I just read an article over at http://www.problogger.com from Darren Rowse about what to do when your Google traffic disappears. Darren made some good points, as he always does, but I thought there were some more details to add to the discussion. Here is my view on the actions you should take when you wake up one morning to discover you traffic is gone.

1. Review Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google is great. They tell you in no uncertain terms what their recommendations are. Take a few minutes to review the latest version of Google Webmaster Guidelines. Google sets the rules. You need to play by them.

2. Install Necessary Tools. In order to fully analyze/diagnose what is going on with your site, you NEED to be using Google Webmaster Tools. Installation is free and easy. Just do it. I will mention in a moment what to do with Webmaster Tools. You also need an industrial strength web traffic analysis package. Google Analytics is the obvious choice, but there are many others out there to do the job. The main point, is to move beyond gut feelings about what is gong on with your site and wild theories about what might have caused your demise. You need to be working with some hard, cold numbers.

3. Do Competitive Analysis. Create a list of your top ten phrases and look closely at the other sites that are coming up ahead of you. It is important to determine whether you have completely disappeared from Google or if you have just dropped off your previously stellar listings. If you have completely disappeared you need to start looking at whether you have been penalized or banned. Maybe Google has been unable to reach your site. But, the other, more likely situation is that your competitors have gotten better at SEO and you have done nothing in the five years since you gained #1 status for your coveted terms. You might need to do some work to regain your mojo!

4. Analyze Traffic and Indexing Patterns. Now it is time to jump into Google Webmaster Tools. Under the Diagnostics area you can see how often GoogleBot (Google’s indexing spider) is visiting your site. Ideally, it should be every few days. You can also see what errors Google is reporting and how many pages are being indexed. These valuable statistics give you a baseline for taking action.

If you have been banned, it will be clear that Google is not indexing any of your pages. Time to jump back to the Webmaster Guidelines and learn about the steps you need to take.

5. Evaluate your Incoming Links. More so than ever, Google rankings are about the link authority that your site has. In other words, who is linking to you, how they are linking, and the trust that Google puts in those sites are all important factors. If you have done nothing over time to fortify your incoming links you will start to  suffer (because you have competitors out there who are working hard). It is possible that Google has done a recent update that devalued your site because your incoming links are on the decline.

6. Look at a Broad Range of Keywords. Is your conclusion that Google has dumped you in the dog house due to a drop-off on one term or is there an across-the-board decline? Before you panic, take a look at a range of phrases. If you are suffering with just a few terms, some focused work on your home page could get you back in the game. If your whole site is suffering, it is back to Webmaster Guidelines to do a point-by-point review of where you falling short of Google’s expectations, or, where your competitors are trumping you.

7. Assess All Changes. This recommendation is huge! Make sure you review whether you, your web designer, or your CMS (if you have a hosted CMS) have made any recent changes. It is possible that significant changes have happened on your site that you are unaware of. As an example: we worked with someone who unwittingly turned off their SEO-friendly urls in WordPress, which completely changed their internal linking on the their website. Or, it is possible your Ecommerce provider has done a major update that has changed all your page titles. Talk to the people you are working with and see if they can give you any insights. You can also look at Google’s cache to compare your current page with a recent version, or, possibly use a service like http://www.archive.org to do some comparison of the current version of your site with past versions to see if the html has changed.

8. See If You Are Alone. Here is another pre-panic step: do some Googling to find out if your case is an isolated issue or if many others are reporting issues. Your change in rankings could be a result of a sea-change on Google’s end. This doesn’t mean you need to sit idly by and fret, but your approach will be significantly different than if your ranking drop-off is isolated.

9. Set up Google Analytics Intelligence. Google Analytics has a brand new feature (as of 11/09) that is awesome. Analytics Intelligence lets you set up custom alarms so you can receive an email notification if there are anomalies in your traffic. Although this tool won’t help you go back in time and address past problems, it will be a great aid as you move forward with a more scientific approach to controlling your rankings and traffic.

10. Be Systematic. Our overarching recommendation is to be systematic in tackling your SEO decline. You need to identify the list of factors and then analyze and address them one-by-one.

There are no shortcuts to working with Google, but if you play by their rules and pay attention to every detail, you can likely be successful in regaining your Google rankings and traffic.

I just read an interesting interview over at Emarketer.com with David Lonczak, VP and Chief Marketing Officer at Drugstore.com. It sounds like David is doing a great job of wading through the murky waters of these tough economic times.

The interview reinforced a key concept I have been thinking about: the lifetime value of a customer. And more specifically, how can you quantify that value and then focus on growing it.

For a micro-entrepreneur, in order to budget correctly for marketing and advertising, it is quite helpful to take the long view and look beyond the first-order-placed impact of a new customer to the full revenue picture.

How much is each new customer going to spend with you over the next three-five years?

How much new business will each customer bring to you in terms of referrals and advocating your product/services?

When you start to quantify these values (and, not by pulling numbers out of thin air, but by looking at your historical data) you can more sensibly set advertising expenditures and you can put more focus on expanding opportunities with your current customers.

Hopefully you have an actual plan in place related to how you can provide value – in the way of products and services – to your customers over the long term. You might see opportunities to develop new products or engage in an ongoing dialog with your customers so they are aware of what you have to offer. Your existing customers are also your best resource to provide feedback on your products and fuel your creative thinking for future development.

In our own business, we are constantly reminded that we need to do a better job of communicating the range of services we offer to our customers. The prospect of getting lots of customers is always enticing and growing your customer base is unquestionably important. But you don’t want to grow your customer base at the expense of providing great value to your existing customers.

Do some work to measure the long term value and cost of caring for your customers. Knowing these numbers will help you will some important decision-making.

Many site owners are dazzled by the power and detail of Google Analytics when they first see it. The reports. The graphs. The details. It is mind blowing!

But when the reality of running an Ecommerce business sets in, getting in the groove of checking your reports on a regular basis – at least weekly – can prove challenging.

So instead of going to your analytics reports each week, why don’t you have your reports come to you?

Google Analytics makes this easy by including an Email Report feature. In just moments you can set up Google Analytics to email your reports to you on a regular basis.

Here’s how:

Log into Google Analytics.

On the main Dashboard screen, click the “Email ” icon near the top of the page.

Do the simple configuration for the report options. For starters, I recommend generating a pdf report, sending it weekly and including a date comparison so you can see how your data is evolving.

You can also have Google Analytics send you an immediate report so you can see what to expect. And that is all there is to it. You can drill down into Google Analytics and create other Email reports that are more specific, such as for your Ecommerce stats.

If you find that you like the theory of having powerful statistics at your fingertips, but have never quite gone for the practice, then try the Email reports. You can’t afford to be unaware of what is going on with your site traffic! If you find any particular Analytics reports helpful for your business, please share.

If you have an Ecommerce website it is likely that a significant percentage of your customers/traffic come from the search engines. I bet you know that already.

Without listings on the first page of the SERPs (search engine results pages) you are likely to get a marginal amount of traffic. Again, no surprises.

So, as you strive to get those premium listings here is a key point to consider:

If you have the exact same product names and descriptions as 40 other sites, the odds of your site getting top placement goes down dramatically. The most common cause of this problem is when you get your product data from an upstream distributor. Guess what? You and every other retailer is getting the exact same data. If you just plunk it on your website – you are going to have the same content as everyone else. That is not a good path to search engine success.

Furthermore, with the increasing importance of Comparison Shopping Engines and other search tools, you really need to consider your product skus and product images. Sure it is easy to grab your vendors images. But if a shopper identifies that you have the same item as every other retailer out there and you are not competing on price, your odds of getting the first crack at the sale are going to drop.

Of course, there are many ways to compete successfully besides price, but you’ve got to get people to your site so you can make the case for the sale.

The more you can shape your data and make it your own, the better off you will be on many levels. When you have thousands of products – and limited time – you need to take a pragmatic approach to managing your data. Perhaps you can start by focusing on your top sellers and see if the effort to develop compelling and unique product data leads to an increased return in sales.

A good way to gauge how many sites are out there with identical products is to pick an arbitrary product on your site and copy and paste a string of text from the description, with quotes around it, into the Google search box. You might be surprised to find out who else is selling your products.

Data. Data. Data. The Internet  is one giant database. To the extent you can make some of that data your own, you will be able to stick out above the crowd. When vying for Ecommerce sales, that is a good thing.

If you get 1000 site visitors a day and have a conversion rate of 2.00%  you  are going to get 20 orders each day. Understanding this simple Total Order equation will get you on the road to planning your ecommerce strategy.

Pushing (and monitoring) either of those key numbers is a great place to put your attention and will help you toward meeting your website revenue goals.

Analytics Data is Your Friend

If you don’t know the details of the traffic flowing into your site you are pretty much hunting in the dark. There are quite a few analytics packages out there. Google Analytics is free, easy to install, and quite accurate.

To take the Total Order equation a step further, if you can track and analyze the sources of your site visitors  you can get more specific in your approach than just wistfully thinking you would love to have another 250 visitors next week.

Here is the Top Traffic Sources table from Google Analytics for a sample ecommerce site:

Now that you see the breakdown of the sources of traffic you can formulate some intelligent questions and dig deeper into your data.

1. The example site above is getting a high percentage from organic traffic. On your own site, are the search terms driving organic traffic the ones that will result in orders or are you seeing a lot of “soft” traffic from irrelevant searches?

2. Are you already putting a bunch of effort into search optimization or another source like Google Product Feed? If so, are you seeing any measurable changes in the traffic level from that source? Ecommerce sites should really be able to capitalize on Google Product Feed and other comparison shopping engines at this point in time.

3. Do you have a high flow from a particular referral source? In the graphic above, traffic is coming from ecomall.com. Have you checked out the listing on the referring site and made sure that it stands out on the page and goes to the best location on your site? Perhaps, since the one referral source is working for you there are other similar opportunities, either free or paid, that will really help boost your traffic.

4. Is Google organic traffic your first or second source? If not, this could mean you are radically underperforming with your search optimization. If you have a new site, you might need to be a patient, but if your site is more than six months old, you likely want to assess your search optimization efforts and incoming links.

5. Direct traffic is comprised of visitors who directly type your url in the browser, have created a bookmark, or come from some other source that Google can’t recognize the referrer. If you have a high percentage of direct traffic, it is worth considering whether this is coming from offline advertising. If so, we recommend adjusting your ad urls so you can track that traffic more closely. If the offline advertising is generating sales, that is a great piece of information to know as you will want to consider budgeting money for effective advertising venues.

The more specific you can get about looking at your analytics data the more effectively you can decide where to put your efforts and resources for driving more high-quality traffic.

We love to talk analytics. Let us know if you have any insights to offer.

If you’re in the Ecommerce business, your long-term success is tied to your ability to skillfully use web technologies.

Whether it is tools like your on-site Ecommerce system, your email marketing campaign manager, or Google Adwords tracking tools, you will live or die by the way you harness all the the available technologies to present your products and offer good old-fashioned service and value to your customers.

Are you still doing the same stuff, with the same tools, as you were five years ago on your website? Maybe, today, this approach is still producing the revenue levels that you need, but chances are you won’t be able to stand still too much longer before competitors who “get” the latest technologies and are able to deploy them will leave you in their wake.

So what is a small business owner to do?

1. Realize that success in the Ecommerce industry is about continually learning and taking action. If you enter the game with that mindset, you will be off to a great start.

2. Don’t get so wrapped up in technology that you forget the core values in your business and you end up pursuing technology for technology’s sake. You need to be up on technology, but charging after every bright and shiny object that grabs your attention is a recipe for disaster.

3. You don’t need to be a technology expert yourself, but if you aren’t, you should surround yourself with people, resources, and tools that keep you where you need to be on the technology front. There are so many great resources available. My favorite site for the ecommerce site owner is http://www.practicalecommerce.com

4. Watch the competition closely. The Internet is the greatest research tool out there. Do your best to glean what your competition is doing on their sites. You might even be able to do some searching of competing site owners’ names and learn from some of the thoughts they are sharing about doing business.

5. Embrace the changes that are happening in the social world. This doesn’t mean that you need to rush out and spend all your time Tweeting or posting on Facebook. But you do need to understand the rapid shift that is taking place in the relationship between buyers and sellers and the role technology is playing in that process.

Does this challenge sound exciting and fascinating or like a form of slow torture? Of course it helps if you love the web, computers, technology, and all that these tools have to offer. If not, it could be time to seek out some help from the pros or start grooming your ten year old to be your chief technology officer.

You’ve made the decision to jump (or at least dip a toe) into the waters of Search Marketing, either through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or a comparison shopping engine (CSE) program.  You have your keyword list ready and feed sent off to your shopping engine of choice.  The campaigns launch and your products are now in front of millions!

Once the orders start coming in and revenue is being generated, the question now is, how do I know if this thing is working for me on a financial level?

The answer is that you should have an idea on this even before the first visitor hits the site.

One of the great aspects of advertising online through either PPC or a CSE, is the ability to accurately track performance.  So before devoting time and money to an online campaign, one should make a decision on the specific goals of the endeavor.  While all businesses have different P&L (profit and loss) models, overhead costs, etc., the one metric most all have an interest in ultimately,  is Return.

This metric can be looked at in a few different ways, most often through either Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Return on Investment (ROI) calculations.

ROAS can be measured simply as Total Revenue divided by Total Ad Cost.

In this scenario, if you spent $100 on an AdWords or CSE campaign and made $500 in revenue, your ROAS is $5 (or 5x).

ROI can be measured in much the same way, with a few new variables added to the equation.

On the Revenue side, one would likely subtract Tax and Shipping income, while on the Ad Cost side, items such as profit margin and management fee (when using an agency to manage the campaign) can be taken into account.  ROI then, is typically a better indicator of the true profitability of an online campaign.

The image below provides a good estimate, based on product-level margin, what type of ROAS one would need to see for profit at an ROI level.

Either way you slice it, the Return metric is one that every advertiser should consider before marketing online and once out there, calculate correctly to  effectively assess campaign performance.

The SMX Advanced 2009 Conference has been running in Seattle this week.

Ok. Ok. I didn’t make it to the conference. I was down here in little ‘ol Springfield, Oregon working away. But due to the wonders of social media I was able to at least get a pretty immediate glimpse of the action.

This blog post, from the folks over at AimClear: “Is Everything you know about SEO Wrong?“  intrigued me. The post covers a session that included several of the top-guns in the SEO biz giving their takes on the current state of SEO.

Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz led off by looking at the traditional list of SEO ranking factors and how the mix is evolving. You can see the SEO Factor List we are currently tracking. According to the SMX Advanced session it looks like the ingredients might not really be changing too much but the recipe has been tweaked quite a bit.

Some interesting highlights:

(Note: Rand was making his statements based on a survey SEOMOZ recently sent out to 100 top SEOs.)

1. Seems SEOs are saying H1 tags are not nearly as important as they used to be. Maybe the Engines have perceived them as the next fertile ground for abuse, after meta keywords, which are now summarily ignored.

2. Significance of keywords in the domain/sub-domain appears to be on the rise. I agree.

3. As many other news reports have been indicating lately, Google Toolbar page rank is a poor indicator of just about anything. It looks pretty. Not worth much.

4. There is quite a bit of  importance to the somewhat nebulous non-link factors, such as freshness and uniqueness of content. Create great content, folks, and you will be rewarded. There is nothing surprising about the need for good content. But over time, the importance of fresh, relevant content seems to be growing.

5. With incoming links, Domain Trust is a biggy. No surprise there. The up-and-coming factors – particularly in regard to social media exposure and the authority that you derive from that, in SEO terms, is still sketchy.

The session went on with presentations by AimClear’s Marty Weintraub and Yahoo’s (yes, they still exist) Laura Lippay. I recommend checking out the entire post over at AimClear’s blog. It is a good read.

As many of you know, Internet Marketing is a key element of our business at this point. I feel like I am pretty much living in Google Analytics these days.

My most recent article at Practical Ecommerce is on using Google Analytics for traffic segmentation and keyword analysis.

Practical Ecommerce: Using Google Analytics for Keyword Segmentation and Analysis

If you are serious about having a successful website business you really need to wrap your head around this topic. The more specifically you can dig into your users’ behavior and what is happening on your site; the more effectively you can make changes to your site and marketing strategy to produce more sales.

I love Practical Ecommerce and the wealth of info they provide.

Anyone who has read my Web Development Team bio knows that when I’m not busy keeping hundreds of websites running smoothly behind the scenes, I’m on the quest for rock stardom. This endeavor recently led me to research purchasing a microphone for my makeshift home studio. Of course, this meant some sleuthing on the Internet to find what was right for my needs.

After a bit of research, I narrowed my possible options and began looking for people’s opinions on what would end up being my final decision. Like any good consumer, I popped over to my favorite search engine and started searching for reviews of this mic.

I clicked on one of the first results that popped up, and began reading the reviews. I read at least one before I realized something: This wasn’t just a site for music gear enthusiasts, it was an online store selling the mic I was researching! Well played, music gear website.

This website was successfully using what is becoming ever more necessary in an increasingly crowded marketplace: useful, relevant content! What’s more, they didn’t even have to expend the time and energy to produce it themselves. Passionate consumers were willing to take their time to express their experiences with the product, and share it for free with this company, which was then kind enough to share it with me. Providing a mechanism for submitting reviews got them content, which in turn got their site near the top of Google, without any cost or effort beyond the initial setup!

There are steps you can take to achieve the same goals. Think about what you offer, and what your target audience would likely be interested to read about. If you sell art supplies, provide some craft ideas (or elicit your visitors to send some in!). Sell Kitchen supplies? Why not ask customers to submit their favorite seasonal recipes?

Some of our most successful sites are those that are actively providing content. Mechanic equipment supplier DenLors Tools posts articles on automotive repair. Dog treat retailer Best Bully Sticks provides Dog Care Tips, as well as asks customers to submit photos of dogs using their products. Search engines are much bigger fans of sites that continue to gradually add content as opposed to being completely static.

You could also try what started this topic off in the first place: Add the ability for customers to submit product reviews (This feature is now available for MightyMerchant sites).

Using Google Analytics, you can then track what is drawing people to your site. The Content section will allow you to view what landing pages people are entering your site from, as well as what keywords led people to those pages, showing you what content might be good to focus on. You can even discover what other sites are linking to your content, which can give you a better idea of how traffic is finding it’s way to your site. This is just scratching the surface of how Google Analytics can help you determine what works and what doesn’t.

Any way you dice it, appropriate content is one of the most crucial components to draw traffic to your site. It’s beneficial to you as a site owner, and gives your visitors more reasons to find and stay on your pages.

Partially due to those reviews, I ended up buying that microphone. Although keeping a big chunk of the World Wide Web ticking along is a bigger priority these days than rock stardom, I don’t regret my purchase one bit.