Well most people must, because it seems today more and more retail businesses are offering points as a reward for purchases made at their stores. For example, I receive points at my GM/Chevy and Ford dealers when I get repairs done. When I return I can use the points as dollars to reduce my next repair bill. Recently we bought a new flat screen TV at Best Buy and they gave us points that I can claim at their Reward Zone towards additional purchases. Cabelas gives points when I use their credit card which can be used towards new purchases at Cabelas. Sometimes Cabelas offers double points when you make purchases at Cabelas with the card. True Value stores gives points on purchases made and at my local grocery store I get points that I can turn into money off my gas purchases at the local gas station down the road.
The point system is meant to get customers to return and buy more items and services from the merchant. Is it working? Well it must be because more and more stores are using it. It's a nice feeling when you walk up to the checkout counter to pay and the clerk asks you do want to use your points towards your payment. It does help build loyalty, especially if the service and products are good.
The other thing I see happening is to enroll in the points program the retailer is able to capture your email address. Now they have your permission to send you emails with various promotions to get you back in their store to buy more and get additional points. After all, email is a terrific way of get a sale message to your local target audience.
So how can other types of retail businesses, like flooring and furniture stores use points to build loyalty and increase sales? It's tougher for them because consumer purchases are so infrequent. Can a carpet store work with a local carpet cleaning company to allow consumers to earn points towards their next flooring purchase or next carpet cleaning? Or, can several different local businesses get together and offer points that can be redeemed at any of the particating retailers? Maybe offer contractors or interior designers points every time they make purchases through your store.
Anyone have any other thoughts?
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Getting A Handle on Website Search Engine Optimization
Since many businesses are still clueless about search engine optimization (SEO) and what it involves I thought I would post part of a seminar I did at a trade show convention back in 2004. Hopefully, this will give business owners better insights into what is entailed in optimizing a website and why we do it.
How Do Search Engines Work?
In general, search engines use sophisticated software applications (called spiders or robots) to crawl the Internet and read web pages. Search engine robots find new web pages by following links from web page to web page and through people submitting their website address directly to the search engines. Each page read is then cataloged into a huge database. They then use very complex algorithms and computational formulas to determine which web pages they should list, which is based off of a page’s relevancy and popularity to the words typed in by a person performing a search. Search engine web page listings are commonly referred to as Search Engine Rank Position or SERP for short.
Search Engine Optimization
You can have a $500,000 website, but if no one can find it than you have wasted a lot of time and money. With millions and millions of websites today, getting lost in the sea of web pages is very easy to do. Since so many people use the search engines to find what they are looking for online, we must continually optimize our websites for better search engine listing postions to consistently drive potential online customers to our websites. Search engines are not only consumers resource guide but also many times their yellow pages today.
Search engine optimization is really about optimizing specific “sets of keywords” within the various pages and page elements to help your website achieve a higher search engine ranking positions (called SERPs). The exact sets of keyword phrases should mirror the words your targeted audience uses when performing a search. It should be noted, keyword optimizing strategies will differ between manufacturers looking for a more global targeted audience versus retailers interested only in connecting with their local online shoppers.
Although optimizing web pages may seem easy at first, it does take a lot of time, effort, industry knowledge and search engine expertise to really be effective. To make things more complicated, search engines are always tweaking their algorithms, adding new things to their listing mix, and smart competitors can visibly see your strategies and duplicate them. Plus, the search engine industry is constantly changing the playing field.
Also, no two search engines yield the same algorithmic results. So what works with one search engine may not produce the same results with another search engine, or may be slightly different from region to region. So what someone in California sees when doing a search may be slightly different than what someone in New York will see when conducting the exact same search.
Keywords and Keyword Phrases
Keywords and phrases are used to help the Search Engines determine exactly what a web page is all about. Search Engines reading all the text on a page will give more weight to words that are consistently repeated in the page title tag and within the page itself. This is commonly referred to as: “keyword density” and applies to individual pages as well as the overall web site.
At the same time, overuse of keywords within a page may penalize your overall rankings. Using too many different sets of keywords within the same page can confuse the search engine spider and cause your overall rank to diminish.
It is important to realize four things:
Most people use 2-3 or more words together when conducting a search. So it is important to optimize your keyword phrases within your web page for the words your targeted audience most often uses when searching for your products and services. Too often website owners tell their web developers to target very general keyword phrases. These general terms may not get you your true targeted audience (especially local audience) and can be extremely costly to obtain high search engine ranking positions. If all I sell is “hardwood flooring” I do not want everyone who searches with the keyword “flooring”, because chances are they are not in the market to buy a hardwood floor. Also, if I am a flooring store in “Maine” do I really want to bother interacting with people from “California”? To help pull our real targeted audience to our website we need to optimize all keywords and phrases with well thought out keyword qualifiers that mirrors what our targeted audience uses.
Adding qualifiers to keyword phrases will accomplish two things. This will help get a more targeted audience and it will be much easier to obtain a higher search engine rank position than using generic terms and the more competitive phrases. This is especially true for retailers who really only want to attract their local targeted potential buyers.
Geographic-related Qualifiers
If your business products and services are limited by defined geographic area, it is probably not worth going after highly competitive terms that don’t specify your specific region. For example, if you are a carpet store in “Atlanta, GA.” adding geographic qualifiers (in this case "Atlanta carpet store" or "Georgia plumbing supply") means you have a better chance of being listed on page #1 for that exact phrase (versus “carpet” by itself) which should also attract a much more targeted shopper to your website.
Descriptive Noun Qualifiers
The addition of a descriptive noun can take a keyword phrase that attracts a more general audience and transform it into a phrase that will attract the exact type of targeted traffic that you seek. As example, “hardwood flooring” is a very broad term and is very competitive between web sites looking for high rankings. Adding a descriptive noun modifier (such as “store”, “retailer” or “stores”) will help you target exactly the type of traffic you really want. The term “hardwood flooring store” is also much easier to obtain high ranking position than “hardwood flooring” and will probably get you a more targeted buyer who is seriously looking where to buy their hardwood floor.
Descriptive Adjective Qualifiers
Using descriptive qualifiers can also help you achieve high ranking positions with your targeted audience. If your business is strictly selling “round area rugs” than you can get a much more targeted audience for a lot less effort if you add “round” to the keyword phrase “area rugs”. This helps narrow your audience to those looking specifically for “round area rugs”.
Poor Quality Qualifiers
These are generally words (“free”, “advice”, “guide”) that attract the wrong type of audience that has no intention of going to your business or buying from you. In the flooring industry we have specific words like “install” or “installing” that when used may target consumers looking for installation help after they have already made the flooring purchase at another store. If you are looking to drive consumers to your store to buy flooring you definitely don’t want to bother giving out free installation advice to every DIY consumer on the Internet.
Incoming Links
Google uses incoming links to web sites to determine how popular a web site may be for a given subject, or keyword phrase. This is referred to as: “Link Popularity”. In laymen terms what this means is every web site that links back to you gives you a popularity vote. The more popularity votes (incoming links) you receive the higher your ranking listing position will be in Google for a given search phrase. This is why the popular flooring manufacturers generally do well in rank position, everyone links back to them which increases dramatically their link popularity with Google.
Three important factors will also effect you link popularity:
Regardless, if incoming links gain you link popularity they will help get you more traffic. If you exchange links with other targeted web sites you will see more traffic and exchanging links between web site owners is almost always free.
Internal Links
The same rules apply to internal links pointing to other pages within your website. Use good keyword strategies within the link descriptions for all internal links.
How Do Search Engines Work?
In general, search engines use sophisticated software applications (called spiders or robots) to crawl the Internet and read web pages. Search engine robots find new web pages by following links from web page to web page and through people submitting their website address directly to the search engines. Each page read is then cataloged into a huge database. They then use very complex algorithms and computational formulas to determine which web pages they should list, which is based off of a page’s relevancy and popularity to the words typed in by a person performing a search. Search engine web page listings are commonly referred to as Search Engine Rank Position or SERP for short.
Search Engine Optimization
You can have a $500,000 website, but if no one can find it than you have wasted a lot of time and money. With millions and millions of websites today, getting lost in the sea of web pages is very easy to do. Since so many people use the search engines to find what they are looking for online, we must continually optimize our websites for better search engine listing postions to consistently drive potential online customers to our websites. Search engines are not only consumers resource guide but also many times their yellow pages today.
Search engine optimization is really about optimizing specific “sets of keywords” within the various pages and page elements to help your website achieve a higher search engine ranking positions (called SERPs). The exact sets of keyword phrases should mirror the words your targeted audience uses when performing a search. It should be noted, keyword optimizing strategies will differ between manufacturers looking for a more global targeted audience versus retailers interested only in connecting with their local online shoppers.
Although optimizing web pages may seem easy at first, it does take a lot of time, effort, industry knowledge and search engine expertise to really be effective. To make things more complicated, search engines are always tweaking their algorithms, adding new things to their listing mix, and smart competitors can visibly see your strategies and duplicate them. Plus, the search engine industry is constantly changing the playing field.
Also, no two search engines yield the same algorithmic results. So what works with one search engine may not produce the same results with another search engine, or may be slightly different from region to region. So what someone in California sees when doing a search may be slightly different than what someone in New York will see when conducting the exact same search.
Keywords and Keyword Phrases
Keywords and phrases are used to help the Search Engines determine exactly what a web page is all about. Search Engines reading all the text on a page will give more weight to words that are consistently repeated in the page title tag and within the page itself. This is commonly referred to as: “keyword density” and applies to individual pages as well as the overall web site.
At the same time, overuse of keywords within a page may penalize your overall rankings. Using too many different sets of keywords within the same page can confuse the search engine spider and cause your overall rank to diminish.
It is important to realize four things:
- Search Engine robots only READ TEXT content!! They can NOT read graphics, flash, etc. and they ignore Javascript.
- Search Engines cannot insert text into a form and click the submit button, so pages behind a form cannot be crawled by the search engines. For example, search engine robots cannot enter a zipcode and click the submit button to see store listings.
- Do not overuse keywords and never try to be sneaky in your keyword strategies.
- No one has real control over the Search Engine ranking position. It can change from day to day depending on the Search Engines algorithms and formulas. It is an ongoing job to keep good rank position for a specific set of keywords.
Most people use 2-3 or more words together when conducting a search. So it is important to optimize your keyword phrases within your web page for the words your targeted audience most often uses when searching for your products and services. Too often website owners tell their web developers to target very general keyword phrases. These general terms may not get you your true targeted audience (especially local audience) and can be extremely costly to obtain high search engine ranking positions. If all I sell is “hardwood flooring” I do not want everyone who searches with the keyword “flooring”, because chances are they are not in the market to buy a hardwood floor. Also, if I am a flooring store in “Maine” do I really want to bother interacting with people from “California”? To help pull our real targeted audience to our website we need to optimize all keywords and phrases with well thought out keyword qualifiers that mirrors what our targeted audience uses.
Adding qualifiers to keyword phrases will accomplish two things. This will help get a more targeted audience and it will be much easier to obtain a higher search engine rank position than using generic terms and the more competitive phrases. This is especially true for retailers who really only want to attract their local targeted potential buyers.
Geographic-related Qualifiers
If your business products and services are limited by defined geographic area, it is probably not worth going after highly competitive terms that don’t specify your specific region. For example, if you are a carpet store in “Atlanta, GA.” adding geographic qualifiers (in this case "Atlanta carpet store" or "Georgia plumbing supply") means you have a better chance of being listed on page #1 for that exact phrase (versus “carpet” by itself) which should also attract a much more targeted shopper to your website.
Descriptive Noun Qualifiers
The addition of a descriptive noun can take a keyword phrase that attracts a more general audience and transform it into a phrase that will attract the exact type of targeted traffic that you seek. As example, “hardwood flooring” is a very broad term and is very competitive between web sites looking for high rankings. Adding a descriptive noun modifier (such as “store”, “retailer” or “stores”) will help you target exactly the type of traffic you really want. The term “hardwood flooring store” is also much easier to obtain high ranking position than “hardwood flooring” and will probably get you a more targeted buyer who is seriously looking where to buy their hardwood floor.
Descriptive Adjective Qualifiers
Using descriptive qualifiers can also help you achieve high ranking positions with your targeted audience. If your business is strictly selling “round area rugs” than you can get a much more targeted audience for a lot less effort if you add “round” to the keyword phrase “area rugs”. This helps narrow your audience to those looking specifically for “round area rugs”.
Poor Quality Qualifiers
These are generally words (“free”, “advice”, “guide”) that attract the wrong type of audience that has no intention of going to your business or buying from you. In the flooring industry we have specific words like “install” or “installing” that when used may target consumers looking for installation help after they have already made the flooring purchase at another store. If you are looking to drive consumers to your store to buy flooring you definitely don’t want to bother giving out free installation advice to every DIY consumer on the Internet.
Incoming Links
Google uses incoming links to web sites to determine how popular a web site may be for a given subject, or keyword phrase. This is referred to as: “Link Popularity”. In laymen terms what this means is every web site that links back to you gives you a popularity vote. The more popularity votes (incoming links) you receive the higher your ranking listing position will be in Google for a given search phrase. This is why the popular flooring manufacturers generally do well in rank position, everyone links back to them which increases dramatically their link popularity with Google.
Three important factors will also effect you link popularity:
- What keywords are used within the link’s description. <a href=”http://www.mysite.com/”>Milwaukee Carpet Store</a>
- An external page’s content relevancy to your website’s content is extremely important. A page link coming from the wrong content may have a negative effect to your website’s link popularity.
- The page ranking of the page linking to your website can also be an important factor.
- Authoritative websites, such as government websites are great sources to obtain a listing from and carry a lot of weight with the search engines, so do many major manufacturer and major online publication type websites.
Regardless, if incoming links gain you link popularity they will help get you more traffic. If you exchange links with other targeted web sites you will see more traffic and exchanging links between web site owners is almost always free.
Internal Links
The same rules apply to internal links pointing to other pages within your website. Use good keyword strategies within the link descriptions for all internal links.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Stainmaster Shifts To Lowes - What Carpet Retailers Should Do
After listening to Jon Trivers audio interview on TalkFloor (see: Trivers on Stainmaster’s Shift to Lowes) where he discusses StainMaster's move to Lowes I began to think about how dealers could use their website to drive potential Stainmaster® customers to their stores.
If you go to Lowe's website and look at the flooring section you will see they are promoting $39 whole house installation on StainMaster® Carpets when you buy the carpet and padding from them. This does not include tear-up, old carpet removal, furniture moving, installing on stairs and customization. As Trivers points out in his FloorRadio interview the idea of making labor seem cheap is not smart, since we all know installing carpet is very labor-intensive and doing the seams correctly takes skill. Yet, Lowes has a great reputation in the eyes of many homeowners and have numerous reasons why homeowners frequent there.
So how do retailers use their websites to combat this? First off, your goal should be to get the consumer to visit your specialty flooring store where you can have an intelligent conversation with them and show them some of your real carpet values and carpet expertise. Whether you sell them StainMaster®, Shaw's Anso® or Mohawk's SmartStrand® Carpet doesn't really matter at this moment, the key is to use your website to help get the potential carpet shoppers to visit your store before they buy.
To get them to visit your store via your website means we have to first get local, online StainMaster® shoppers to visit your website. If you sell StainMaster® Carpets then you need to add a geo-targeted web page to your website that is dedicated to StainMaster Carpets that you offer. Otherwise, consumers don't know you sell it. Plus, you won't have a chance of getting found in the search engine results by online Stainmaster® Carpet shoppers. Be sure to make this geo-targeted, Stainmaster® Carpet landing page compelling enough so the local shoppers will want to interact with you and make your store a must visit before buying their new carpet. I know this will work because it is the kind of strategy I use at Webstream Dynamics all the time with our retail clients and have had great success.
If you go to Lowe's website and look at the flooring section you will see they are promoting $39 whole house installation on StainMaster® Carpets when you buy the carpet and padding from them. This does not include tear-up, old carpet removal, furniture moving, installing on stairs and customization. As Trivers points out in his FloorRadio interview the idea of making labor seem cheap is not smart, since we all know installing carpet is very labor-intensive and doing the seams correctly takes skill. Yet, Lowes has a great reputation in the eyes of many homeowners and have numerous reasons why homeowners frequent there.
So how do retailers use their websites to combat this? First off, your goal should be to get the consumer to visit your specialty flooring store where you can have an intelligent conversation with them and show them some of your real carpet values and carpet expertise. Whether you sell them StainMaster®, Shaw's Anso® or Mohawk's SmartStrand® Carpet doesn't really matter at this moment, the key is to use your website to help get the potential carpet shoppers to visit your store before they buy.
To get them to visit your store via your website means we have to first get local, online StainMaster® shoppers to visit your website. If you sell StainMaster® Carpets then you need to add a geo-targeted web page to your website that is dedicated to StainMaster Carpets that you offer. Otherwise, consumers don't know you sell it. Plus, you won't have a chance of getting found in the search engine results by online Stainmaster® Carpet shoppers. Be sure to make this geo-targeted, Stainmaster® Carpet landing page compelling enough so the local shoppers will want to interact with you and make your store a must visit before buying their new carpet. I know this will work because it is the kind of strategy I use at Webstream Dynamics all the time with our retail clients and have had great success.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Leveraging Your Mouse To Shop For A Vehicle
Over the past few days we decided it was time to buy my wife a new vehicle. It’s been several years since we had done any serious vehicle shopping I wasn't sure what to expect online versus offline at the dealerships.
This buying journey began by my wife first visiting a Ford dealer on her way home from work and getting some ideas what you wanted. Once she had narrowed it down to 2-3 models (slightly used) I immediately went online to learn more about the vehicle models she liked, what problems those models may have had (recalls) and then begin the process of shopping dealers. Websites like AutoTraders.com and Cars.com helped immensely to quickly see what vehicles were available in our local area. Some vehicles allowed us to see the CarFax reports for free online. (Although the CarFax tells you some things for leased vehicles it is pretty vague.)
Using the Internet to shop vehicles this quickly becomes a game of price/feature/color with no regards to dealer service or why buying from one dealer is better than another. Even visiting the actual dealer’s websites there is little or nothing about “Why buy from us?” It’s all about price and personal color preference and what features they offer for each vehicle.
The first thing I noticed while shopping is all the different dealers obviously also check the Internet before pricing any vehicle. So the Internet prices listed pretty much are all right in line with each other. The real buyer advantage happens when you start to physically go see a few dealers with printed spec sheets from the Internet. Once they know you are a web savvy shopper and have done your homework prices begin to fall. They may first say “That’s our Internet price we can’t do any better”, but in this economy and by doing thorough research online and offline you can get the price down…. sometimes dramatically! (It makes me wonder what the actual dealer cost of the vehicle was.)
My thought throughout this whole process was there was never any real discussion about what we can do for you (service wise), nor why we are the best place to buy from. It’s all about price, color and options. After all, you can get your vehicle serviced any where and chances are it may not be at that dealer. Two dealers did say “We would like to earn your business” but never offered how they would do that. They were just passing words that had no real value to us.
This leads me to my final comment… If other retailers (ie: flooring dealers) do a poor job of differentiating themselves from their competitors, if they forget to talk about their services, then they too will be in a price war. Without building your own brand value in the consumer’s mind you are strictly selling on price. After all, consumers can buy their products today just as easily online as offline.
This buying journey began by my wife first visiting a Ford dealer on her way home from work and getting some ideas what you wanted. Once she had narrowed it down to 2-3 models (slightly used) I immediately went online to learn more about the vehicle models she liked, what problems those models may have had (recalls) and then begin the process of shopping dealers. Websites like AutoTraders.com and Cars.com helped immensely to quickly see what vehicles were available in our local area. Some vehicles allowed us to see the CarFax reports for free online. (Although the CarFax tells you some things for leased vehicles it is pretty vague.)
Using the Internet to shop vehicles this quickly becomes a game of price/feature/color with no regards to dealer service or why buying from one dealer is better than another. Even visiting the actual dealer’s websites there is little or nothing about “Why buy from us?” It’s all about price and personal color preference and what features they offer for each vehicle.
The first thing I noticed while shopping is all the different dealers obviously also check the Internet before pricing any vehicle. So the Internet prices listed pretty much are all right in line with each other. The real buyer advantage happens when you start to physically go see a few dealers with printed spec sheets from the Internet. Once they know you are a web savvy shopper and have done your homework prices begin to fall. They may first say “That’s our Internet price we can’t do any better”, but in this economy and by doing thorough research online and offline you can get the price down…. sometimes dramatically! (It makes me wonder what the actual dealer cost of the vehicle was.)
My thought throughout this whole process was there was never any real discussion about what we can do for you (service wise), nor why we are the best place to buy from. It’s all about price, color and options. After all, you can get your vehicle serviced any where and chances are it may not be at that dealer. Two dealers did say “We would like to earn your business” but never offered how they would do that. They were just passing words that had no real value to us.
This leads me to my final comment… If other retailers (ie: flooring dealers) do a poor job of differentiating themselves from their competitors, if they forget to talk about their services, then they too will be in a price war. Without building your own brand value in the consumer’s mind you are strictly selling on price. After all, consumers can buy their products today just as easily online as offline.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Promoting Your Fall Sale Events
Most retailers right now have major Fall sale events going on in their brick-and-mortar stores. So are these sale events also promoted on your website? Shame on you if they are not.
Supplier Marketing Support Portals
Your website should be an extension of your store's overall marketing strategies, which means what ever you are promoting in your store should be on your website too. Some suppliers have special dealer portals where you or your web developer can login and download flyers and sale event details. Some even supply snippets of code to embed in your website that will display the sale event for you. So there is little excuse not to participate.
If your supplier has a big Fall Sale and they don't have web content for you to use on your website tell them: "Hey this is 2010! How can we support you if you can't be bothered supplying us with website digital promotional materials?" Don't let them off the hook they need to get with the times.
Be Creative
If you really want to separate yourself from your competition then be creative. Rather than just using the supplier's materials create a unique landing page promoting your Fall Sale events! Add Youtube videos, room scenes, in-store photos, etc... Make it say to your website visitors "Wow I have to go there!" You can also link to that page from your website as well as pay-per-click advertising. Plus, using analtyics you can track the page results and determine how successful it was.
Don't Be a Lemming
Bottom line, if you want your website to give you a good ROI you have to continually put some serious effort into it. If you have a supplier's templated website and you can't update it yourself I would dump it and get something you can personalize and have regularly maintained with all your latest in-store sale events, store photos, testimonials, photos of previous jobs, and unique geo-targeted content to improve your search engine ranking positions. Don't be a lemming!
Supplier Marketing Support Portals
Your website should be an extension of your store's overall marketing strategies, which means what ever you are promoting in your store should be on your website too. Some suppliers have special dealer portals where you or your web developer can login and download flyers and sale event details. Some even supply snippets of code to embed in your website that will display the sale event for you. So there is little excuse not to participate.
If your supplier has a big Fall Sale and they don't have web content for you to use on your website tell them: "Hey this is 2010! How can we support you if you can't be bothered supplying us with website digital promotional materials?" Don't let them off the hook they need to get with the times.
Be Creative
If you really want to separate yourself from your competition then be creative. Rather than just using the supplier's materials create a unique landing page promoting your Fall Sale events! Add Youtube videos, room scenes, in-store photos, etc... Make it say to your website visitors "Wow I have to go there!" You can also link to that page from your website as well as pay-per-click advertising. Plus, using analtyics you can track the page results and determine how successful it was.
Don't Be a Lemming
Bottom line, if you want your website to give you a good ROI you have to continually put some serious effort into it. If you have a supplier's templated website and you can't update it yourself I would dump it and get something you can personalize and have regularly maintained with all your latest in-store sale events, store photos, testimonials, photos of previous jobs, and unique geo-targeted content to improve your search engine ranking positions. Don't be a lemming!
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