So what is a conversion? Depending on your organizations goals a conversion can be many different user-behaviors – creating an account, signing up for a newsletter, submitting a contact form – but for eCommerce websites the most important conversion is a transaction and is measured in the most pure-play business KPI metric that exists – dollars. Measuring conversions is critical to monitoring and optimizing the performance of traffic generating campaigns, particularly paid campaigns such as search and display advertising.

Track with Analytics

Using software such as Google Analytics will allow you to track the data about your website, transactions, and measure the conversion rate. You should be able to segment the data as well, and potentially see variations in conversion rates from different traffic sources or types of users. You can then gauge the quality of traffic sources and user types and therefore inform your advertising spending. Sometimes with site updates, maintence, and relaunch, tracking code can be lost or misplaced and their will be a gap in the ecommerce data. It’s very important to account for these data discrepancies as they have the potential to misinform an otherwise sound optimization strategy.

Aim to Improve

By taking ownership of your conversion rate your taking the first step towards improving it. There are two primary factors to consider when you goal is to improve your conversion rate. The first thing to consider is the traffic that is coming to your site to convert. Are they your target market? What behaviours are they expecting to perform on your site? Does your website meet their expectations for the experience they’re about to have? Could we further segment or refine incoming traffic to only focus on those that convert more frequently? The next thing to consider is once people get to the site, what can we do once we have them to keep them there to drive them into the sales funnel and, ultimately, convert.

GET BETTER & MORE EFFECTIVE CONTENT

By providing our authors with not only a topic but also a title, and keywords, and other detailed information about the final destination for the content and information about what other authors are writing – we have the ability to get higher quality content that performs better in search engines. Once we’ve acquired content, these content generation directives immediately serve as a content spec that we use to make a pass or fail decision. Assuming grammatical and stylistic acceptability, content pieces either quantitatively meet or miss the expectations set by the content directives. If you’re interested in content to achieve specific business goals in brand awareness, web presence, and search optimization - then your first step is created detailed content generation directives.

KEEP RECORDS & ORGANIZE

Organization is critical for even the most straight-forward content campaign. Keep track of all your parameters, content directives, content pieces, and destination URLs. These will be important for planning and measuring performance as your campaigns grow. Track everything you can and worry about sorting it out later. You’ll be better off having the data. Although acquiring a few articles without detailed data recording and cataloging can seem harmless at first it is often the first step in the wrong direction. Especially in extremely vertical web markets, even 25 articles may have similar titles, keywords, and motivations – the nuances of which cannot be capitalized on properly with an ad-hoc effort.

ADDITIONAL ANALYTIC DIMENSIONS

By having every content piece you’ve acquire cross-referenced by various keyword engineering parameters – you’ll be able to shape your content generation strategy to best meet your online objectives. Correlating this data to other KPIs measured by Google Analytics or AdWords can further inform your online marketing decisions.

ONLINE CONTENT IS A SCIENCE

Thinking about the content you create or commission in relationship to your online marketing goals is only the first step in maximizing the ROI on web asset development. Content Generation Directives help conceptualize & organize the content on your website into building blocks for web exposure while providing quality information for your customers and stakeholders. For more information or to discuss further how atomni can help you take the data about your web assets and turn it into information to help your business succeed Contact Us Today.

The dawn of search engine optimization (and really web marketing in general) has opened the gates for flourishing expansion of inbound marketing. It has truly replaced many outbound initiatives simply because it’s more efficient and effective to market people looking for your products already. Many focus on the holy grail of SEO being the best possible way to build sustainable qualified traffic to your website, but slowly social media networks like Facebook are incorporating optimization opportunities. As content aggregators attempt to more ‘intelligently’ serve content to their users, it will become increasingly important to inform them as best as possible about the content you are creating – search engines and social media alike. The first step you can take in optimizing for Facebook, Twitter, or Search Engines is providing any and all information you can to these outlets so they can informatively get it out in front of your target market.

Facebook Meta Tags

This is probably one of the easiest things you can do to maximize the impact of your social media content. You can specify any Open Graph properties (although not all will be used by all content types) with this format
<meta property="og:{tagName}" content="{tagValue}"/>
inside your <head /> tag.

If you’re running WordPress, there is a great little plug-in called (go figure) Facebook Meta Tags Plugin. Either way, you’ll finally get to stop re-copying and re-pasting links into Facebook until it automatically crawls the right thumbnail image. Now you’ll be giving Facebook all the information it needs to decide who should get your updates in their feed & their authority around specific searches.

Customize & Maximize Social Media Results

Taking these efforts a step further, integrating a Fan Page for your business or website is the next huge step in making sure that anything you do on social media gets put in front of as many people as possible. Dynamically setting the creation date or categories of content can dramatically increase the net impact of your social media content generation efforts.

Reach More on Social Media

Factor out a Factoid, Pose a hypothetical question, do anything you can to tease interest out of your market because the ripple effect of sharing, liking, and interacting with your social media content is gargantuan! It also helps to keep a variety of shares, posts, polls, videos, & images streaming on your Wall to demonstrate the human component to Facebook’s algorithms and keep your Fan’s engaged.

Look for More to Come

As Facebook continues to grow into a mature company, you will continue to see an increasing number of OpenGraph properties being included in their algorithms in attempts to better serve content to it’s users. Once you make some of these changes to better inform Facebook of what content you are creating, look for notable increases in Facebook referral traffic & impressions.

You’ll need an SSL Certificate to shake hands with Google Checkout, which you can read more about here. For our purposes we’ll just say you need to have https:// enabled for Google Checkout to synchronize data with the Magento sales dashboard, so acquire and install a SSL certificate with your hosting provider.

2. Magento Administrative Dashboard Modifications for SSL

Log into the Magento Administrative Dashboard and Navigate to System->Configuration->Web under ‘General’ in the left hand column. Specify the secure URL as https://www.yourdomain.com/ and set ‘Use Secure URLs in Frontend’ to ‘Yes’. Make sure that the media, skin, and javascript base URLs reference the {{secure_base_url}}. Save Configuration.

3. Verification of SSL with Google Checkout

Navigate to the frontend of the website. Make sure your certificate is validated and no warnings or errors are generated. If you’ve correctly installed the certificate but have a big red X through the https in Chrome, you probably have issues with mixed-content. Basically you’re trying to secure a page with unsecure resource references; that is http:// links and paths in the source code of your https:// page. For troubleshooting, please read these instructions.

4. Callback URL Verification for Google Checkout

Navigate to http://checkout.google.com/sell/ and either login or create a merchant account. After you click the ‘Settings’ tab, select ‘Integration’ from the left hand column.
To test the callback URL, you will need to navigate to the following 4 URLs
https://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/googlecheckout/api/
https://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/googlecheckout/api/beacon
And
https://www. yourdomain.com /googlecheckout/api/
https://www. yourdomain.com /googlecheckout/api/beacon

The correct callback URL will render a 404 error at /googlecheckout/api/ and a blank page at /googlecheckout/api/beacon/. This is the best information we have for verification testing of the callback URL. Fill in the correct callback URL, select ‘Notification as HTML’ and click ‘Save’. Keep this browser window open for reference. You will also need to make sure that the apache module mod_security is either not installed, or if it is installed that you’ve added an exception. Any questions you have with this (unless you host your own site) will be most easily remedied by contacting your hosting provider.

5. Enabling Google Checkout in Magento Admin Backend

Log into the Magento Administrative Dashboard and Navigate to System->Configuration->Google API under ‘Sales’ in the left hand column. Enable Google Checkout as a payment option, select ‘Yes’ for Secure Callback URL, provide the Merchant ID & Merchant Key from the Google Merchant Integration screen. Select ‘Notification as XML’ then select a continue shopping URL and click ‘Save Configuration’.

6. Correct Shipping and Tax Calculations in Google Checkout with Magento

Within Magento admin go to the following sections:
i) System -> Configuration -> Google API -> Google Checkout
- Enabled to YES
- Sandbox to NO
- Secure Callback URL to YES
- Debug Mode to YES (important!)
- Disable Default Tax Tables to YES
ii) System -> Configuration -> Google API -> Google Checkout Shipping – Merchant Calculated
- Enable Merchant Calculated to NO
iii) System -> Configuration -> Google API -> Google Checkout Shipping - Carrier Calculated
- Enable Carrier Calculated to YES
- Select your shipping methods...hold control to select more than one
- Delivery Address Category...change this based on your customers’ addresses (Residential or Commercial)
- Default price for methods: change this to something like $15 if only offering ground/parcel. This is in case the calculations fail
iv) “Save Config” to save everything
v) Goto Google Checkout and edit the shipping settings to reflect Carrier Calculated and enter the names of the methods (IE: USPS Parcel Post) and select settings accordingly. These shipping options need to mirror the shipping options configured in the Google Checkout dashboard so that the data objects exist for the call-back synchronization.
vi) The next few code modifications fix a bug with Magento/GC wherein Magento will pass $0 values for shipping and tax amount values, instead of empty values, which causes circumvention of GC’s standard shipping and taxing calculations no matter what the settings are in GC.
Go to app->code->core->Mage->GoogleCheckout->Model->Api->Xml->Checkout.php
~ line 600, there are two references to ‘tax-table merchant-calculated’ that need to be set to ‘false’ to allow Google to calculate the tax based on Google Checkout dashboard settings. Also change the line to:

Set the $xml variable at line 247 to “”
Set the $xml variable at line 264 (different if the above is deleted first) to “”.

Once completed, process a test order and you will see the correct carrier-calculated shipping options, Google Checkout tax rules, and updating of orders processed with Google Checkout within the Magento Sales Dashboard.

For more information on how atomni can maximize the performance of your Magento eCommerce website, or to discuss further how 3rd party payment systems & SSL / site security can enhance the user experience of your website - please contact us anytime.

Their scalable & pixelated patterns can hold an significantly greater amount of information than the typical UPC including images, messages, and URL destinations. Their adoption by the mobile phone industry had led to widespread incorporation of QR codes into most major brick & mortar marketing campaigns. It’s a pretty common practice at this point – driving individuals whom experience physical channels of advertising back to the web in order to close the marketing data loop – but effectively blending this into your own marketing efforts seamlessly can take finesse. Making sure you properly keep track & organize the QRCs that are active within your campaigns is a crucial step in the integration of QRC mobile marketing.

Test Before You Distribute

If you’re having fun mixing in your logo or corporate colors be sure to test your QRCs once actually printed on the marketing collateral. The difference of a few millimeters in size can be the difference of a ‘scannable’ or ‘un-scannable’ qr code. Many times the color balance, resolution, or gloss of a high-quality monitor will allow you to scan on-screen codes that will not work once printed. The entire point of QR codes is to make it easier for your target market to not only experience but interact with your brand – so if they’re unable to scan the code it sort of defeats the purpose. Don’t be afraid to include the actual destination URL as well in case someone without a QR code scanner still wants to manually navigate to the landing page or special offer.

It’s All About the Camera

Even with enhanced mobile technologies being prevalent for the last decade, there are still many shortcomings to some of the value-add features that have been incorporated over the years, such as the digital camera. If this is your first mobile marketing campaign using QRCs – you have no idea what types of devices will most commonly be used to scan. This means that someone using an iPhone 3 with barely 3 megapixels of detail will need to be very up close and personal with your mobile marketing collateral to make a successful scan.

Shorten URLs for Higher Contrast

Shortening the URL contained within the QR code means there is less information to store within the code’s surface area – which means bigger squares and a simpler pattern for lower resolution smart phones to recognize. Services like Bit.ly will shorten URLs and create QR codes for each of the URLs you enter – although you need individual URLs for each QR code you’d like to track. Another service which doesn’t require multiple destination URLs for mobile marketing data tracking is QR Create which will shorten your destination URL and serialize any number of QR codes.

Serialize and Close the Mobile Marketing Data Gap

Once you’ve added QR codes to your marketing campaigns, the next step is capturing all of the data associated with when, where, and what collateral is scanned. Using QR Create you can assign labels or individual contacts to each QR code. When your QRCs are scanned you’ll receive a summary email letting you know which specific code was scanned, approximately when & where as well. You’ll know within a moments notice what trade shows are paying off, who your top salesperson is, or which store has the most mobile-enabled customers.

For more ideas on how to integrate QR codes into your mobile marketing campaigns, or to discuss bridging the brick & mortar marketing gap – please contact us anytime at atomni

An adept PPC Manager is critical to the success of any search marketing campaign. He or she will be the person organizing advertising campaigns, managing spend and budgets, and measuring performance. Getting the most out of your PPC Manager takes a real understanding of your business, how PPC works for your business, and hiring a person who has all the qualifications and experience necessary to spearhead these integrated marketing initiatives.

Set Goals & Take An Internal Inventory

Brainstorm what your company’s goals are for online advertising and any limiting parameters to decision making. Are you interested in targeting specific geographies or industry verticals? Do you have budget constraints? If you’re an eCommerce website, what are your profitability margins for each product you sell? If you’re looking to generate leads for a more extensive sales cycle, how much is a lead worth? If you want to build brand awareness, who do you want to target and how is mind-share with your target market worth to the company? Your PPC manager will need to know the answer to all these questions and more in order to design a successful campaign. Bid strategies need to account for many variable since most online advertising networks are organized into instantaneous online auctions, and the competitiveness of any give keyword target will guide the cost of driving a click-through.

Online Tools & Decision Support

In addition to the free tools available such as Google Analytics, there are several great data tools that allow greater transparency and robust decision support. Research your options and find one that works for your company. Hire a Google Adwords Certified PPC manager to insure he or she is completely familiar with these tools. Even with the various tools & services available for PPC advertising management, even more synergies can be exploited by integrating your organic search optimization efforts with a cohesive online advertising strategy. Inquire with your PPC Manager how they would help actively take advantage of opportunities in organic search, as well.

The City of Brotherly love is brimming with technology start-ups, independent creative professions, & communities of tech-savy professionals. Being search engine optimization specialists for the last few years in Center City has been an enriching experience for atomni largely part to being able to work with a variety of talented independent contracting professionals and being surrounded by other great technology companies.

You Are What You Eat

With more than ten major universities and design colleges within 15 square miles including Drexel, Penn, University of the Arts, Villanova, & Temple – it’s easy to see how a well organized community could thrive in Philadelphia. We’ve worked with some of the best & brightest moving forward the frontier of organic optimization – focusing on understand and working with search trends, rather than attempting to ‘trick’ algorithms. Our proprietary SEO strategies & online visibility techniques have help our clients build their websites into business assets with tangible value. Whether you’re interested in targeting industry-verticals, geographies, or demographics we have a solution that will work for you.

Search Optimization Companies in Philadelphia

When you’re shopping for website optimization, it is important to have a good idea of what business goals you hope to obtain by optimizing for search. Instead of focusing on which keyword phrases you’d like to target in search, take a step back and define some higher-level objectives such as, ‘increase unique page views’, ‘achieve 5 contact forms submissions per day’, or ‘attribute 5 new customer conversions per quarter to the website’. Let the SEO Company you’re going to hire define the tactics – you define the mission. Be careful in hiring an individual SEO Consultant opposed to a reputable & established company if you do not have the technical vocabulary to manage them directly. Without the skillset to properly assert their work is accurate, complete, & effective you will have nothing with which to hold them accountable beyond good-faith and trust (and keep an eye out for SEO Credibility Red Flags).

Open Source Information

Organizations like TechnicallyPhilly and PhillyCHI foster a environment of information sharing that is rising all boats in Philly. The ecosystem approach to developing an industry like web marketing breeds a sustainable culture of professionals that can provide Silicon Valley quality service, locally, & for a fraction of the price. Even further, some self-help meet-ups cater to individuals or small-business owners learning their own tips & tricks to manage their own organic optimization efforts. This type of information sharing breaks down the traditional barriers associated with technology providers and their clients heightening the systemic intelligence of the region.

Developing Professional Communities

Places like Indy Hall in Northern Liberties provides top-quality space for independent contractors to work, meet, & collaborate on creative projects that span many web-enabled disciplines. These type of spaces allow for creative professionals to offer a high level of end value in comparison to cost as well as gain access to resources required for larger projects and extend their personal networks.

Bill Rowland is doing awesome stuff with SEO Grail Philadelphia as well, leveraging MeetUp.Com to host events to share domain knowledge about organic optimization techniques. This is a great way for SEO professionals from all experience levels to develop their craft.

Long-tail search refers to the majority of keyword phrases, that is a unique combination of characters typed into a search engine, which reside in the ‘long-tail’ of the normal probability distribution curve – basically there are more keyword phrases that are searched very few times (or never again) than there are keyword phrases that are searched a many times by multiple individuals. Between punctuation, spacing, capitalization, plurals, & tense – the large majority of search queries that take place have never been searched before, and won’t be searched again.

A Big Fish In Lots Of Little Ponds

Most high volume keyword phrases – the short tail – are very competitive and expensive to pursue in organic or paid search campaigns. By focusing on long-tail keyword phrase opportunities & emerging trends within your industry often you can gain a competitive edge on your competition. Coordination with on-site analytics, online advertising data, and eCommerce transaction data can provide detailed information about which keyword phrases are worth pursuing. By combining this data with the content you create – you’ll be growing your website to align with search trends.

What Searchers Want, When They Want It

Developing a large catalog of useful content that targets a wide variety of potential visitors is a great way to give everyone what they want. As search engine algorithms become increasingly refined, it will be increasingly difficult to optimize a single web page for performance across a range of keyword phrases. This is yet another great reason to begin developing individualized web pages targeted at your top-level search optimization objectives.

The Early Bird Gets the Worm

By identifying potential long-tail targets for which to optimize your website, you can take advantage of the unique and low volume search queries that your stakeholders are searching but your competitors aren’t yet wise to, while incrementally increasing the number of traffic generating keywords and indexed URLs that indirectly build relevance for the more competitive high-volume keywords. You’ll be getting to the virtual real-estate people are searching for before your competition – staking your claim as the oldest and most authoritative resource on the topic.

Turning the Corner with eCommerce

Targeting specific products or category-verticals will allow you to segment your respective search market and attack otherwise extremely competitive keywords within individualized niches. Answering common questions, addressing customer service requests, & other consumer engagement opportunities are great ways to build a catalog of useful content and keep the cost of customer service down.

Keyword engineering consists of the hypothesizing, testing, & refinement of the textual content used on-site with respect to optimizing for search engine crawler consumption. When optimizing your website for organic search rank it is important to consider all of these elements as variables in the search authority equation. Your search engine results page (SERP) rank depends on the authority and weights associated with the URL, Page Title, Meta-tags, on-page content, & usage data of the page itself so each of these component contributes to the overall quality asserted by search engines. Since usage data (time on site, bounce rate, pages viewed) enhancements are really a side effect of quality user experience enhancements, we’ll focus just on the text-based variables in this post.

SEO Friendly-URLs

Beyond root domain authority, creating a URL structure for your website that aligns target content with traffic-driving keywords is one of the best ways to increase your website’s authority for specific keyword phrases. Use tools like Google’s Keyword Tool to find out what people are actually searching for and organize your URLs for better ranking.

Page Titles for SEO

Since page titles are the primary information and anchor linkage text in most search engine result listings, it is crucial that they are optimized and properly describe their respective pages. Like most text-based variables in search, the authority for any given keyword in a page title is computed based on percentage of the total title string and it’s starting position within the title string. This means for the keyword “SEO” the following page titles would rank in the following order: “SEO Company”, “The Best SEO”, “The Best SEO Tips”. The density parameters for page titles vary depending on the keyword phrase.

Meta-Tags

Meta-tags are HTML elements contained within the head of the page. Two of these that are used by search crawlers to determine the contents of the page are page description and keywords. Keywords were once highly considered by search engines for authority but now due to improvements in full-text crawling performance are largely downplayed for the actual textual content of the page. The description is displayed underneath the title hyperlink on most popular SERPs and used for keyword authority assignment so it is important to exude consumer confidence and authority with this tag.

On-page Tagging Structure

In general, headline tags (h1,h2…h6) should be used for outlining a framework for the page’s content – much like chapter titles within a book. Typically search engines decrement any page with multiple h1′s, but other h tags can be used multiple times within a page without consequence. These tags can be used to highlight tieriary keyword phrases supplementary to the primary target included in the URL or page title.

Optimized Content

Search engines are continually putting more emphasis on usage data for qualifying authority. This means providing useful web content, resources, & other information on your site that engages new users and commands a retentive audience is increasingly important in your overall web marketing strategy. Use data tracking and analysis to capture which keyword phrases are driving qualified traffic and provide content for those users.

If you’d like to continue the dialog about keyword engineering and it’s place within a thorough online visibility strategy, please contact us anytime

One of the most frustrating characteristics of developing quality organic traffic is that it takes time and resources. SEO campaigns require an initial investment of time and resources and can seam like a cost center, which makes it even more important to have trust in the professionals you’ve made responsible for converting those efforts into trackable and positive ROI. Establishing this trust is the single most difficult barrier to entry for any company seeking an SEO service provider. After a month or two of organic optimization doesn’t yield ten-fold results a client will sometimes get impatient with the “stay the course strategy” response. We’ve seen scenarios time and time again where companies leave potentially lucrative opportunities on the table because they could not bridge the trust gap with their provider. These credibility factors are meant as resource to better vet search optimization companies and to introspectively take measure of your own web marketing firm.

1. Proven Success

Any reputable search optimization company should be able to provide you specific information on a similar campaign where they’ve achieved their goals and delivered results. If a company proposing an SEO product, service, solution, or strategy can’t put in front of you clear & simple data on how it performs – do not hire them.

2. Technical Expertise

Make sure the SEO consultancy has a deep technical background including programming. The fact of the matter is search engines, search engine algorithms, & social media sites are all created and written by computer scientists – why not hire some of your own to figure out how to best rank for target keywords. It should be a red flag if any SEO company or consultant does not have a programming background or talented web developers involved at the strategic level of the project.

3. Industry-Vertical Experience

The best organic optimization is a meticulous process that is highly aligned with your specific product catalog, competitive search space, & industry differentiators. There is also a lot of initial research and keyboard legwork that goes into developing a cohesive search optimization strategy – so finding a company experienced within your industry vertical allows you to capitalize on their previous research and successes out of the gate. There is inevitably some trial & error involved in SEO – so capture this domain knowledge by hiring experience.

4. Ability to Scale & Grow

If your website optimization techniques exceed your wildest expectations – doubling or tripling online sales inside of 6 months – could this company or consultant keep up? Your expanding web business will require expertise in graphical design, online advertising, data tracking, analysis, and programming just to name a few. Will your provider be able to scale with you when their proposed strategy succeeds? Look for a company that offers a range of services & solutions within the web marketing spectrum so you can unify accountability across the board and simplify management of outsourced web marketing activities.

5. Does It Make Sense?

Buzzwords and acronyms are plentiful in the web marketing industry, be wary of any provider that use these quickly & without explanation – many players selling smoke & mirrors use this as a tactic to steamroll potential customers. By inflicting a technically superior tone to the dialog, they hope to drive a customer by instilling fear and unease. This should be another red flag – just because the marketing efforts are happening in a virtual space does not mean all logic virtually goes out the window. A solid holistic web optimization campaign should be easily understood without a Facebook PhD and trackable to the real value impact to your company and bottom line.

For more information on how atomni can help you succeed with your organic search campaign or search engine optimization strategy