SEO, Ecommerce & Project Management

SEO Consultant - How to Shortlist the Best

2013-11-12T13:18:00.005-08:00

How to shortlist an SEO Consultant for my online business

If you're scouting for a SEO consultant or company to perform ethical and effective SEO Search Engine Optimization for your online business, then you have to make sure that you evaluate them correctly. Do not be afraid to ask questions. If you make any mistakes in your selection, that would have a direct impact on your business - to the extent of getting blacklisted.

Here are some of the questions we believe you should ask before hiring a SEO consultant or business:

About the SEO Consultant / Company

· How long have you been in business?

· How many clients do you have?

· What is the experience of the team that work on the projects. How is the team structured?

Evaluate their work

· What kind of results can we expect to see? What is the time-frame? How do you measure your success?

· Could you please provide your success stories?

· Have you worked with a client in a similar niche as mine?

· Have you worked on local SEO?

· How frequently would you provide reports to us?

· Can you provide references or testimonial?

· What is the realistic traffic expectation?

· How will you measure ROI ?

Check Methodology

· Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

· How do you decide on the keywords and phrases to target?

· What are the online marketing services you work on?

· Do you have marketing experience or just keyword manipulation and back-link building?

· What according to you is the key factor in SEO?

· How do you get backlinks?

· Would you share what changes you plan to implement on my site on a high level?

· How would you carry out competitor analysis?

· Do you work on social marketing?

· How many pages would you optimize?

· Do you carry out both on-page and off-page optimization?

Asking a set of above questions would help you gauge what they have done for the past clients and if they are capable of ranking your online business or not. When you evaluate you should also look at their sites. If they know their job well, they should rank well on all SEPRs. Stay away from companies that use ANY kind of black hat methods and who guarantee you ranking in a short time. Doing that would only get you ranked for a few months and then later get impacted by a google animal.

Remember - SEO is a long-term investment. Do not look for short term gains.

Why are my keywords jumping? Is Google Dance the end of me?

2013-10-10T16:14:00.002-07:00

GDS or Google Dance Syndrome is a sickness seen in Google Search Engine when it gets too much of information about a site or it reacts to one of its own animals (aka, panda, penguin, hummingbird, zebra bla bla.. ) in an unknown way. Funny?

It’s not! Only people who have seen their keywords getting impacted by GDS know it all. It is serious and leads to a lot of frustration. When I experienced this for my ecommerce site, I didn’t know what was wrong.

I questioned myself again and again. Did I :

- over-optimize my site

- get too many backlinks from somewhere

- get impacted by one of the Big G’s – animal

- did my competitors do too well to push me out on rankings

- someone play malicious

- I lose my good backlinks

Have you questioned yourself any of these? If yes, chances are that your site is affected by GDS.

WHAT DOES GOOGLE DANCE MEAN?

Let me talk about that in a common man’s language. A keyword on my site ‘satin scarf’ ranked on 12^th position. I woke up one morning and as part of my normal tracking activities, noticed that the keyword jumped from 12^th position to 208^th position in Google. I missed a beat, actually a few. I checked and rechecked if I made any mistake, but the fact was that keyword was far too out. A shift of a couple of places in either direction is natural. It could be because of a number of reasons. A jump that big, means my business for that specific keyword is gone. While I have been waiting for my keyword to come to #1 page, it has vanished altogether.

I wait for a day or two and three and four. The keyword moved sideways but did not get any closer to its initial 12^th ranking. Panic?

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO IF YOUR KEYWORDS DO GOOGLE DANCE?

Relax. If you have not employed any black hat techniques to get your site ranked in the past, there is nothing to worry. In my case, I was doing everything right. I was writing a lot of good content on my blog, I had products added to my site almost daily, the traffic on my site was increasing every passing day, and the social marketing was improving. I could not think of anything for which Google could penalize me. But I was disheartened. I was frustrated. It was months and months of hard work. In addition to the keyword jumping off, I checked some more basics.

- Google webmasters has no malware or manual actions or messages for my site.

- In fact, there were few positives. A few days later the SEO Analytics Reports were out and the domain authority for my site had increased by 1 place and page authority by 2 places.

- The majestic SEO also showed a slight increase in my citation and trust flow.

So what exactly was wrong?

NOTHING!

I saw my keywords dance for about 7-8 days and at the end of it, it climbed to position 8^th. As I write this post, I see that the keyword is in the images on the first page of Google. That brings in more traffic than before, because a picture speaks better than words.

So my belief is to follow the Google guidelines for on-page and off-page SEO and practice ethical techniques. All Google does is over a period of time, it reassess the site. That could be because of one of its algorithms, or for the fact that you have received some qualitative backlinks that need to be reassessed and then your domain re-positioned in the SERP. As long as the keywords are jumping, you should feel that something is more to happen. Google is not done yet. For my other competitive keywords, I have also seen them being completely out of SERP, even non-existent till position #500. They have come back, some have done better than before, and some have gone down a little.

SHOULD WE STOP SEO ACTIVITIES WHEN GOOGLE DANCES?

What is important is to believe in your techniques, follow the right path and keep working on quality content. I would not recommend stopping your SEO activities when you see Google dance happening. The dance goes on for about 2 weeks. Not working for 2 weeks would definitely bring you a drop in rankings. So just keep working on quality content.

So when Google dances, you dance to its tunes. Coz if you have played it right, you would be safe, not sorry!

Hope this gives you a bit of relief. If you have experienced Google dance, go ahead and share your findings.

Top Forum Backlinks Sites for SEO

2013-10-09T07:42:00.005-07:00

Online business, be it a store or blog requires traffic. To build traffic one needs to build authority & trust in the eyes of search engines. That's not easy, that's not a quick fix. One of the important ways to build authority is by adding quality content. Remember what they say - Content is King ! And trust me, it is till date. I have realized that the hard way after making mistakes in promoting my estore. But now that I have learnt, I would like to share a little bit of what I know.

Other than the site being content rich, what is required is that you build trust. That is possible ONLY when trustworthy sites link back to you. While you can get thousands of backlinks by some scarppy tool in a matter of few minutes, that would not help. What would help is building quality links from high authority, high PR sites that would give you a lot of link juice and trust flow. Too techy ?

Let me make it simple. Blog guest post, blog comments, directory submissions and forums involvement are few ethical white hat methods to build backlinks. Yes it is tedious to get links from them. But hard work and patience pays - ALWAYS. It has, for me. Let's talk about forum backlinks in this post.

WHY FORUMS?

1. They have huge flow of traffic

2. The authority of these domains is usually high

3. The trust flow to links from forum is high

4. You get links from forums after you establish credibility. ( 10-50 posts, 1-10 likes)

5. You get DO FOLLOW link from forum profile to your home page

6. You can include your do follow link also in your signature (after 10-50 posts)

7. They are permanent links

8. The increase your SERP ranks

9. They are ethical

Good enough reasons ? Forum backlinks can help you in a big way. You can register in a few forums and check what kind of trust flow they get to your site in a tool like Majestic SEO. Usually forum links get you trust of atleast 25 to start with. As the links become older, the trust increases.

CAUTION

1. Do not spam the forums. You may be banned.

2. Build links gradually. 2-3 links a day is good.

4. Be helpful on forums when you are answering questions. Be detailed. Be respectful.

5. Do not just focus on the backlink. Be a subject matter expert.

6. Do not go overboard and register in every forum that you see. Not all forums are good. Backlink from a forum in your niche would have greater benefits.

LIST OF AUTHORITY FORUMS

Below is the list of high authority forums that can help you in your off-page SEO.

1. http://www.siteownersforums.com

2. http://www.talkgold.com

3. http://forums.oreilly.com/

4. http://www.webcosmoforums.com

5. http://www.searchenginegenie.com

6. http://www.techsling.com/

7. http://iphonedevsdk.com/

8. http://www.seomastering.com/

9. http://www.freehostforum.com/

10. http://www.warriorforum.com

11. http://www.cashfindforum.com/forum/

12. http://www.makingimoney.com/

13. http://www.webmastercage.com/

14. http://www.solutions.pro/forums/

15. http://www.sitepoint.com

16. https://forums.digitalpoint.com/

17. http://www.v7n.com/forums/

18. http://www.serppoint.com/

19. http://earningemoney.com/

20. https://www.email.biz/

21. http://articlestars.com/forum/

22. http://forum.graphicdesignblog.org/

23. http://www.seobetter.com/seo-forums/

24. http://www.dreamteammoney.com/

25. http://internetmarketingforums.com/

26. http://www.helpingwebmasters.com/

27. http://www.websitebabble.com/

28. http://www.associateprograms.com

29. http://www.namepros.com/

30. http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk

31. http://www.esyndicat.com/forum/

32. http://www.htmlforums.com/

33. http://www.affiliateseeking.com/forums/

WHAT NEXT?

Above is the list of high authority forums. Start building you backlinks! Be honest and ethical about what you are doing here. Although the intent is to get backlinks, once you become active on forums, it is addiction. Remember the set of practices that you need to be cautious about.

If you like this post remember to bookmark it and share with your colleagues. If you know of any other forum that gets you high trust, please leave it in the comments for others to take benefit from.

Free SEO Tool – TOP 7 SEO tools

2013-06-20T10:28:00.002-07:00

SEO is the bread and butter for any company wanting to have its presence felt on the internet. A lot is dependent on on-page and off-page SEO techniques.

Here is a set of free tools available that could give you a decent report on on-page and off-page SEO for your website.

1. SMALL SEOTOOLS

2. FREE SEO TOOL

3. SEO MOZ

4. SCRUB THE WEB‎

5. RAVEN TOOLS‎

6. WOO RANK

7. TRAFFIC TRAVIS

Here are best practices to improve your on-page SEO. On-page SEO techniques improves the site ranking on google search. This leads to more organic traffic to your site, resulting in more page views / conversions.

Site Authority - Check Domain Authority

2013-06-20T10:22:00.002-07:00

What is Site or Domain authority ?

Site or Domain Authority is a measure of how a website will perform in search engine rankings.

A site with higher domain authority would rank higher than others having low authority. The quality of back-links is one of the key factors that impact the authority of the site.

How to check Domain Authority ?

Here are a few tools that you can use to check your domain authority. Most of them are free and some are free for a limited usage.

Increase in domain authority would improve your organic traffic. Most traffic would result in higher conversions. DO NOT ignore domain authority.

1. Moonsy

2. Robin Gupta

3. Open site Explorer

4. Out Reachr

Read similar other article - Does Domain registration Length impact SEO.

Google page ranking tools

2013-06-20T08:56:00.001-07:00

Page rank is a measure of a website's importance. Google ranks a website based on various parameters. Page Rank is a relative indicator of a website in the range of 1 to 10.

One of the ways to improve the Google page rank is improve the on-page SEO.

Here are some of the free tools where you may check the page rank of your site.

1. PRChecker

2. Check Page Rank

3. Robin Gupta - multiple domain page rank checker

4. Check Page Rank Free

5. Small Seo Tools

6. Jotttr

7. I Web tool

8. CJIS – multiple domain page rank checker

9. SEO Centro

10. Page Rank Checker

Check Google page rank schedule for 2013.

Google Page Ranking

2013-06-20T08:38:00.001-07:00

Google page rank updates happen every quarter. The Google page ranking schedule update for 2013 is as below.

Page Rank first update

January 30^th 2013 to February 2^nd 2013

Actual : February 4^th 2013

Page Rank second update

June 30^th 2013 to July 2^nd 2013

Page Rank third update

September 30^th 2013 to October 2^nd 2013

Page Rank fourth update

December 31^st 2013 to January 3^rd 2013

Here are some tools to check Google page rank.

Sites like Craigslist

2013-05-21T13:48:00.001-07:00

Craiglist founded by Craig Newmark in 1995. It is an absolute interesting business serving the local market. Over the years, the site has refused to change its minimalist design and easy-to-use posting system. Although Craigslist is not as popular as it was a decade ago, it remains a popular and successful site.

This success of craigslist has spawned many imitators over the years. Most of those sites like Craigslist have failed before anyone knew they existed. Still, there are a few sites like Craigslist that serve a similar purpose.

Here is a robust list of free classified sites like craigslist and who have a market share in buy, sell and trade in local market.

1. Backpage

2. Oodle Marketplace

3. Patricks Post

4. ClassifiedAds

5. US FreeAds

6. Recycler

7. Domestic Sale

8. OLX

9. Adoos

10. Hoobly

11. Bookoo

12. Shopgoodwill

13. Krrb

14. Sell

15. Ebay Classifieds

16. Geebo

Which is your best place to buy, sell or trade in local market.

List more sites that are similar to craigslist, if you had a great experience with them.

See my other similar posts - sites like Amazon's Mturk and Groupon.

Sites like Groupon

2013-05-06T07:18:00.003-07:00

The success of Groupon is known to all. The company started with the thought of community buying where a group of people come forward to buy a product or service in bulk, thereby making a saving. Group discount, daily discount or deal of the day is Groupon's business model.

Post Groupon, a lot of business have established with a similar model. Some have made a mark, while some have not been that great a hit.

Let’s take a look of some top coupons sites that have seen success in Group Buying Business Model.

Top Coupons Sites

1. Amazon Local deals – Amazon Local is a daily deals site and is one more addition to the Amazon family of business. It sends daily deals to its subscribers to use in their city and online.

2. Bloom Spot - Features unique local luxury experiences from top-rated merchants. Exceptional offers for weekend getaways.

3. CBS Local Offers - Brings you the best local deals and unique experiences in your community. Offers ranges from enticing restaurants to exciting shows and events.

4. Half off Depot - Provides customer acquisition programs over the internet for local merchants. This marketplace hosts an array of local experiences & services as well as products and travel offers. The offers availability ranges for an average of 15 to 30 days.

5. Ever Save - Seeks your favorite local activities, restaurants, stores and spa, so you can play, eat, shop & relax for less! From spa treatments to cupcakes, yoga classes to ski packages – Ever Save finds the best deals and delivers them to you - in the form of a Save.

6. Gilt City – It’s the local lifestyle site from the Gilt Groupe. Gilt City offers memorable adventures & exclusive offers, all at great prices.

7. Google Offers - Google Offers are from the giants themselves. Amazing deals from local business available to Google Offers subscribers.

8. In Bundles – Daily offer for ONE steeply discounted gift certificate to something related to food and beverage. The sale only lasts between 24-72 hours.

9. LivingSocial – We know it all. This is the biggest competitive to Groupon and works pretty much on the same framework as Groupon. This is the closest website like Groupon.

10. Plum District – A site that is by Moms and for Moms. A community of moms connecting other moms to products and inspiration to make lives easier.

11. Saveology- Brings a large spectrum of high quality offers at deep discounts, with both national and local deals. Offers range from movie tickets and batteries to vacation packages and car leases.

12. Savored - Is a Groupon company with focus on restaurants. Not as known as the parent company, but it will get there with strong business model knowledge.

13. Scout Mob - Reachs direct to independent makers and merchants. Bridges the gap between buyers and sellers and removes all middlemen costs.

14. Travel Zoo - Excellent place for travel and entertainment deals.

15. Woot - Woot is an independent subsidiary of Amazon. A great place for community sources deals.

These are some of the Groupon like sites that are creating waves. If you know some more, please share with others in the forum.

See my other similar posts - sites like Amazon's Mturk, freebies and samples sites.

Best Sites for freebies and samples

2013-05-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

Freebies and Samples are attractive for everyone. While you would find thousands of sites that offer no cost samples or freebies, knowing which are legitimate and which are not means a lot.

You don’t want to share your details only to get some spam. There are a lot of scam sites floating around, both online and off.

Legitimate Sites for Freebies and Samples

There are some legitimate websites that offer freebies, and samples and tips and advice to find even more free stuff. The following are the best sites for getting freebies and samples. While most of them are offered worldwide, some are specific to countries.

1. Freaky Freddie’s – 100s of free samples in various categories. Free samples updated every day.

2. F for Free - This has freebies for specific countries – Worldwide, US, India, UK. Check the discounts and coupons section on this site.

3. I Crave Freebies - Freebies, Free Stuff, Free Samples, Coupons, Hot Deals.

4. Free Snatcher - Expensive Giveaways, printable coupons, store deals and free money and stuff.

5. Hey It’s Free – Lots of categories to choose from. Regular updates to freebies.

6. Sample Train – Free Samples in USA and other countries. Surveys, Contests and Coupons.

7. Shop 4 Freebies – Daily updates. Samples, print and online coupons for restaurants, beauty, facebook giveaways.

8. Seriously Free Stuff - Free Stuff, Giveaways, and Sweepstakes & Coupons! Updated daily.

9. Sample Stuff – Great freebies on perfumes and deodorants. Coupons and Paid Surveys.

10. The Freebie Source – Lots of categories from pet food, weekend passes, free software, cosmetics, and birthday freebies.

11. Known Freebies – Deals for India, UK Australia, USA and some worldwide deals.

12. Wowzila – Freebies from around the world. Check free stuff for India, UK, USA, New Zealand & Canada.

13. Vonbeau - Loads of free coupons every day for kids, men and women.

14. Freebie Shark – Freebies, Coupons, Deal and Sweeps.

15. Absurdly Cool – New freebies updated almost every day.

16. Pumpkins Freebies - Thousands of free product samples and Giveaways. No S&H.

Share which are your favorite freebie sites.

See my other similar posts - sites like Amazon's Mturk, sites like Craigslist.

Best on page SEO practices

2013-05-04T21:24:00.002-07:00

Improvising on your on-page and off-page SEO parameters would lead you to improve your SERP ranks. Improving SERP ranks would lead to more traffic. Converting traffic is yet another area which we would talk about some other time.

What is On Page SEO?

On-page SEO improvements are a set of areas that are purely IN YOUR CONTROL and help you rank higher in SERPs. I would emphasize - these are parameters that YOU CAN CONTROL.

The Google algorithm for search results keeps changing. The on page SEO has fairly taken a 25% share contribution to the search results.

Lets look at the best on page SEO practices that can optimize your page and improve your rankings.

1. META Title Tag

2. META Description Tag

3. META Keyword Tag

4. URL

5. Image ALT Tag

6. Image Names

7. Keyword Density

8. Long Tail Keywords

9. Usage of BOLD

10. Usage of Italics

11. Headings - H1, H2 , H3..

12. Internal link Building

I am not including Content here. Content is King. Remember ! Its a different animal in itself.

Improving on the above parameters would help you address about 25% of the factors that effect you Google Page Rank. You may check your page rank for a specific keyword before and after these on page updates. Also, make sure you check you SEO Score Weekly and track the improvement.

Once you make changes to a specific page, you may use a META Tag Analyzer Tool to check how well you score on the on page optimization. Here are some great tools to check your site SEO.

Share your thoughts on what you think is the best on page SEO Practices you use.

Does Domain Registration length affect SEO ?

2013-05-04T20:50:00.002-07:00

If you are in a hurry to get your answer let me cut the crap right here.

Yes, domain registration and SEO have a very strong relationship. If your domain is registered for a longer duration (read 5 years or 10 years), it gives you better results in terms of Google Page Rank and SERPs.

If your domain registration is done for a year or couple of years, go ahead and extend the duration.

How does Domain Registration help SEO ?

What is Google looking for end of the day?

- Relevant Content

- Trustworthy site

To help this, Google has arrived at an algorithm that reads 150 or more behaviors of the site and arrives at a decision of how quality, trust worthy and relevant the site could be categorized.

Domain Registration is NOT the only factor that impacts the SEO. It is one tiny drop in the scheme of things. The good part is, it is the easiest way to improve SEO.

Consider this:

1. If you ever registered your kid for some extra-curricular class, have you seen some great price reduction for annual fees vs quarterly fees vs monthly fees?

2. If you are in a corporate environment, you would sometimes see that employees are given business critical projects while temporary consultants, who are probably better, are not.

WHY?

The answer is simple. It’s a matter of trust and commitment. Same goes with Google. Google bots are defined by people like you are me. When they see that the domain is registered for a length of time, they read commitment there. They do not consider you a spammy site and you get the brownie points by ranking higher, relative to other sites, considering all other parameters are EXACTLY similar.

In a nutshell, when Google looks at the domain registration, it adds an element of trust and hence gives you higher score. There are a lot of other ways to improve your rankings in Google, both on-page and off-page.

I have seen my rankings change for my online fashion jewelry store, once I extended the domain registration by 5 years.

Share your views on what you think on Google’s take on domain registration duration.

Win abandoned cart customer

2012-06-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

Increase your revenue by winning customers who abandoned carts

There are various reasons why the customers abandon the cart halfway through the checkout process. These almost-customers are low hanging fruits to give your business a boost. With a more that 65% cart abandonment rate, even if your business can bring in 50% of these customers back, it will increase your toplines.

1. Pre-requisite to winning back:

When a customer begins the checkout process, it is very vital to gather one of the following: email or phone number. If you don't, there is no way to reach out to the customer and potentially get him back, unless he changes his mind and returns back.

2. Trigger Emails:

Send a follow up cart abandonment email to the customer. The timing of the email and the content is utmost important. Emails sent WITHIN A FEW HOURS of cart abandonment have higher conversion rate. However, sending an email immediately when the cart is abandoned may be too intrusive. Also, if the email is sent a few days later, the customer perhaps would have lost interest. An email within 12-24 hours has shown maximum conversions. The other important aspect is the content of the email. Personalizing the email and offering help in terms of a direct customer service number or email would be useful to bring back customers. No sales pitch is required here.

3. Analytics:

The analytics report provides informative statistics. Study the report to see at what stages the carts are abandoned. If you see a clear trend, it’s time to address your website by fixing the problem. Repeat the study post the fix.

4. Remarketing & Retargeting:

Remarketing & retargeting the customers who visited your site and did not place order is a good way to remind customers of their abandoned cart. To be able to do so, make some technical upgrades to your site. When the customer visited your site, persist their browse behavior local to the computer. When browsing other websites, the search engines personalize the ads so that they see their recent browse history. This may bring them back. Example: eBags.com – Once you leave the eBags.com site, it picks the browse history and shows the items you were interested in on other sites that you navigate to.

5. Service call:

If you obtained the contact number of the customer during the checkout, a service call may help understand reasons for cart abandonment. Call them and help address their concern so as to complete the checkout process. A lot of companies have an option to connect with the customer service representative by live chat/ support number on the checkout screen. It helps the prospective customer right away during the checkout process.

6. Incentivize:

In order to win customers back, have a program to incentivize them. Provide offers and promotions relevant to the products in cart. However, the incentives should be provided to selective customers based on their purchase history, buying pattern, cart value or some other business driver. Sending the offers right after the cart is abandoned may put the customer in a habit of expecting discounts. They will abandon their cart in this expectation each time. Example: GobalWholeSaleArt.com calls customers who abandons cart and works out offers to complete checkout.

Not all cart abandonments are bad. Customers do like to check items, add to cart, compare with competitors, think and come back. You can therefore, only diminish this percentage and not avoid it completely. While these are actions that can be taken post cart abondonment, it is important to understand Why Cart Abondonment happens on ecommerce sites.

Please provide your feedback on this article and add other ways that could possibly help in winning customers from abandoned carts back.

Reasons for ecommerce cart abandonment

2012-06-26T12:11:00.000-07:00

What are the top reasons for Cart Abandonment in ecommerce?

What is the percentage of customer cart abandonment instances of your ecommerce site, when compared to order confirmation? What are the top reasons your customers abandon the cart and never complete the checkout?

If you have a customer who has come to you site to shop, your marketing has worked to bring the customer to your site. If you do not manage to capitalize this opportunity and convert this footprint to sale, you have lost your customer, not just for this one purchase but may be for future as well. In fact, in this world of digital social networking, it does not take long for publicity – both good and bad. You perhaps also lost some prospective customers.

In 2011, the average cart abandonment Rate was 65.23%. This is subsequently higher during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In 2012, the statistics reveal that this percentage would be higher than the prior years.

What are the top reasons why your customers abandon the cart?

While there may be reasons that are solely customers specific, like the customer is not ready to make the purchase or the customer changed his mind or any other constraint specific to him. In this article, I would like to call out the reasons that are more retailer specific and things that could be changed or improved, so that the retailer provides the customer a seamless checkout flow.

Listed below are some of the reasons why the customer would abandon the cart:

1. Delayed Stock check:

Ecommerce websites that do not perform a real time inventory check on color, size when the customer adds the item to the cart, result to customer’s frustration. Perform the stock check when the customer is making the selection on the product page and adding it to the cart. Performing a stock check in checkout, when the decision has been made, would only lead to customers abandoning the cart.

2. Lengthy registration / no guest checkout:

If you are the lucky once to have new visitors on the website, build the customer relationship. It is good enough for you to just get the email id of the customer. The guest checkout should be as little as email address. It is important to capture one way to reach out your customer. Don’t miss that by throwing a registration form that makes your customer close the browser. If the customer chooses to register, the MUST HAVE information on your site should be minimal.

3. Insecure checkout:

With an increase in cybercrime, the users have become very careful about providing their information over the web. Make sure that your ecommerce allows for a secure checkout in order to gain confidence of the user during checkout.

4. Limited payment options:

Does your site provide all possible options to the customer on the payment? At the very basic, the ecommerce site should have debit / credit / gift card checkout as the payment methods. If you offer loyalty programs, the checkout should make it easy for the customer to use their points and redeem them partially or completely against the purchase.

5. Coupons and offers:

Do you restrict the user on how to use the coupons and offers that are not clearly called out in the offer itself? Showing new variables during checkout would disappoint the customer and make rethink, sometimes abandoning the cart.

6. High shipping cost:

Ecommerce today has grown rapidly and one of the reasons why people buy online is because of simplicity and getting the options that they need in the comfort of their house. However, the whole purpose to buy online would be defeated if, in order to shop online, the customer is paying a very high shipping charge. While next day shipping could be offered at a high cost, most customers are not willing to pay additional for ground shipping. Low product cost and high shipping results in abandoned carts. Offer the customers free or lower shipping for normal delivery and pick up in store options.

7. Restricted shipping:

Do you offer a varied shipping option to all locations? One of the things that get traded in online shopping when compared to in-store purchase is the time duration to have the product. Although online shopping does give the convenience to purchase, if the shipping takes too long, it may not interest the buyer. They may prefer buying it from the nearby store in order to get the product on time. Make sure the shipping options are competitive enough and are not a reason for the customer to leave the cart.

8. Ugly / complex user interface:

If the user interface you provide is loud, ugly or complex, it would not please your customers.

Have a clean design with a very well-toned and marketable copy. Provide the information in the right place and be cautious about the data. A few usability ideas would be to display the user progress, limiting the call to action, displaying discount and calculating the final price early in the checkout process, designing the layout that goes with the eye flow etc.

9. Difficult to decipher CAPTCHAs:

If you are using CAPTCHAs, chances are that it would lower your conversion rate. Every user finds it difficult to interpret; they carry no meaning and are difficult to read. Sites using CAPTCHAs for all secure transactions may have a high cart abandonment rate, for the simple reason that it impacts the usability and restricts the flow of the customer.

10. High price compared to competitor:

Smart shopaholics always compare prices across competitors. If your items are priced more than one your competition is offering, why would anyone proceed with the order? Would you?

11. Unfriendly Returns and Exchange Policy:

Online shopping has once clear drawback. When you buy in store, what you see is what you get. However, that logic fails with online purchases. Have a fair returns and exchange policy for online purchases comes as a package with online shopping. If you make the returns and exchanges difficult, the pitfall would be lower conversion rates.

12. Technical issues:

If your website responds real slow or has bugs that stop the user to proceed, chances that the customer would keep trying to complete their order are slim.

13. Cross sells and up-sells:

Are you doing cross sells and up-sells during the checkout process? If you are doing so, perhaps instead of helping you to gain more business, it is confusing the customer thereby delaying their purchase. Once the customer has reached checkout, DO NOT give any second thoughts to him to go back and revisit the decision. You would have customers email id once the order is purchased; cross-sell and up-sells would follow after the order is placed. These act as distractions if shown during checkout.

14. Delivery options:

Give the options of delivery to the customer and do not restrict. You sites need an upgrade if you do not provide options to order online; purchase from a store; order online and get delivered to a near by store.

15. Not living up to your promise:

If you promised the customer any discount, loyalty program, offers, coupons, free shipping – make sure you live up to it. Any deviation from what you promised would lead to lack of trust and not help conversion.

In short, an abandoned cart directly hits your topline. While above is one aspect of taking a hit on the topline, there are corrective ways to win customers who abandoned carts.

In the fast moving digital world, it is important that the business seek feedback from the customers, look at the usability of their commerce site, as well as learn from the metrics on what could be done in order to increase sales and profit margins.

Let me know what you think about this article. If you have ever experienced any situation leading you to leave the cart, please feel free to share.

Competitive Benchmarking

2012-06-25T09:46:00.000-07:00

What is competitive benchmarking?

Did you ever demand you parents for the same gadget that your friend had?
Did you parents ever compare your grades with you elder brother or sister?
Ever faced comparison with your peers at workplace to get that much deserved promotion?

We compare and are compared with competitive people around us, all the time.

Now take another aspect of this competition.

When you asked for the gadget, did you ask for an outdated version or the latest model?
When your parents compared the grades with your siblings, did they want you to have a better or lower grade?
When you faced competition with your peers, did your boss compare you with the one better than you?

So not only we compare, we compare with something / someone better in some aspect. We always seek for high quality and performance.

Competitive Benchmarking in simple terms is comparison of performance with the benchmarked industry standards. In a way, it means that to be successful in the industry, you need to know what your competition's performance levels are. The benchmarking is done on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and this may be different based on the industry types.

However, whatever industries it may belong to, Competitive benchmarking results are reflected as a function of time, cost or quality. While there are several other parameters, like customer satisfaction, human resources, employee satisfaction, all of them impact of or the other key functions of time, cost or quality.

Robert Camp defined Competitive benchmarking as ‘The search for the industry best practices that will lead to superior performance.’

Importance & Advantages of Competitive Benchmarking

In the fierce and cut-throat competitive environment, it is essential to reduce the operating cost at the same time continue to deliver high performance. Competitive Benchmarking is a planned and structured way of understanding the competition and having a baseline to do comparison. With this study, the business would be able to find the gaps between their performance and that of the benchmarked industry standards. Knowing the gap, benchmarking also provides areas of improvement to bridge the gap by setting achievable and meaningful targets over a period of time. It helps in defining the road map to get closer and go over the set benchmarking standards.

The data obtained by competitive benchmarking is an eye opener and the transformers in organizations find it easy to present the results to the senior executives and suggest a need for a process or strategy transformation to become competitive.

Benchmarking is important as it helps the organization in;

1. The current state assessment
2. Basis for future state and transformation with a defined road-map
3. Continuous improvement to be at pace with changing environment
4. Having a common vision across organization & driving change

Steps involved in Competitive Benchmarking

Benchmarking is a structured process. There are companies who are skilled in carrying out the benchmarking across industries. A lot of tools and resources are available in the market to conduct this study. Benchmarking involves the steps as below:

1. Planning

a. What is to be benchmarked

b. Define the competition

c. Understand the data gathering approach

d. Identify the source of data

2. Data gathering and validation

a. Gather the data

b. Understand the KPIs to be validated

c. Produce the benchmark results

3. Qualitative and Quantitative Assessment

a. Understand Voice of Customer

b. Review CAT Scores

c. Determine current performance levels

4. Review & recommend

a. Review the gaps

b. Identify the causes

c. Put together recommendations

d. Review and gain stakeholder acceptance

5. Execution

a. Develop plan of action

b. Monitor progress

c. Recalibrate benchmarks

Types of Competitive Benchmarking

There is a vast variety of competitive benchmarking techniques that is available in the market. Based on the specific need, one of more competitive analysis may be recommended.

1. Strategy Benchmarking

2. Healthcare Benchmarking

3. Financial Benchmarking

4. Salary Benchmarking

5. Business Benchmarking

6. Hospital Benchmarking

7. Marketing Benchmarking

8. Logistics Benchmarking

9. External Benchmarking

10. Internal Benchmarking

11. Human Resource Benchmarking

and the list goes on !

What next?

As the environment keeps on changing, the process of competitive benchmarking can never be termed as complete. It is an ongoing process to compare oneself with the toughest competitors to survive and flourish the business. What seems to be a benchmark today would change later and hence for an organization or business to succeed, the competitive benchmarking should be an ongoing process. Recalibration of benchmark should be an integral part of organization processes. Defining the KPIs and comparison with the highest qualitative standards would help in continuous improvement.

If you have carried out a competitive benchmarking study, please share your experience. Look forward to your feedback on this article.

Sites similar to Amazon's mturk

2012-06-22T08:19:00.000-07:00

Crowdsourcing with Amazon's mTurk

With Amazon mturk being such a success, the workforce is looking at more sites similar to Amazon mturk, that can help them earn money working at home.

One thing that web has done is - united us. In many different ways – be it ecommerce or social networking or information, web has made its presence felt. A new way by which web has made its presence in recent times is by uniting the mechanical taskforce.

Amazon's mturk

Amazon’s mturk is one such site that has given innumerable opportunities to people with different level of skills to sit in the comfort of their homes and get paid. Although the amount paid for these work from home jobs is not a lot, but this is a great hit for hard-working taskforce.

The concept of these sites is to CrowdSource the work amongst the virtual workforce.

These sites have new jobs posted every single minute and need taskforce to get the jobs done. Depending on what kind of jobs you qualify for, you would be paid anywhere from few cents to double digit $ for a few seconds to few hours worth of effort.

In order to get more from these sites, constantly increase your qualifications and attempt to do specialized tasks.

If you are looking at more sites similar to amazon mTurk, here is the list.

1. Cloud Crowd – Requires a facebook login

2. Amazon's mturk

3. Mobile Works

4. Mini Jobz

5. Sama Source

6. Varolo - Requires a facebook login

7. Micro Workers

8. Short Task

9. o Desk

10. Crowd Tap

11. Click Worker

12. Minute Workers

13. Hits Worth Turking For

14. eLance

15. Text Broker

16. Joy Boy

17. Why do Work

18. Scriptlance

19. Casting Words

Please leave a comment or share more sites similar to Amazon's mturk.

Tips to Pass Agile Certification ACP

2012-05-31T21:56:00.000-07:00

Passing Agile Certification

The author is PMP, IPSR, ACP Certified and has 14 years of experience in Information Technology

Here are key focus areas to be successful in PMI's Agile Certified Practioner (ACP) exam. Understanding of these would help answer a sizeable number of ACP exam questions.

1. Manifesto and Values – Knowing the manifesto and agile values will help you answer at least 10-12 questions correctly. If there are any conflicting answers – agile values and manifesto is the right thing to do.

2. Meetings – Understand the importance of each meeting –Stand ups, retrospective & planning.

3. Agile Practices – Differentiate lean, scrum, kanban and extreme programming.

4. Roles & responsibilities - Understand roles & responsibilities within different methodologies. E.g. Agile coach vs facilitator

5. Understand the Agile Charts & KPIs – Burn Up, burn down chart for sprints and risks, calculating velocity, ROI, earned value metrics.

6. Read and re-read worded questions – Word problems tend to focus you attention on something that is not very important. Key is to understand the MOST important issue and not what is the FIRST thing that is projected to be an issue. In case of conflicts, manifesto and agile values win.

7. Application of knowledge – If answers are not obvious, apply your knowledge from experience.

8. Agile Concepts - Understand affinity estimation, planning poker, wide band delphi, value based decomposition, Release backlogs, sprint backlogs, value stream mapping, iteration vs sprint, validation vs verification, WIP limits, servant leadership, minimally marketable feature, done done, portfolio management, agile risks.

9. Various levels of Planning – Know the depth that is covered in Strategic, Release, Iteration & Daily Planning.

10. Exam Questions - Take some practice tests from legitimate websites or books. Questions from Andy Crowe's – ‘The PMI-ACP Exam: How to Pass on Your First Try’ is very helpful.

11. Agile Training - I personally do not see a need to take training if you have worked on a few projects and read some material. Any online training can be counted against your contact hours for this exam.

12. Recommended book – The PMI lists 10 books for Agile. No one can read all of them. Here is what I would suggest that would be good balance to get though the exams

Mike Cohn - User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development

James Shore - The Art of Agile Development

Alistair Cockburn - Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game

Andy Crowe’s The PMI-ACP Exam: How To Pass On Your First Try

Good luck for your gig !