It seems that the financial crisis is on everybody’s mind and web merchants are certainly no exception. As we enter the all-important Holiday shopping season, consumers are anxious about the economy, and their spending is coming into question.

Just about the only group with higher levels of anxiety than these consumers are the retailers selling to them, and online merchants are no exception. Nobody knows what to expect going forward.

You might think that online retailers cut their ad spends during uncertain times and many certainly have done so. However, as I have noted in a recent CyberSiteSearch Blog post, search marketing clients generally have not decreased their PPC ad spending. But what has changed is that they have increased their conversion optimization efforts by a whopping 300%!

This is certainly a strategy that makes a lot of sense. Decreasing PPC ad spending can only lead to lower traffic to a merchant’s site, which of course translates into lower sales. Not exactly an appealing option to most online retailers, but one that many choose out of economic necessity.

But what if that lowered ad spend could actually yield the same sales as the old, higher advertising budget? Or maybe keep the same budget, garner more customers and actually increase sales?

The key to that approach is of course converting more visitors into paying customers. Always a noble goal, it has become exceptionally important now since we are operating in an incredibly complex economic environment. Even small changes to landing pages, site navigation, and usability can mean the difference between success and failure.

Study after study has pointed to a starkly sobering fact: if site visitors cannot quickly locate products of interest on a web site, they leave and try the next site. Even more sobering is the fact that the time it takes for them to make that decision is usually measured in seconds.

The key to engaging these visitors and converting them into paying customers is a robust e-commerce style site search. It helps visitors to not only rapidly locate products of interest, but also assists them in making favorable buying decisions by showing product images, promotional messages, product availability information, etc. One of our customers has recently reported a whopping 40% increase in Google sales using our CyberSiteSearch product.

In this economic environment, conversion is no longer King; it’s become God!

E-Commerce Guide.com did an article today entitled Find Holiday Profits with Revamped Google Product Search, which basically urged merchants to utilize the Google Product Search to increase sales at no additional cost (the service is free). The author also pointed out a number of best practices.

We thought it appropriate to point out that the Google Product Injection feature of CyberSiteSearch implements every one of these features to help insure that our merchants achieve the best possible increase in sales. And best of all, it does this entirely automatically and requires no additional work on the part of the merchant.

It’s interesting to note that in honor of their 10th anniversary, Google has brought back to life it’s oldest available index from January, 2001.

Simply go here, and you’ll be able to search the Web as it was indexed by Google almost 8 years ago.

You can find some Interesting stuff!

It seems that the financial crisis is on everybody’s mind and web merchants are certainly no exception. Nobody knows what to expect going forward.

As quoted in a recent post to the Search Insider Blog, search marketing clients have not decreased their PPC ad spending, but what has changed is that they have increased their conversion optimization efforts by a whopping 300%!

This is simply a reflection of the fact that we are operating in an incredibly complex economic environment. Even small changes to landing pages, site navigation, and usability can mean the difference between success and failure.

The time couldn’t be better to implement CyberSiteSearch. If a customer cannot rapidly locate and purchase products on a web site, they leave within seconds. And CyberSiteSearch not only helps site visitors do exactly that, but it also offers integrated marketing features that bring additional, highly targeted visitors to your product pages.

In this economic environment, conversion is no longer King; it’s become God!

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you not only survive, but also prosper.

Google recently updated and reorganized their Submit your content page. It seems to be a lot clearer and streamlined than before and well worth a read.

If you look carefully at the portions of most interest to e-commerce merchants, it’s interesting to note that  CyberSiteSearch automatically addresses those needs via its Google Product Injection and Search Engine Product Visibility features.

Merchants who sign up for these features have their content submitted and refreshed to Google on an automatic, ongoing basis. They don’t even have to think about it.

Some time ago we noted in this Blog that our company President and Founder was invited by Work.com to author a guide to e-commerce site search entitled “Guide to E-Commerce Site Search: So What Exactly Is It?”.

This article explains the fundamentals and important advantages of this style of site search for online merchants and has garnered high ratings by readers.

Apparently, as a result of those rankings, Business.com has now picked up the guide and is featuring it in their E-Commerce section. It is ranked in position 14 out of only 33 articles in that section. You can read the guide on Business.com here.

Business.com is the leading business search engine and pay-per-click advertising network. We are proud that they saw fit to include us.

We’ve recently added new features to CyberSiteSearch that permit easy customization of search results.

With these new features, merchants have complete control over the appearance and content of product search results. Examples of how this feature might be used include:

• Implementing multiple “buy now” buttons on each product search result, such as for the site’s own shopping cart, Pay Pal, and Google Checkout.
• Add a “New” or other attention graphic to specific products results.
• Adding a drop down list of product options.
• Showing multiple images for each product.

The combination of our product’s robust handling of merchant defined product attributes with this new enhanced customization feature permits merchants to show attribute information in search results such as color, voltage, flavor, pattern, axle diameter, or any other attribute they wish to define.

Best of all, this powerful new feature can typically be implemented using simple HTML.

You can read today’s press release here.

Marketing Sherpa recently posted to their blog “Before You Write Copy Or Blog, Make A Keyword List”. It makes an interesting point concerning the importance of keywords.

While keywords are most often thought of in connection with search engine optimization (SEO), Sherpa notes “Keywords are the highly specific words that your target audience would use to describe anything that has to do with your offerings, as well as the personal reasons why they’d buy” and “nothing is more compelling than speaking in a prospect’s language – describing their own desire or pain to them in exactly the words they would use.”

Hmmm … speak to customers in their own language, using their exact words?

Do your users search for “garbage can” or “trash bin”? Do they search for “Kousmichoff” or “Kusmi”? “Car” or “auto”? “Balsamic vinegar” or “aceto balsamico”? The list of questions goes on and on.

So where might you find the answers? Use the CyberSiteSearch search reporting to ferret out those keywords. It provides easily sortable reports of keywords based on frequency of use, click volume, sales volume, etc.

With those answers you’ll be better equipped to speak to your customers using the words they themselves use.

In response to a few comments that we’ve received, here are links to the full series of postings that we did about Product Attributes And E-Commerce Site Search, listed in chronological order. It’s a lot easier to read in this fashion.

• So What Are Product Attributes?
• Product Attributes In The Real World
• Product Attributes In The Online World
• How Site Search Tools Should Not Obtain Product Attribute Information
• How Site Search Tools Should Obtain Product Attribute Information
• Product Attributes And E-Commerce Site Search Tools: The Real Payoff

We noticed today an announcement  by Google concerning their support of alternative data feed formats to Google Base. Basically, they now support incoming feeds formatted for Shopping.com and Shopzilla.com in addition to their own feed format.

One interesting aspect of this announcement is that it mimics our own strategy of supporting popular feed formats, except that we can accommodate feeds formatted for not only Shopping.com, and Shopzilla, but also Shop.com, Google, Yahoo, Price Grabber, Smarter.com, Become.com and others. Merchants may use existing feeds in one of these formats to send product data to CyberSiteSearch. In fact, our Merchant Console permits rapid and easy use of virtually any existing feed format.

But the other interesting aspect is that although it may provide some convenience to merchants, it also comes up short in terms of taking advantage of optional and custom attributes.

CyberSiteSearch continues to fully support these attributes in data sent using the Google Product Injection feature.