How to use Amazon Product Ads to your advantage

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 01 May 2013 14:00:00 +0100

In my last article I spoke about best practice Amazon product page optimisation for gaining higher rankings.

That’s fine if you have an Amazon Seller Account but for many Australian businesses it’s hard to create a fully operational Amazon Seller Account if you don’t have a US or EU bank account.

Tips for selling on Amazon: Your eCommerce El Dorado awaits

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0100

Australian businesses struggle to get a look-in on arguably the world's biggest eCommerce platform, Amazon.

But if you can get your products onto Amazon, and you know a little bit about how Amazon's search algorithm hangs together, your online sales will skyrocket. Some of the people I've been speaking to confirm that the volumes of what they used to sell each day are being exceeded each and every hour on Amazon.

As an Australian business, getting an Amazon Seller Account w [...]

Top 10 tips for optimising AdWords

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0100

AdWords is a huge product. Not only does it enable you to target people with ads on Google's search engine when they're looking for stuff, but also via Google's Display Network (via text and banner ads, using contentually or managed ad placements), remarketing and YouTube (video ads), just to name a few of the options.

Throw in Mobile Ads, concepts such as "Quality Scores", geographic targeting principles and it can quickly get quite overwhelming.

And when something gets b [...]

How to ‘hyper target’ consumers with Facebook Custom Audiences

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 14:00:00 +0100

The drive towards insane ad targeting took another leap forward a couple of months ago, when Facebook quietly announced Facebook Custom Audiences. If you’re not salivating after reading this, it’s time for me to pack it in.

Facebook Custom Audiences allow you to upload your customers’ data into Facebook, which is then anonymously matched to the data Facebook has about its users. You can match your lists via:

Phone numbers
Facebook user ID’s
Email addresses

Probably th [...]

How social sharing is driving SEO and ranking

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Social sharing is becoming an increasingly important factor in helping your ranking positions. Search engines have been factoring social 'signals' into their algorithms for quite some time to help determine ranking, and reward relevant and popular content.

I know that many websites (Pinterest, for example) use 'Rel=Nofollow' tags to stop 'link authority' passing back to your website from a linked image or content, but regardless (and crystal ball gazing), I'd say social signals and [...]

Australia Post, Tarazz and online marketing: Just a storm in a teacup?

eschmidl@hotmail.com — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Recently Australia Post caused a bit of a ruckus when it struck a new partnership deal with eCommerce retailer Tarazz.

Grant Arnott from Online Retailer described the deal as a, "...major kick in the guts for a retail industry already under significant pressure from overseas retailers".

The executive director of the Australian Retailers Association, Russell Zimmerman, was reported by SmartCompany as saying: "Obviously, we do have some concerns that a body like Australia Pos [...]

Does Pinterest help with SEO?

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has been another one of “those” rising social networks over the last 12 months. It’s somehow managed to break through the curtains and onto the stage where many thousands of other competing and socially focused websites haven’t.

It’s surprising really. I mean, Flickr’s been around forever and does a similar job but missed the potential that Pinterest saw in allowing image sharing. On Flickr, people create accounts and they share photos they’ve ta [...]

Tech-tonic shifts in digital marketing

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 14:00:00 +0100

Kudos this week to The Iconic; an emerging fashion brand that’s using a variety of digital marketing tactics, both online and offline, to establish themselves as an ecommerce powerhouse.

I’ve no idea whether there’s an agency behind some of their recent and ongoing campaign work or whether it’s all handled in house but, regardless, I love great work and I tip my hat to whomever is responsible.

I started seeing ads for The Iconic around Feb-March this year on The Age online p [...]

The trick to responsive design and SEO

andrewmedia@internode.on.net — Wed, 30 May 2012 22:29:07 +0100

I’m a really big fan of responsive design on a whole bunch of levels.

One of the great things about responsive design is that no matter what device you’re using to view a responsively designed webpage you probably won’t even know you’re looking at one!

Why?

Well, that’s the great trick to responsive design. A responsively designed web page will automatically adjust to whatever device you’re using to view it.

A great example I was shown recently at SMX Sydney [...]

How to market to Chinese consumers online

andrewmedia@internode.on.net — Wed, 16 May 2012 22:53:56 +0100

China’s catching up. From a closed economy based on agriculture and limited trade, to the roaring industrial force it is today, China is fast becoming a huge opportunity for savvy online marketers.

Recently Reseo had its first ever stand at SMX 2012 in April this year and I was quite amazed by how many companies wandered up and asked for help in their attempts to reach Chinese consumers online.

Luckily for us, we’re pretty familiar with China and its major search engine Baid [...]

Major brands are not utilising Google Places

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 02 May 2012 22:44:19 +0100

It still amazes me how many major brands are not owning their Google Places listings.

Bunnings, Mitre10 and a ton of other big brands should really be getting on top of this. Some already have, so ‘hats off’ to the agency that looks after Harvey Norman. All the Google Places listings for their stores (that I’ve had time to check) have been claimed.

The reason why I raise this issue (again) is that there’s been yet another push by Google to promote Google Places listings in t [...]

Using banners to build links

cthomas@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:31:06 +0100

I’m going to giveaway a small SEO secret this week. I know it sounds odd, but you can use banners as a very effective link building technique for SEO.

Before I start, let me be clear, you need to be careful and you need to be ethical. Please ensure you adhere to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines if you decide to try this.

To explain how this can work for you, it’s probably best told as a story.

We had a client a couple of years ago who feature all sorts of franchises on th [...]

Lead collection advertising on Linkedin

pstafford@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0100

As an advertising platform, LinkedIn often gets overlooked. If you've got a manufacturing or service-based business that depends on other businesses to survive I think you should take a look at LinkedIn ads.

As LinkedIn has grown it's added some new and quite powerful features into its advertising platform including (finally!) a business console: so, if you're an agency, you can split out your customers into discrete accounts and give your customers shared access to their account if [...]

There’s no longer a digital divide in advertising

ekrieger@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0100

A few years ago I blogged about QR codes – what they are and how they work.

At the time, most advertisers weren’t using them much at all, save for some of the bigger outdoor advertisers such as Telstra and a handful of others.

But QR codes seem to have come of age, and they’re popping up everywhere as smartphone use proliferates, especially in direct mail catalogues. And some advertisers are being very smart about how they’re being implemented.

A quick case in point [...]

The trouble with Tablets

mheffernan@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 04:43:46 +0100

Over Christmas I succumbed and bought an iPad 2. It’s a great little gadget and I’m really enjoying both for business and pleasure… as are the kids.

On the weekend I decided to do some online shopping on the thing as I needed some new jeans. Pretty simple.

Now, I guess like most people, I do have a favourite little online store where I usually do my clothes shopping, it’s pretty basic but reliable; www.sambear.com.au.

Before I went to Sam Bear, I decided to do some c [...]

SEO and the cloud

ekrieger@smartcompany.com.au — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:56:01 +0100

This article first appeared May 13, 2011.

With the NBN rolling out we’re all (eventually) going to enjoy much faster internet connection speeds in the not too distant future.

That’s the theory anyway.

With faster internet speeds I think the uptake of cloud-based services will be exponential.

There’s been a lot of interest in the cloud and lots of people are talking about it. But for the sake of clarity I’ll try and summarise what it is.

The cloud is r [...]

Last minute online sales improvement ideas for Christmas

ekrieger@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:18:24 +0100

If you’re an online retailer in the B2C space, now’s the time to make hay. The sun will be shining brightly as we approach Christmas this year.

Conversion rates always improve from about now through to around December 20 without you having to do anything. I call it “conversion pressure”. At this time of year, people change their online shopping habits from a “browsing mindset” to an “intent mindset”. They’re under more pressure to get a pressie and they don’t have much tim [...]

Google’s controversial new announcement: Hiding keyword referral information

ekrieger@smartcompany.com.au — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 21:53:41 +0100

This week Google announced a controversial new initiative which prevents keyword data showing in Analytics Reports when someone is logged into their Google account.

Google has decided to encrypt their main site using SSL when people are logged in for “privacy reasons” so that people’s search queries can’t be intercepted by nasty hackers and also remain invisible in analytics reports.

The keyword report is incredibly useful to website owners and online marketers as [...]

New Google tools for SEO

ekrieger@smartcompany.com.au — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:03:17 +0100

Google has recently released a new tool in its Analytics product, which enables you to link your Google Webmaster Tools account to your Google Analytics account.

It’s early days yet, but I’d recommend that anyone involved with SEO should use this feature to enable some pretty powerful keyword research. You’ll see why in a minute.

First of all, I’ll take you through how to set this up; luckily it’s pretty straightforward.

Step 1. Jump into the new (beta) ver [...]

How to track phone calls from your website

jthomson@smartcompany.com.au — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 22:36:31 +0100

There are lots of things you can track as goals or events from your website through Google Analytics, including form submissions, downloads or PDFs, mailtos etc.

One of the big problems has been tracking phone calls that came through to your business as a result of people seeing your phone number on your website.

It’s a really important lead conversion event but for a long time tracking has only been possible via specialised companies such as www.jetinteractive.com.au who ca [...]

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