Marketing and SEO for Ecommerce Sites

January 7, 2009
 

The winter season is always marked by holiday shopping and people continue to turn online to get their shop on. Today’s show is all about online marketing considerations for ecommerce sites. Bruce, Susan and Virginia take a look at why you should establish a presence in all parts of the buying cycle. By maintaining a presence in a variety of channels (not only online but offline as well), a person is more likely to turn to your familiar company when they are looking for a service you provide. The concept of creating a circle of presence around your company through multiple channels is called halo media.

Gregg Banse, president of Web strategy and development company 7thpixel and moderator of Webmaster World’s ecommerce forum, talks to Virginia about how ecommerce sites fared this holiday season. According to what Gregg, online sales were not as high as expected despite growth over last year. Gregg also explains how online retailers are carefully entering the social media space, and rightly so. He says that while necessary to have a social network presence, the commitment of time and resources is often underestimated and should not be approached haphazardly.

Then Susan, Virginia and Bradley consider common pitfalls and areas of needed improvement that often occur on ecommerce sites. Poor crawlability due to session IDs and multiple dynamic variables in URLs, unfriendly content management systems that don’t allow adequate customization, and using catalog content online rather than the actual words a searcher might be looking for are all easy mistakes to make in the realm of online retail.