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.  

What To do Now After Hummingbird? Why this Update? How Will It Affect Better Searching?

What Is Hummingbird Algorithm? Why this Update? How Will It Affect Better Searching For Users? What SEOs should do Now? These are some questions which comes in our mind ever since the launch of this update.

It was September 27th when the World was happy celebrating the 15th Birthday of Google. On this day, Google introduced the first of its kind algorithm named "Hummingbird". Hummingbird was introduced to bring improved search results for Desktop, Laptop, Mobile devices, and Voice command for search on advanced and intelligent devices. There is no doubt that Google is evolving its Search Engine in a much faster pace than any other Search Engine. This update is introduced to bring more natural search results in order to kill Spamy websites to rank.

Hummingbird has taken into account factors like Long-tail Keyword, Page Authority, Mobile Search, Voice Search, more concentration on content quality, and knowledge graph to give its user a more semantic and much improved result. Long-tail keyword is the biggest beneficiary. I personally think that though people were using keywords like SEO Agency Delhi or SEO Consultants Delhi for hiring a Seo firm for their business, but it is most likely that people will search for "How To Find A Good SEO Company" or "How to Find Good SEO Specialists for My Business".

These enhanced search result is said to be that no search has gone beyond the results shown after the Hummingbird update has hit the web. This has affected nearly more than 90% of the of a web searches. This was user focused update, depending upon the understandings and the thought process of a searcher and then providing better answers to every queries by a Googler. Better results for longer search queries is the finest example of the Hummingbird. Earlier Google was delivering results based on important words from any query, but now each individual word from the query is processed and the result is delivered after examining the whole meaning of the search phrases used. With this advance algorithm, you will now find the exact result for your searches like "best butter chicken near my area". Best butter chicken is understood, but what about - near my area? This is possible now. Google will now give you the result based on the area you live in after checking your Google profile. And yes you have to be logged into your Google account to get this result. (But of course, the restaurant owner will not be able to know of this search by this user as he was logged into his Google account and Google's privacy policy has declared that it will not disclose private data of any user who is logged in, as it comes under the account activity of the user). Google is geared up for the next generation of search result. This is to make sure that the Googlers will now interact, speak, participate and contribute to the Google product more often and more effectively.

Is Seo Dead Now?

Is SEO dead now, is what everyone is wondering about these days after this algorithm. The answer is No, SEO is not dead. Seo is more intelligent now. Those who were considering SEO a less preferred task over other technical jobs, will now respect this job more. SEO is alive now if you know how to cope with the changing pace infact fast changing pace of Google, updating its algorithm to give the user a more user oriented and user oriented result. SEO is no more a link building activity, where you will build more and more rich anchor text links and rank your keywords high on most of the business terms. And since the beginning, Google has been shouting - "Be original, be relevant, be informative about your product, contribute value oriented content for its users and you will get benefited in the Search Engine." Those who have always believed in the concept of high quality content and you were never involved in easy spammy link building practices, you will be in a win win position. You will get high traffic with the help of long tail keyword searches.

What to do now? Whats the Future?

Now, if you were having duplicate content, just change it and write a fresh content for your business. If you have written original content for your business, you have to tweak it in a way to make it easier for the search engine to be able to make it searchable for long-tail queries like why, how, when, how to, what and where. You have to make sure that you are able to make your page and content searchable for more than four to five(4 to 5 word most necessarily and most likely). This will be a long lasting effort from you and you will get long term benefits from this. Share your content on Social Sites, the likes, share and comments that you will get are now going to affect your SEO. Presence of your links on Authority websites is the only to build links. Inbound links for your website is still valuable. Do not get into the trap of building links from directories, bookmarking website etc. While posting articles for your content marketing, just post it on a single website. DO not republish the same content again and again on other article sites. Web 2.0 is now going to play a bigger role in your SEO strategy.

What Clients Should Know About Penguin 2.1 & Hummingbird

As many of us are already facing fall in the ranking and traffic due to the recent changes and Penguin 2.1 updates in the algorithm. The results being displayed in the SERP is still not stable and is fluctuating. We had a rank check this morning and just before some time from now. We have seen changes in the rank ranging from 5-10 in position in general and even upto position drop in some cases. Even yesterday’s rank results are not the same as today’s.

How to recover faster from the recent Penguin 2.1 update and do the right thing according to the Hummingbird update? Are you looking for the answer to this question? Here is a effort from me to help you in this regard:
As already conveyed to the esteemed clients, the process of identifying areas to recover and repair(identifying bad links and disavowing through Google Webmaster Tools) are being done extensively and we are hoping for a more stable result in the SERP in the coming days. The same process is being done as a part of recovery exercise worldwide. This recovery or detoxification process (identifying bad links and disavowing through Google Webmaster Tools) is a slow process as it will be a request to Google for the reconsideration after doing all the necessary things i.e. removing improper and incorrect back-links as per the latest algorithmic guidelines. Google process all these reconsideration requests from webmasters on a random basis as per the requests. 

Once you will do the needful with our website and we will send the reconsideration request, you will be rewarded from Google again. According to  these updates, we have to rework on some key factor which played negative for us i.e. the bounce rate and less user-friendly site structure and navigation. As Google doesn’t want to give results to its users having high bounce rate. Also If the time spent by the visitor is also very less then it also affects the site ranking according to the current algorithmic evaluations. 

SEO is no more a Directory and Bookmarking stuff only, it needs high-end experience to get a successful SEO campaign. Build content around your Domain, participate and contribute to the web. That's the key... Happy Seoing and safe & fast Penguin recovery.