Cart Abandoment: Why It Happens? How To Recover Your Lost Opportunity?

Getting a lot of traffic for your website is awesome! It all happens due to your efforts to get good content, great products to sell on your website, Huge amount of back links, very good internal linking and site navigation and a lot of other things. When we get a lot of traffic through various sources on our website that means people are loving your website, your products and services. 

But we always want more as we are human beings and we are never satisfied with what we are getting. we can always do a little effort to get more sales and leads. Especially for an e commerce website, we always want to get more orders. There are a lot of instances where many e commerce websites do get a lot of cart abandonments. We can reduce the cart abandonment ratio to increase the sales from our website and get a lot more revenue generation for our website. An independent web research company claims thats 67.75% of the total shopping cart are abandoned. That means that 7 out of every 10th visitor is leaving the cart on an average. Few reasons why someone can abandon the cart are:

1. Price too high(above the expectation) 

2. Didn't liked the product 

3. Free shipping not available

4. It was the first visit of the customer. As almost more than 90% people will not like to buy the product in their first visit.

5. Another website offering the same product at a lower price

6. Process taking too much time

7. Security concern while doing payment

8. Price presented in some other currency

9. Website crashing

10. Too many steps before final checkout

Few things that we can do to reduce the cart abandonment ratio are:

1. Offer some discount to the customer

2. Offer some loyalty program to cart abandoner

3. Use re-targeting for those who have left the cart

4. Use call tracking to track orders over phone or through sales support. 

5. Email about the cart abandonment to the customer and remind him about the purchase they left with some offer specially for them

Cart abandonment is not just the end of opportunity for you, it is a great start for you to re-engage the customer back to your website for some more value added sales. Use your re-targeting tricks efficiently to get more out of your e commerce campaign.

PR Updated in December 2013 - What Does It Mean In New SEO Approach

Today, on 6th December 2013, Google has updated Page Rank for Websites and Blogs. Contrary to Matt Cutt's saying that he will be surprised if Google updates its Page Rank before 2014, Page Rank has been updated by Google just a few hours ago. Google is always unpredictable! And that is why Google is the leader in the Search Industry and ruling the other Search Engines(Read BING and Yahoo). Refer this Tweet by Matt Cutts.

But as now Google has updated the Page Rank including increasing the Page Rank of Websites, as well as downgrading the page rank for many websites and blogs. Does this shows any new signal for the Webmasters and SEOs, who are used to measure Page Rank for any website performance. Since the last two months, Page Rank was not getting any importance due to the recent Matt Cutts statement, Hummingbird Update and the Penguin 2.1 update. It was believed that if you will work on the basis of Page Rank, you will start making mistakes again by getting backlinks from higher page rank websites, and not considering the other very important quality checks for a high quality website like the Domain Authority, Page Authority and  Author Rank etc. 

What Does This Page Rank Update Means For SEO?

Page Rank is calculated on the basis of backlinks created and the authority of the pages. So, does this means that building backlinks is back again like before. Because a boost in the Page Rank means a boost in your ranking and website performance on Google.

According to me, Page Rank has been updated, but that does not mean the Golden Era of SEOs are back where they can start building thousands of links for their website like they used to do earlier. No one has stopped you to build a backlink for your website, but the links should be relevant and shouldn't be only rich anchor text. You can still build links with dofollow and nofollow links. But if you will make only dofollow links for getting more search engine ranking,  you will be thrown out of the Google's indexing and SERP for sure. I am saying this because Google has changed its search now, and it will not allow you to manipulate that.

Stay tuned for the next blog on this update and its signal for the future of seo and link building aspects. Because, this update was a shocking news for everyone including me. Nobody was expecting it after Matt Cutt's Tweet. But as it is here now before 2014, it is definitely to say something. We will have to watch for the performance  of our website for a few days from now to come to any final conclusion. As of now, my organization's website home page Page Rank has been updated from 4 to 6 and all the internal pages has been updated from 3 to 5. 

Penguin 2.1: How To Do SEO-Off Page For Website Now

Develop some really good, informative and original content for your website, and rule the WEB! 

My website is hit by penguin 2.1, I have lost my traffic, my keywords were ranking on the first page of Google but now they are ranking on 3rd or the 4th page or even beyond. How to build links for my website now? These are some most common thing you got to hear these days ever since Penguin 2.1 was introduced. Here is my next post on this.

So by now, we all know what is Penguin 2.1 update, what is its impact on websites, which websites are hit by this deadly algorithm. We now know the reason for the drop or fall in the ranking or traffic of most of the website. I have personally observed that all my friends except a few lucky ones are crying with this hit. But Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam, said it impacted about 1% of search queries. (I wonder how 1% search queries can hit almost every business website around me, except a few whereas the earlier Penguin 2.0 was said to have affected 2.3% search queries, but the impact was quite low in my surrounding.)

But now lets get into discussing something serious. Lets discuss about what to do now after this hit. How to rank website back on Google? How to regain the traffic again? I am discussing these things based on my past experiences in fighting similar hits. Lets discuss some of the best practices in SEO , I will mark things to do now point wise.

• Get a website ready which provides rich content, easy navigation, highly engaging UI, keeping in mind various SEO friendly HTML factors.
• Ofcourse the first step will be to get rid of the low quality backlink profiles. Do whatever you can do including disavowing Unnatural links which you are unavailable to remove maually through contacting their Webmaster.
• Forget Link Exchange, specially PAID
• Forget Directory Submissions, despite the high PR of the website. Just include your website into dMoz directory and Yahoo Directory.
• Forget Social Bookmarking now, just Stumble, Reddit, Delicious etc. (Mostly the sharing options you find in the most popular sharing widgets.)
• Do not Focus on Article submission. Even if you are not willing to do a little bit of article submissions, just use a well written, informative article discussing some of your achievements and your product specialties and specialties of your services. Submit this article on any one of the article directories for e.g. EzineArticles.
• Focus more on getting more and more Social signals through Google Plus(G+), Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc. Get more likes, sharing, comments, get involved in the discussions going on your Social Page. The more likes, sharing, and comments you are getting, more is the natural back-links that you are getting, which is Google's new LOVE.  
• Use popular Web 2.0 websites like the Tumbler, WordPress etc. to share your content and build content channels for your website without spending extra penny on creating websites for publishing your valuable content.
• Find some big blogs which allow guest blogging opportunities. Ask them, if you can publish some great content and informative stories/articles, if it meets their Guest Blogging requirements. Do not add anchor text rich links embedded into your post. Just use your brand name to introduce your business. If your content is good, you will be getting natural links automatically. If you can create a BUZZ around your content, all your hard work and efforts in writing such wonderful and great content is rewarded. Make sure your content is in the right context.
• Do not allow dofollow links on the footer of your website, nofollow them immediately.
• Do not link your website anywhere unnecessarily, until you have a logic and you can relate it will the content. 
• Make some great engaging videos to visually represent and describe your business, your products and services. This is a great source to bring huge traffic to your website.
• Keep practicing the white hat on-page seo techniques that we already know. Do not ignore a single thing to stand apart from all these hits.
• Get Google authorship for your content.
• Start using long keywords for your website. Long tail SEO is the new in thing after HUmmingbird Algorithm. Long tail Keywords is also showing signs of improved conversion ratio over the one-two word keywords. 
  

In short, let people link you rather than you running for links. Everything which will be natural is going to survive. Do not try to cheat the current algorithm, because another update to eat the cheats done to beat this current update must be into the pipeline and can be launched sooner.