Marketing a Magento Site
January 1, 2012
This is a brief intro to a few articles I want to write about marketing related to a Magento Ecommerce website. We have been using the platform for some time now and adapted our market methodology to automate with it.
These are the top ten areas I think it is important to work on to ramp up your sales using Magento. I will follow up this post with some more detailed information on each area. If you comment and let me know what you would like covered first then I will go with it.
In no particular order
1. SEO changes to remove the duplicate content issues with layered navigation. Also making sure things like brands are indexing correctly with page titles etc…
2. Make sure you integrate Magento with a good email marketing program and get good data into your list that allows you to follow up with triggered emails based on past purchase history.
3. Watch your search log like a hawk and create redirects where necessary, create specific landing pages when users could get confused
4. Get an automated feed into Google Base and choose some good shopping search engines based on a PPC model
5. If you have an affiliate scheme, make sure you have an automated product feed and then check out what it looks like to the affiliate. Check it is giving them the correct prices not RRP
6. Google Optimiser is there for categories and products use it. Try changing the product name and product image as this has a big effect on conversion
7. Follow up on abandoned orders with a reminder email, you should be able to reduce your abandons by half
8. Set up your stats program, Google Analytics or otherwise to track campaigns and everything to an actual sale
9. Do a monthly review and plot everything on charts so you can see what way things are moving
10. Make sure you split the revenue from PPC and organic SEO so you know what is doing what. Then optimise for high converting terms. Also do not forget Meta keywords and Meta descriptions as they affect your Google AdWords quality score.
I actually have more than 10 but lets focus on these for now!
Thank You
Mark Hammersley
6 responses to "Marketing a Magento Site"
Thanks for these, all solid tips. I’ve bookmarked it – looking forward to the additional tips you allude to at the end. I’m not related to these guys at all, but here’s an Abandoned Cart module:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/1290/abandoned-carts-alerts-pro
Also, I’d like this one to be followed up:
“1. SEO changes to remove the duplicate content issues with layered navigation. Also making sure things like brands are indexing correctly with page titles etc…”
I’ve seen this article here:
http://www.blueacorn.com/magento-blog/magento-seo/magento-seo-development/
And they mention changing the page titles on the Category pages, but I’m not quite sure how to do this. That, and any other tips you have for removing duplicate content would be really helpful.
@Marc –
Hi Marc, thanks for your comment. For SEO structure of Magento you should look at Yoast’s post on the subject here – http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/ and this lists most of the points we have found too.
Thanks for the Abandoned Cart link, yes this is one we use on a couple of sites. The key is in the followup email that you use. You have to remember that some people will have thought that their order has gone through already. Also most people are tempted to put a money off voucher in the follow up email but I have tested this and found that customer get saavy and start to wait for the coupon before they buy.
If you do want to use a money off coupon wait until the second follow up email after a couple of days have passed.
Also remember to check your telephone orders against the abandoned cart list as many people give up and call. Otherwise these orders will distort your figures.
Nice article. We are using “Canonical URL’s for Magento” too and it works very well.
Thanks Davide, yes I think Canonical Urls is pretty key in the fight against duplicate content. Next I need to find something that can help me direct the page rank on the site using certain no follow links. Any suggestions?
Mark,
using Nofollow will not help you sculpt your pagerank. You’ll simply loose the PR you don’t follow.
To do proper pagerank sculpting you need to use Javascript like you would find on the free and open source http://www.seotoaster.com which provides point & click silo building and link sculpting out of the box. An excellent solution for small e-commerce shop, scalable with a subscription to SEO Samba.
Thanks for the good tips! Can you share with us how to separate organic and paid search conversions using Magento? Thanks!