
Miva Suivant ReadyTheme Customization: The Sky’s The Limit!
If you use the Miva shopping cart platform, or if you’re looking to start a Miva store, you’ve probably heard of Miva ReadyThemes. These themes offer beautiful, functional styling right out of the box. However, they look even better with a little customization. Here at 216digital, we regularly customize Miva ReadyThemes for our clients. One of our favorite recent projects was a redesign via ReadyTheme for D’Andre New York, a seller of fine shearling coats. In this post, we’ll talk about that project and explain the Miva Suivant ReadyTheme customization that we performed.
D’Andre New York: A Great Product Deserves a Great Website
D’Andre New York sells fine shearling coats. These jackets feature beautiful, understated styling. Since they’re made of real wool, the moisture-wicking property of the material gives the wearer natural climate control. That means shearling coats can be worn comfortably in summer or winter. With this natural flexibility and their finely-tailored lines, shearling jackets are the pinnacle of outerwear style. Of course, high quality comes with a price tag. Shearling jackets typically range in price from $1000 to $3000.
D’Andre New York’s target customer is affluent, style-conscious, and expects high quality. If the product itself delivers on all these—which it certainly does—then shouldn’t the website that sells the product display that same excellence? That was our reasoning, and Tatiana, owner of D’Andre, agreed. She wanted a redesign of her website, something that would showcase the beauty, durability, and value of her shearling products.
D’Andre’s Legacy Site
D’Andre New York’s old site had excellent functionality, and it had served the business well for years. However, the site was built in the days of low-resolution screens, and it looked a little small on today’s larger monitors. Worse, the site was built long before the mobile responsive revolution. It was awkward and cumbersome to use on a mobile device. With more and more customers shopping and purchasing products directly from their phones, D’Andre stood to lose out on potential business. With each sale worth a few thousand dollars, D’Andre needed to convert every prospect who came their way.
D’Andre New York’s legacy site in mobile simulation. Get ready to zoom and scroll!
It wasn’t just the resolution and lack of mobile responsiveness that worried us. D’Andre sells a fine product to an affluent market. We believed that D’Andre’s old site didn’t quite convey the level of luxury and comfort that wearers could expect from a shearling jacket. We thought the site ought to display the excellence that D’Andre’s shearling coats provide. Clearly, it was time for a redesign.
Miva Suivant ReadyTheme: Almost Ready To Rock And Roll
Miva ReadyThemes give Miva store owners beautiful, functional online stores right out of the box. But as with all cookie-cutter solutions, ReadyThemes leave a bit to be desired in the details. A little customization takes a Miva ReadyTheme to the next level. D’Andre New York had chosen the Miva Suivant ReadyTheme. We agreed that this theme was perfect for a retailer of fine shearling jackets. It just needed a few tweaks.
For starters, the Miva Suivant ReadyTheme has a large header. This isn’t necessarily a problem—except that by default, that header anchors to the top of the screen when the user scrolls. It’s not too noticeable on desktop, but on a mobile device, that pinned header eats up a lot of real estate. For every client using the Suivant ReadyTheme, we routinely recommend customizing the header. In D’Andre’s case, we changed the header so it wouldn’t stick to the top of the screen. We reasoned that users know where the header is. They know to scroll up if they need to use the navigation bar. This change significantly improved the user experience of D’Andre’s new website.
The header wasn’t the only tweak that the Suivant ReadyTheme needed. With the ongoing evolution of SEO (search engine optimization), Google now values good content more than ever, and many web users find value in useful, informative content. Blogs and magazines can display the entirety of a piece of content without compromising other organizational goals. However, in an ecommerce setting, selling product is critical. Too much content on a product or category page could keep the all-important buy buttons hidden from site visitors. Yet content is critical for SEO! What’s a webmaster to do?
For all our clients doing customized ReadyThemes, it’s a simple fix. We custom-code an option to display the first 150 characters or so of the content, followed by a “read more” button. This gives us the best of both worlds: 300+ word content for SEO purposes (and for those readers who want to educate themselves fully), and product imagery and buy buttons still displayed above the fold for users who are close to making a purchase. For D’Andre New York, this solution was a no-brainer.
Optimizing D’Andre’s Onsite Content
Speaking of content, it’s one of the most important components of branding. Content that doesn’t convey the right brand impression negatively affects marketing. In the case of D’Andre New York, we recognized at once that Tatiana’s great luxury brand needed content that created an opulent, luxurious impression. With Tatiana’s permission, our SEO content writing team began writing new copy for the D’Andre website.
Our process was simple. We researched other luxury brands, such as Rolex and Mercedes-Benz, to get a feel for the appropriate voice and tone. We settled on two points of focus for D’Andre. For Tatiana’s women’s collection, our content revolved around the word “elegance.” For the men’s collection, we chose the word “achievement.” These words matched D’Andre’s brand perfectly. With these two ideas in place, the rest of the content flowed. The result was a unique, memorable brand identity in all D’Andre’s onsite content.
Image Optimization: A Key Element In Ecommerce Marketing
Customers want to see what they’re buying. In the case of D’Andre’s fine shearling coats, customers want to see not only the overall look of the jacket, but also the elegant details of accents and trim. With D’Andre’s old site, product images looked small on larger screens, preventing customers from getting a complete picture of the jacket they were considering. Every product image on the site existed in two separate files: a tiny thumbnail version, and the full-sized version. Since the thumbnail had to be created manually in an image editor, and since both images had to be uploaded manually, the old system required double the work on catalog updates.
Enter the Miva Image Machine. This state-of-the art functionality dynamically creates multiple image sizes from one image file, eliminating the need to create thumbnail sizes manually and upload them separately. The Image Machine also allows alternative images. These show up as thumbnail images below the main image on a product page. Users can click on any of these alternative images and view the full-sized image in a popup. This allows store owners to provide multiple views of a product, giving customers a sense of what the product looks like from different angles.
The Bottom Line
We saw at once that Tatiana’s company offered a great product. We wanted to improve the overall value of her brand by optimizing the impression her company made on web visitors. With a little Miva Suivant ReadyTheme customization, Tatiana’s redesign was ready to go, clearly communicating the luxury and style that customers could expect from D’Andre New York.
It was a pleasure to work with Tatiana. Through deep market analysis and ongoing communication, we formed a partnership with her to improve the marketability of her brand. We think you’ll agree—the new D’Andre New York website looks beautiful, fully matching the luxury and elegance which D’Andre offers its customers.
If you’re considering a responsive Miva design for your ecommerce store, get in touch with us today. We specialize in Miva design and development, and all our work is fully mobile-responsive. Whether you need tweaks to a Miva ReadyTheme or a ground-up custom design, we’ll turn your vision into a reality. Drop us a line, and let’s start talking about your next big thing.
In this week’s Digital Marketing Round-Up we’ll cover tips to optimize your conversion rate, how to make your SEO content writing stand out, and whats next for the Penguin update.
So you’re getting visitors to your site but they aren’t converting. What can you do to turn those visitors into customers? Start optimizing your acquisition strategy for conversions.
Message Match – Make sure your ad copy is true to what your product or service offers. If a consumer gets to a landing page and finds what they expected to find, they are less likely to bounce from your page.
Help Your Customer Be Successful – Conversions are more likely to occur when a customer is confident in the quality of the product. This confidence can come from a variety of things, but offering support and customer engagement can make a customer feel secure in their purchasing decision.
Keep your landing pages short and simple – Provide enough information to the consumer for them to act on the CTA. Consumers who are in the purchasing phase of the sales cycle don’t want to read more information than the information they need to buy.
Nothing destroys readers trust like factual errors in a piece they were using to help make a decision in the purchasing process. That is why research is at the top of the list when writing content for SEO, get your facts straight and then start writing.
Divide your readers into segments. For example, customers who are researching your product, customers who are getting to know your product, and customers who have a long lasting relationship with your product.
As long as you are putting your audience first then your consumer will put trust in your knowledgeable and relevant content.
While the Penguin refresh isn’t knocking on our door step, it is still important to be complying with all the best practices (cough cough mobile responsive design).
Currently Google is dealing with a slow running Penguin algorithm, which is far from the goal of an algorithm that runs in real time.
Google is working towards a continuously updating Penguin, versus what they have now, which is data that has to be manually refreshed.
Until then we will abide by rules like easy to crawl site link structures, mobile responsive designs, and well thought out content.
This week’s Digital Marketing Round-Up is all about staying ahead of the curve. Make sure your eCommerce marketing efforts are aligning with the best practices.
Link building authority Brian Dean, put out a how to guide for promoting your blog content. While it sounds simple, it is more than just throwing it into the social universe.
Good influencer outreach email
Promoting your content takes time. This time should be spent identifying influencers in your industry, and once you know the names, reach out and ask them to share.
As you reach out make sure that the influencer’s audience will be interested in your piece, if the content is relevant to their audience they will be more inclined to share your content.
With promotion, you are not only putting your content in front of more people, but building valuable links for your website.
It always seems that once you get a grasp on a new marketing trend, it is the way of the past. Start playing by the rules of the future, and your marketing mix will stay creative and up to date.
Personalize your online shopping experience – customers are more likely to provide you with personal information if there is incentive. For example, free shipping on their next purchase if they create a customer log-in.
Make your mobile advertisements targeted towards discounts and deals. This is important to the two-thirds of U.S. mobile shoppers who are comparing and checking prices.
Don’t let your social strategy fall to the wayside. Social marketing is becoming increasingly important with the mass adoption of the “buy button” bringing one click shopping to the consumer.
It is hard to do keyword targeting when there is no search volume for your keywords. But as the Moz Blog points out in their latest White Board Friday video, SEO can be a channel for opportunity.
When there is no search volume for your product or service it is important to take a step back in the SEO process and do in depth keyword research. For example, what else is your target audience searching for?
When you identify what else your audience is looking for, you can optimize content for those key phrases, even though they might not directly promote your product or services.
Building brand awareness is also important when a product has low search volume. Build your brand awareness through a combination or organic and paid advertising on sites that your audience is already visiting.
Call-to-Actions (CTAs) are critical for Ecommerce marketing. And just a few simple changes can improve your click through rate. HubSpot took a look at what works and what doesn’t work.
This CTA doesn’t align with a couple important rules. The actual CTA text doesn’t stand out from the copy text, and the wording itself is traditional and uninspiring.
This example of a good CTA has more than one element that makes it good. The CTA stands out against the hero image, without other distracting copy text. The CTA text is also interesting, it invites the shopper to browse and buy, without saying “shop now”.
Move away from from traditional text on your CTAs. Try something that is fresh, fun, and aligns with your brand personality
Pick a CTA color that contrasts with your background or hero image
Make sure the button inspires action, “click here” does not inspire
Don’t make the mistake of not having a clear clickable image
Your competitors are a valuable resource to pull information from. And that information can be used to improve your own SEO.
With a quick search in SEM Rush, you can identify the main competitors in your industry.
Analyze 5-10 competitors in your space. Verify them with a variety of sources, including your own eye
Use a competitor’s Google my business page to mine their data. With this data we can see if there are any common trends between your competitors that are working for them
Analyze your competitors landing pages
Finally with a simple Google search, you can see what links Google thinks are authoritative, associated with that business
Using Google Analytics is the first step in understanding your customer’s behaviors. Search Engine Land put together a piece on how to stop spending money on people who aren’t going to buy from you.
Make sure your remarketing campaigns only target people that visited pages that warrant remarketing. For example, you’d want to exclude remarketing for a careers page on your website
Exclude remarketing to visitors who spend less than 10 seconds on your website
By making these edits you can increase your CTR, which can affect your quality scores and impact your ad’s positioning
Cut Out the Excess Noise, And Your SEO Content Writing Will Pop!
Writing comes in all kinds of styles and lengths, but one thing distinguishes great writing from mediocre: doing more with less. If your SEO content writing boasts thorough research and clear expression of facts, congratulations! You’ve passed level one. After all, truth is the first goal of expression. But what if you took the writing itself—the expression of the truth—to the next level? Can you make the truth unforgettable, even for clients whose market doesn’t interest you personally?
This is the challenge of professional SEO content writing. At 216digital, we practice this all the time! We continually improve upon our own work, growing and learning from everything we’ve ever written. Were we born knowing our clients’ markets? No way. We only got here through strategic research into every client we write for. But we’ve found that great research isn’t enough. Great research must lead to great writing—and great writing is a process.
To see this in action, I’ll give you a micro-tour of our revision process. We’ll look at a few examples of sentences from first drafts produced by our SEO content writing team. Each of these gives you a little snapshot of our writing refinement process. In the first version of each sentence, you might notice a little wordiness or a lack of clarity. In the revised sentence, you’ll notice that the meaning really pops off the screen. In the final version, you’ll see how we’ve achieved the ultimate in the clear expression of the truth.
SEO Content Writing Process: Examples
Example 1:
“Today, we’ll be examining the way in which some example phrases are constructed. We’ll try and see if we can say the same thing using one half or even one third of the original number of words, compared to the original.”
“Let’s look at the construction of some example phrases. Can we say the same thing in half the words—maybe even a third of the words?”
“In these sample phrases, we’ll work on saying the same thing in half the words—maybe even a third of the words.”
Example 2:
“You should aim to have a high quality score because that means that your bounce rate is going to plummet.”
“A high quality score will cut your bounce rate dramatically.”
“A high quality score will slash your bounce rate.”
Example 3:
“Since 1999, 216digital has been a premier Miva developer. Over that time, we have become experts in the design and development of responsive Miva websites and custom Miva applications and modules.”
“216digital has been a Miva developer since 1999. We’re experts in responsive design and development, and we rock Miva applications and modules.”
We couldn’t really improve on that one. The first revision was the final revision.
The Bottom Line
The point here is that your best writing is never your best. At each stage in the writing process, the writer of each of these sentences couldn’t find anything else to improve on. Yet after a little time away, we found we could take these sentences through two more versions to reach the ultimate in clear, concise expression.
This process is easy for us now. Fast drafting and revision are second nature to us! We bring these skills to every client we serve. If you’re looking to improve your existing SEO content writing, or if you’re about to dive in for the first time, get in touch with our SEO content writing team. Let’s start talking about your next big thing.
Google presented a webinar introducing micro-moments “the new battleground for brands” last Thursday June 11th
What is a micro-moment? A mobile device moment that delivers quick information and takes only a moment to identify
This matters for Google AdWords marketing. Marketers needs to be taking advantage of “click to call” ads to make impulse shopping easier
Taking advantage of these micro-moments is important because over a year’s time, there has been a 29% increase in mobile conversions, accompanied by an 18% decrease in session time
Completing The Miva Design Picture with SEO Content Writing
So you have a killer Miva design for your online store. You’re ready to sell your great niche products to a hungry market. You’ve heard about SEO (search engine optimization). You don’t know quite how to do it, but you hope to pop up on the first page of Google someday. You keep checking, but your competitors are bumping you down to the 4th, 5th, even the 6th page of search results. What’s going on? Why aren’t your niche customers flocking to your great Miva design?
Miva Design: A Skeleton In Need of Flesh and Blood
Don’t let me confuse you: mobile responsive design is critical to the success of any online store, but it’s only part of the picture. Think of a great Miva design as the skeleton on which you’ll hang the healthy, athletic body you’re building. One critical component of that body is your store’s products. Okay, you’ve got that covered. But the final element—and the most difficult to master—is engaging, well-written content.
The doomsday predictions on increasing web use and decreasing literacy have turned out wrong. If anything, the web has all of us reading more than ever. It’s not how much we read that’s changing—but what we read, and how we read it. Tapping into this knowledge and using it strategically in your content writing is critical to engaging your customers—which, by the way, is critical in SEO.
People search the web for everything imaginable. As this article from Search Engine Land explains, people use Google not only to find specific websites, to get information, and to buy things, but also to delve deeper into a topic for which they have only basic knowledge.
Engaging, Useful Content: The New SEO Rocket Fuel
How can content improve your business’s SEO? That depends on what you’re selling. Take a step back and look at your market. Most markets that can support online stores also have knowledge and entertainment angles that businesses can leverage into blog posts.
Think about it: the only transaction you make without needing further information is your regular grocery shopping. You always get the same kind of toothpaste. You buy whatever toilet paper is on sale. This kind of market—which sells simple, cheap commodities that everyone needs—doesn’t have much of a content angle to it. But niche markets, which sell specialty products to a base of avid enthusiasts, are another story entirely!
Let’s look at it from the user’s perspective. (By the way, that’s the first rule in content writing!) Say you’re a car enthusiast. You just bought a car for customizing, and you’re joining a passionate community who modify this make of car. You’ve customized other cars, but you know very little about the specifics of this model. You want to learn about common modifications, inherent design strengths and weaknesses, and possible pitfalls before you start taking things apart. You google something like, “X model powertrain customization.” You find a great blog post at SomeKindOfCar.com/blog that explains not only the basic characteristics of the stock powertrain in your car, but some of the most popular mods to the powertrain. The post has a few links in it leading to the aftermarket car parts you’ll need for these mods. You buy the parts, noticing that the online store lives at the same URL—SomeKindOfCar.com.
Guess what? The folks at SomeKindOfCar.com just sold you the exact parts you wanted, using SEO-guided content writing.
Leveraging Content Writing for SEO
Writing great content to improve your business’s SEO takes more than an ear for language and a deep knowledge of your products. A good SEO content writer couples three things together: the artistic ability to write with power and precision, the technical knowledge of the subject matter, and a strategic SEO vision derived from detailed keyword analytics tools.
Good SEO writing isn’t just search engine food. It isn’t a poetry contest, either. It hangs squarely between best technical practices, informative coverage, and engaging style.
That’s a demanding list to hit. Many businesses can cover one or two of these requirements in-house, but not all three. If you can’t hit all three of these with your existing staff, consider outsourcing your writing to a dedicated SEO content writing team.
At 216digital, our content writing team researches every client’s market for topics, style, and voice. We analyze our clients’ existing writing on landing pages and blog posts (if a blog exists). We formulate recommendations for improving landing page copy, and we watch these changes jack that page up in Google search. Through consistent communication, we nail down a blog voice for each client. Then we crank out informative, well-written posts day after day—all of it strategically informed by our extensive suite of keyword analytics tools.
If you’re ready to watch your site leap through page rank, get in touch with our SEO content writing team today. We’d love to start talking about your next big thing.
