Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

Blog Homepage : Category - Internet Marketing

As a person who uses the web professionally during the week, I often forget that there’s a whole other side to the web.  One that I also use heavily.  That is the research aspect of the web.  While the web can be a powerful income generation tool, it is an even more powerful education and research tool.  Too often online retailers forget this side of the equation.

As you may have read in the last Daily Roundup, I had set aside some time this weekend to take on a new project involving setting up a little search engine indexer in my home.

I do this because in this industry – the search marketing industry – you either lead or you follow.  Even to just maintain your abilities you must always be learning and experimenting.  I can not tell you how many new techniques I’ve developed over the past years through “what if” ideas.

Over the past few years I’ve studied search engines like Google (and Altavista when it was big, and Inktomi before it became Yahoo!) in order to learn how they have leveraged technology to become world leaders.

Understanding these engines means not only looking at results to figure out how they got there, but also understanding the technology that got it there.  That is why I set up the small indexer on my computer – to get a better idea how crawlers work.  The LAMP project that I installed also has a simple search engine that does rank pages by relevance.

I am also interested in installing software that is easy because I’m still relatively new to Linux.  I’ve been using it as my primary system at home for just over a year now, but I’ve used Windows since 3.11.  I am even a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, and have been for some time, so am very familiar with how Windows operates.

So, as I am still technically a “newbie” when it comes to Linux I like stuff that’s relatively easy.  I have moved away (somewhat) from the automated package installers and can manually install packages if I need to, but I wasn’t too interested in doing all that for this project and since the install did seem pretty simple as I had most of the prerequisites already I decided to give it a go.

Of course, it didn’t go as smoothly as it was supposed to (they never do for me) so I found myself launching a browser and searching for the errors that I was getting.

I remember doing something similar about 8 months ago.  I don’t remember what I was playing with then, and I was generating a fair number of errors, however I was becoming extremely frustrated with Google at the time because I wasn’t finding answers to my questions.  Instead I found myself using Ask Jeeves increasingly more during that time because of my perception of lack of Google quality.

Flash forward to yesterday and for every error I searched for I found an answer usually in the top spot and in every case in the top 3.  It never really clued in for me until this morning how much Google has improved their results in just 8 months.  In fact, as I think about it, the more research I find myself doing online, the more relevant Google results have been getting.

I doubt that there has been any time in our history when there was so much information available to users at their fingertips like now.  The web has become much more than an e-commerce generator.  It is also a very powerful research tool.

And I think this is the message that is missing in some websites – the whole research aspect of the web.

How many times have you been in research mode searching for product information or even a decent picture of a product, only to find yourself on a site which is the same as the last 5 sites that you have visited that has a grainy picture, no information yet offer free shipping and handling?

This is a real frustration to me because as you may have guessed, outside of my job I do lots of personal research.  Yet too often the websites I visit aren’t geared towards the typical researcher.

Here’s a good example:  My wife and I are looking for a new TV.  Ours is about 12 years old, so we’re thinking with the new wide screen technology, and the new types like DLP and LCD that it’s time to upgrade.

My first question is:  What’s better?  LCD or DLP?

It took me close to an hour to find this information and it wasn’t on a vendors site or an e-commerce site (although I must have seen a couple dozen of them by then) it was on About.com.  I got a great article explaining the benefits and disadvantages of each format.

So then, upon deciding on one, I wanted to get an idea of the different models and features.  Again, after browsing many consumer sites I was becoming frustrated because I wasn’t able to find out much about any of the systems.  Most of the sites simply re-generated the manufacturers promotional brochures giving me very little concrete information such as screen resolution, the number of inputs and anything else that would help me make up my mind.  Remember, I’m still in research mode, so not interested in pricing at the moment.

In the end it was a consumer opinion site that I finally found the information I wanted on the different brands and features. Another missed opportunity from the retailers.

Finally I had determined which one I wanted, now it was a matter of getting a little more information in order to make up my mind.  Keep in mind that I’m close to making a purchase (or at least in the coming months) so now is the time I go price shopping.  I already know which one I want, I just want to know how much it’s going to set me back.

And again I must say, most retailers dropped the ball.

With many retail sites that I saw, there was no way for me to check stock in the stores in my area, nor did they provide the extras I would have expected such as online coupons or other promotional material.  Yet when I look in many of their printed fliers they offer free satellite systems, or free DVD players, or coupons for free movie purchases, yet none of that was online.

In fact some of the largest retailers in my area didn’t even have that online.  Many websites were nothing more than online brochures.  There was no way for me to browse products or perform any other type of shopping online.

Overall, through this whole procedure, I would give most online retailers a failing grade.  Simply because they lost me before I even became a potential customer because I couldn’t find that information at that crucial research stage.

I guess the morale of this story is this:  In order to become a true online retailer, you need to be able to capture the browsers as well as the buyers.  By focusing on one target (the buyers) you are alienating a much larger potential customer base – the browser.

And as an online retailer I can give you another reason for bulking up your site.  Not only is it great for helping convert browsers into buyers, but it’s also great spider food!

That’s right – the more content you have, the more authoritative your site becomes on the search engines.  Why do you think sites like the Wikipedia, or About.com appear at the top of the search results so often?  Because they are packed with content.

So, online retailers, my message to you is this – become everything to everyone.  Remember that the conversion may have started 3 or 4 visits ago, and continues beyond the purchase.  Don’t just focus on the person who comes to your site, fills their cart, purchases and leaves.  Also pay attention to that customer who comes along, looks in your window and kicks some tires.  These are the ones you may have to spend more time winning, but could end up making you the winner through repeat sales and referrals.