At less than 1/3rd of the cost of traditional suites, no hardware to maintain, a host of real time collaborative tools, and no worries about losing work when your offices servers go out, Google Apps is set to change the way we think about the office environment. Next month we go over the new Google Apps for business service, and how you can use it to rocket your office into the cloud(s).
From the Editor:
People often get caught up in success. It's a myopia of sorts, a short sightedness that comes with running a successful campaign. It works, it's going great and so you forget to look beyond. People get so used to looking at something close up that when it gets big they don't know how to look beyond it. They can't see what's left to do.
So with that, this month we're taking a look at the myopia of success, and how--when it comes to SEO--the most successful web companies are often failing in the most common of ways. And we hope to show how even a small online retailer still has a chance to stare down a Goliath.
The Art and Science of Online Persuasion:
How to Get Visitors to ACT
In this one-day crash course, we won't dwell on the obvious technique like offering discounts or the power of "free". Rather, we'll teach you how to create emotional appeals that may not sound strictly logical… but work!
On November 12th, you'll learn 14 diabolicallyeffective persuasion tools:
Ugly Jerry and the Contrast Principle
Optimal Level of Dissonance
Distract then Reframe
Harnessing the Power of People We Like
Plus 10 more!
Course Fee: $475
Register by October 23rd and save $100 Call 1-866-733-8899 Ext. 242 to reserve your seat
Future Shop
This entire project started with an old favourite of ours: Futureshop.ca (known in the US as bestbuy.com), a massive company that has cemented itself as one of the sources for electronics online. The problem is, while they do very well as far as brand recognition and sales goes, their website still needs some work (though they've make great strides every time I check back). In this post, we looked over their site and pointed out how some smart page titling, H1 tag usage, and duplicate content fixes, could make their already substantial online income even greater.
Hanna Andersson started in 1983 and their website pulled in a whopping $65 million 2007. Still, despite this massive profit from web sales, they suffer from some fairly major SEO mistakes, including misused 302 redirects, low content pages, duplicate content, and, worst of all, improper title tag use. Fixing this would mean more organic traffic, and thus more sales.
Most people in North America have heard of Fry's Electronics and it's no surprise since their website makes 48.4 million dollars a year. Still, rampant subdomains, session ID's and dynamic URL's abound, creating loads of duplicate content in Google. If they make 48.4 million dollars a year despite this, imagine what they could make by touching up their organic traffic?
Since we originally published this article, Calendars.com have made some really phenomenal updates to their website. They knew that their $18m in sales could be increased substantially by optimizing their organic traffic.
Skymall.com made a whopping $75 million in sales in 2007, surely they are doing something right? Well, they're doing a lot right, obviously, but their SEO is still a mess of duplicate content problems, robots.txt mishaps, sitemap.xml mishaps, and more.
Autozone Inc sells a whopping $59.3 million (in 2007) in car parts merely through their online store alone. That is a LOT of money, but still only 1% of their total sales! Why not take it past 1%? Dynamic URL structures, session ID's, misued 302 redirects, and zip code requirements make it almost impossible for Google to crawl inner pages, while their title tags merely repeat a company slogan. Proper indexing combined with smart title tag usage could boost this maybe even as high as 2%, a small number until you realize that that
would be a $60 million increase in revenue.
