E-Commerce & Online Marketing Blog

Check back on a regular basis for the latest best practice and thought-leadership updates.

Google Local Business Listings: A How To Guide

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 22nd July 2010 to E-commerce and Search

By now you’ll have noticed that any location-based search query brings up Google Maps listings with the top seven to eight businesses listed at the top of the results page. This is prime search ...

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A Better Link Strategy With Bloggers

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 8th July 2010 to Search and Social Media

Link building is an important part of every popular e-commerce site's success. Its how new customers find you and how your web site appears on the first page of search engine results, so it’s import...

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Pay Per Click Lessons From The 2010 World Cup

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 29th June 2010 to Search

Just imagine the amount of search volume the World Cup is getting each second. With the potential stakes so high for retailers, innovation and best practice should be coming to the fore. The England ...

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Uncover Your Money-Making E-commerce Paths

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 12th May 2010 to E-commerce and Search

Sales channels; tracking; return on investment. If you’re a retailer, you’ll know just how time consuming and mind-boggling digging into these things can actually be. Customers don’t come out o...

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SEO: Page-Load Now Included As Google Ranking Factor

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 12th April 2010 to E-commerce and Search

We've written about this subject before, toward the end of last year, but now it's official: Google is using page-load time as a search ranking factor. In short, web sites that are faster to load wil...

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Not So Niche – Optimising Landing Pages For Natural Search

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 18th March 2010 to E-commerce and Search

Search engine optimisation is much easier when you have niche phrases to target. With less competition, it takes less time to achieve visibility, and if the phrase accurately describes what your busin...

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Is Copy Really That Important On An E-commerce Site?

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 1st March 2010 to E-commerce and Search

As a full-service e-commerce and digital marketing agency, we see lots of perfectly good e-commerce sites held back by their use of copy. There’s either too much of it and it swamps the reader; or t...

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Don't 'Pray Per Click’: Improve PPC Performance With Quality Score

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 11th February 2010 to Search

There is a fundamental process to search engine marketing that you can use to improve click through and conversion rates - as well as lower your average cost per click - that doesn’t involve devisin...

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Are Your Search and Social Media Strategies Out Of Focus?

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 13th January 2010 to Search and Social Media

The lines between social media and search engine optimisation are blurred with one often directly influencing the other. This leaves some business leaders worrying whether they’re losing a clear pe...

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The New Tradition: Online Spending on Christmas Day

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 21st December 2009 to E-commerce and Search

With reports indicating another year of growth for online retail in the US and UK (comScore have calculated a 3% year-on-year growth in US online retail over the 41 prime retail days from November –...

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Black-Hat SEO: Is It Time For Retailers To Change Their Colours?

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 15th December 2009 to Search

In a recent Econsultancy blog post, tech reporter Patricio Robles asks whether Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is being kept such a level playing field by Google and what that means for online retail...

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Is Google Going To Favour Faster Web Sites?

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 16th November 2009 to Search

How quickly does your web site take to load on average? Slow load times are rarely a factor in managers’ minds (unless the page is so slow that it takes 10 – 20 seconds for a page to display full...

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Three Tips To Improve Paid Search Conversion Rates

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 11th November 2009 to Search

You can’t outbid a competitor with deeper pockets in paid search, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make more sales than them. Here are three tips gained from our experience to increase your click...

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Microsoft and Yahoo Search: A Done Deal?

Posted by Gareth Cutter on 29th July 2009 to Search

Pretenders to Google’s search throne, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed a 10-year search deal designed to consolidate their shared 30% of the search marketplace. In this deal, Microsoft’s search eng...

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