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.

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.

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.

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.

Practical Ecommerce did a “Tip Of The Day” item titled “Add Misspellings To Your PPC Campaign”, noting

Did you know that 587 people search for “googles” instead of “goggles” each day? If you don’t mind attracting customers who are not spelling gurus, consider adding misspellings to your search marketing campaigns.

Good advice. But where to find these misspellings? One good place is to peruse the CyberSiteSearch search reports. Simply scanning through the lists of keyword searches can yield a list of misspellings found in site searches.

Not only should you use them in your PPC campaign, but they also should be used as synonyms for site searches so that misspellings will yield correct results.

If you’d like to quickly and easily monitor your web site’s position for a few search terms, you can’t beat Rank Checker. It’s a Firefox add on that easy very easy to install and run. Basically you need only specify the domain name and keywords and it will report back within seconds the site’s ranking in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

We use it to check our own search positioning. For example, it took only about 15 seconds or so to check the positioning of CyberSiteSearch for the phrase “ecommerce site search”. (The results were we are in number 2 position in Google, number 4 in Yahoo, and number 1 in MSN Live.)

It’s lightweight, easy to use, fast, and free. You can’t beat it.

After a similar recent posting, one of our customers pointed us to another site with free webmaster resources: The Freebie Directory which contains a section on computer and internet resources. It’s worth checking out.

If you know of other similar resources, please contact us with the details.

Web merchants often wonder how CyberSiteSearch relates to their search marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. The answer is that the CyberSiteSearch Google Product Injection and Search Engine Product Visibility features dovetail perfectly with those efforts.

Search marketing and SEO efforts for the vast majority of retail sites focus on more general themes and keywords such as category names, product features, brand names, etc. For example, for a hypothetical site selling widgets, the focus is generally on promoting keywords representing the product types or categories (“widgets”), brand or manufacturer information (“acme widgets”), product attributes (“left handed widgets”), etc. It is unusual for SEO efforts to be expended in favor of individual product pages, mainly for cost reasons (typically, there are just too many of them).

That’s where CyberSiteSearch comes in. Our product focuses on the search marketing of your product pages. And it does so in a highly efficient, automated, and cost effective manner. Plus, remember that even the most successful search marketing campaigns fail unless these new site visitors can rapidly locate and purchase the products of interest, and that’s the purpose of our ecommerce site search features.

Combining CyberSiteSearch with your search marketing and SEO efforts not only makes perfect sense, but comprises a powerful “one-two punch” to achieve better sales on your retail web site. Contact us today to learn more.

To help gain exposure for your web site and garner a valuable high Page Rank incoming link, consider using Digg to post newsworthy information about your site. Your information must fit within one of their categories, so consider that before posting.

A good example is how we posted our New Product Announcement on Digg.

It’s interesting to note that Google picked up this posting within minutes.