Yogi Land

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

UK retailers are losing more than £8 billion ($12.6 million USD) per year due to website inefficiencies, according to research by data and analytics firm QuBit.

Using its Exit Feedback technology, QuBit collected more than 18,000 comments about a range of UK retail websites and analyzed the data to discover the major issues that these sites face.

Mashable spoke with QuBit CEO Graham Cooke about the company’s research, and what it means for businesses. We looked at the top 10 reasons website visitors don’t convert to paying customers on retail websites and offer a few tips for businesses that face these problems.

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Top 10 Problem Areas for Conversion

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Here are the top 10 website issues that hinder retail website visitors from converting to customers, according to QuBit’s research:

• Pricing: Pricing was the leading issue for consumers in their online purchase decisions. Transparency and accessibility are key for the online retail world, since comparative shopping is drastically easier on the Internet as compared with shopping in the real world. QuBit recommends crossing out previous prices or focusing on a “deal of the week” to satisfy price-conscious consumers.
• Product descriptions: More than 12% of feedback was related to the lack of clear and complete product descriptions. Descriptions must be thorough enough to replace the knowledge of a sales associate. This is especially important for fashion retailers, as “the vast proportion of feedback found on fashion retail sites blames lack of sizing information as a primary reason for exiting the site,” the report reads. Materials used, origin of goods and sizing information are just a few details that retailers should consider listing.
• Stock information: It is important that availability of products be communicated to website visitors early on in the purchasing process. If a product is out of stock, timely information about when it will be available is also important. Otherwise, users should be given the option to be notified once the product becomes available, or the site should recommend related goods that are in stock.
• Site functionality: Users are frustrated when they enter a site with expectations of how it should function and are utterly disappointed. Key missing functionalities cited in this research included wish lists, in-store pick-up, personalized recommendations, guest checkout and product filters.
• Shipping information: Shipping prices and times should be readily available. Lack of this information is likely to cause checkout drop-offs and complete abandonment of the site, the report explained. Offering international shipping and displaying shipping prices in destination currencies are two features likely to improve this problem area.
• Images: People like to see what they’re buying before they make a purchase. High quality photography from multiple angles and with zoom capabilities is important for converting shoppers into buyers.
• Discounts: Commenters point to not being able to find where to enter discount codes as a big problem when shopping online. Likewise, consumers seemed confused as to whether offline discounts could be applied online, and if so, whether the discounts applied to their demographic or purchase. We’ve all been there — exclusion lists are lengthy and can include details on countries, states, brands and even particular items.
• Navigation: Consumers are accustomed to visiting large commerce websites, such as Amazon, that feature clear navigation — and they expect that same level of quality across all retail websites. Broken links within the shopping cart, lack of category pages in the main navigation and broken browser functionalities (such as the back button) were key issues cited by consumers.
• Video: Product videos can add flare to a product page, and apparently consumers expect them, as the lack of videos was expressed as a major problem area on retail websites. QuBit pointed to Burberry as being a trendsetter in this area, as the retailer’s website presents a seamless experience of videos and photos.
• Website speed: Slow loading times are of huge concern to retailers, as consumers simply hate waiting around for a website to finally show up. Retailers should benchmark their load times against those of their competitors and act accordingly.

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Tips for Improvement

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QuBit CEO and ex-Googler Graham Cooke told us that there are three main things that a retail website owner needs to look at in order to improve conversions:

• Product information: “Are the descriptions on your site clear, concise and engaging? Do they tell the user what they need to know about a product? Have you got great images on the site and do you let people zoom in so they can really get the detail? The product information on a website plays the role of the store assistant in an offline store, so you want to make sure its performing at its best.”
• Payment processes: “The checkout is one of the most likely areas where you’re going to lose customers, and there are some really simple things you can do to make this work better. Lots of retailers ignore really simple things, like enabling the display of payment information in multiple currencies or making sure that people have clear information about shipping costs.”
• User experience: “We’ve all known for years that user experience is key to successful online retail, but it still pops up all the time as a major issue. Again, this can be [narrowed] down to relatively simple issues such as slow page loading speeds or site search, but they’re all costing you valuable sales.”

How does your business optimize its website for conversions? Let us know your strategies in the comments below.

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you’re a small business owner, your website is the central hub of your company, and it’s a pivotal part of your marketing and branding.

Potential customers visit your site specifically for its content, meaning its appearance and usability are critical to its success and how those users view your company. However, getting your web design wrong can have a negative impact on your business.

Here are 5 common web design mistakes you must avoid to create a great user experience and grow your bottom line.

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1. Poor Navigation

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Many small businesses fail to make navigation a priority, but without careful attention to how people navigate your site, you could unintentionally be creating a frustrating experience for any potential visitor. People visit your site for specific information, and if they cannot find it they will quickly go elsewhere, leaving with the impression that your business is disorganized in more than just its website.

A good navigation structure should be seamless and will keep visitors on your site longer, which means potentially more readers, subscribers, sales or leads — whichever is your primary objective.

Website navigation affects both usability and accessibility, so it’s important to make it a primary concern. Most websites and blogs use common navigational techniques that are expected by the average visitor. The pages and sections of the site should be easy and logical for visitors to maneuver. Don’t make your visitors think about how to navigate your site; it should be effortless and natural.

There are several principles you can follow to create an effective navigation structure:

• Use icons to aid navigation. They’re both visually appealing and easy to use and understand.
• Create logical groups of related links, with the most important links on the top-level navigation bar and functional (dashboard, account, settings, etc.) and legal (copyright, privacy, terms) located elsewhere.
• Provide location information so users know where they are on any given page and how to proceed to another area of the website. This can be achieved by using Breadcrumb navigation.

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2. No Clear Calls To Action

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The fundamental error of many small business websites is the lack of a clear call to action. We’ve all seen bland small-business brochure websites with nothing but endless descriptive paragraphs. If you aren’t leading users to commit to an action (buy a product, contact you or subscribe, for example), then you are losing them.

Driving traffic to your website is important, but that traffic is useless if your primary call to action is a plain “click here” link buried in a sea of text. Call-to-action buttons are a great way to grab the user’s attention, and these buttons can be the key to higher conversions. Investing time and consideration into creating successful calls to action can help guide users and address their needs while achieving your own business goals.

It’s important to keep the following best practices in mind when creating an optimal call to action:

• The design of a call to action can be broken down into 4 simple elements — size, shape, color, and position. Each plays a vital part in determining how effective the call to action is in directing the user.
• Don’t make your users work or think, or they’ll leave. It’s not that they aren’t smart, it’s that they want access to information quickly without spending unnecessary time searching for it.
• Don’t overdo it with multiple, competing calls to action on every page. Decide what your primary target is and then define a clear objective per page. Your content should have answered, “What’s in it for me?” and your call to action should now answer, “What do I do now?”

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3. Color & Contrast

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Color and contrast aren’t usually high up on the list of priorities for a small business owner when it comes to creating a website. But it should be, because if your website text does not have sufficient contrast compared to its background, people will have difficulty reading your content, especially people with poor vision or color-blindness.

Aside from plain readability, color and contrast are important because they can be used to create visual interest and direct the attention of the user. It can equally be effective in organizing and defining the flow and hierarchy of a page, and it’s therefore an essential principle to pay attention to during the design process. Here are some tips:

• Using a free a Color Contrast tool (which conforms to accepted standards) you can easily check to see how the contrast on your website measures up.
• Research how major sites use color and contrast to improve readability and highlight specific sections, and use this knowledge to experiment with color schemes.
• One of best ways to enhance contrast is by creating size differences between elements, making some things appear larger than others. This works especially well within a minimal color scheme, and it means you don’t have to necessarily rely on color.

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4. Content, Content, Content

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People visit your website for its content, and how that is structured is a huge factor in its success or failure. Unfortunately, an overwhelming number of small businesses get so caught up in overloading the user with information that they overlook how that information is presented.

Most people do not read unless it’s absolutely necessary, and they prefer to scan through information quickly to get to the points of interest. This is why it’s so important to establish a strong visual content hierarchy so users can quickly scan your site and sifting through relevant information. A logical content hierarchy also acts as a guide through each page and creates a more enjoyable user experience.

So when focusing on your content, it’s best to keep in mind these three tips:

• White space is possibly the most important factor to consider. It will allow the user to focus on the meaningful content within each section.
• Break up lengthy pieces of information into digestible blocks of text, utilizing headings, sub-headings, bullets, blockquotes and paragraphs.
• Readable content is important, so use a good line height that is large enough to make content scannable. Margins and letter spacing also need to be taken into consideration.

When talking about content, spelling and grammar cannot be underestimated.

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5. Clutter

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We all know at least one small business website that seems to include everything but the proverbial kitchen sink. Many small business owners tend to cram as much as they can onto a single page — the end result is a busy, cluttered and unreadable page.

The more extraneous items there are on a web page, the more unprofessional it looks, and it becomes overwhelming, confusing and distracting for the user. A cluttered website will also affect traffic because visitors won’t return if they can’t understand or follow the content, which leads to low traffic, a high bounce rate and possibly a poor Page Rank.

Clutter also applies to images. Too many can be a huge distraction and just plain annoying. Images should be used to illustrate, capture attention and guide the user where required.

Follow these guidelines for a more streamlined visitor experience:

• Challenge every item on each page and ask, “Does it really need to be there? Does it serve a specific purpose? Can I live without it?”
• The key is to aid the visitor in finding the information they’re looking for, so make sure to differentiate between areas of content, advertisements and promotions.
• Prioritize your content and decide what is the most important to your visitor and potential customer — and sell it well.

Even the greatest content can become lost in a mess of words and graphics, so de-cluttering is essential.

These are just five web design mistakes that many small businesses make. What other mistakes have you noticed on small business websites?

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Writing articles is a very simple and free way to generate traffic to your website and improve sales of your product. However, to be effective it has to be done properly, and there are some aspects of article marketing of which many people are unaware. Or perhaps you are aware of them, but don’t know how to put them into practice. It is not the purpose of this article to tell you how to write: there are rules that should be followed for best results, but these have been more than adequately covered by the myriad other articles that have written on the subject. In fact, that would be one of the lessons: the use of the noun ‘myriad’. A word for a large number, it is Greek in origin, and correctly should be neither preceded by ‘a’ or followed by ‘of’, so ‘a myriad of articles’ is not grammatical, while ‘myriad articles’ is. However, like many of these rules of grammar, common usage is gradually superseding the correct form, and I’m not going to lose sleep over it. No, here we are going to discuss how articles can be used as opposed to how to write them. We shall assume that already have a great article, with a good keyword-rich title and your body keywords used as they should be. So this is not so much about writing articles, but how to use them to generate traffic and improve sales of your products. There are two main ways in which articles can be used: by publication as content on your own website and by submission to article directories. Let’s discuss each of these in turn. Using Articles as Website Content Articles can be used as web content for any type of website. People generally prefer to come across a web page containing a useful article that tells or teaches them something about the topic of the page than simply a page of graphics or links. In fact a proper silo site demands them. Silo Sites: When writing articles for a silo site it is first important to draw up your site structure and make a list of the topics you will have to write about. There are various types of silo site, but that which offers excellent search engine results involves a home page linked to each of a number of silo header pages. Each of these introduce the theme of the silo, and link both to the home page and to the first silo page for each silo. It is not the purpose here to discuss silo sites in detail, only that they can help to generate traffic and improve sales by the simplicity of their structure. Search engines can easily find every page on the site, and every page contains good content. That is assuming that they are well written and provide useful information. Articles should just be ‘page fillers’ but should teach something about the topic, or provide information that is genuinely useful to readers or visitors to your website. Each page of a silo site is intended to provide that type of information, and can also be backed up with products or services that relate to the theme of the article and the silo page. Sales Sites: Writing articles for sales sites does not infer writing sales pages, but writing in such a way as to promote a product or provide a problem and its solution, the product or service being promoted then being presented as a means of applying or achieving that solution. While I see a silo site as providing information first and the product second, with a sales site that is reversed, and certainly changes the way the articles is written and used. Affiliate products can be sold both ways: they can be presented as a means of backing up the information provided in an info-silo site, offered as solutions to problems or form the main object of a web page and the articles offered in a promotional or review format. Distribution to Article Directories When you distribute an article to an article directory you benefit in a number ways, the main two being through the Google PageRank and search engine results listing gained from the backlinks proved to your selected web page from the link in the resource section of the article, and from the search engine listing of the article itself. Articles are also read by users of the article directories, and they are also copied by webmasters as content for their own Adsense site: here, the resource section must be left intact, again offering you links back to your site. However, it is from their listings on search engines that you will get most tangible benefit, because each article is published on its own page in the directory website, and can be listed on Google in the same way as any other web page. Hence the need for good SEO on in your article. If you don’t understand how to optimize an article it is certainly worth hiring an article ghostwriter or learning how to do it yourself, because it can make a massive difference to your sales, and generate traffic such as you have never previously experienced. It is not necessary to submit your article to hundreds of individual directories and ezines. Submission to the top 10 or 15 directories is all that is needed. Because many of these syndicate their articles to other directories, and a number of ezines also pick them. If you want to increase your submissions above that, there submission services available online and also software that can be used to help you do it yourself. So, writing articles can generate traffic and improve sales very dramatically if you know, not only how to write them properly with good search engine optimization, but also how to use them to your greatest advantage.

By Pete

Have you ever noticed that competitive runners achieve their best race times when they are pitted against worthy competitors? You can be an excellent sprinter, but odds are you will not run your personal best on a track by yourself–most of the time it’s the spirit of a heated race and a determined runner breathing down your neck that makes you dig down deep give it all you’ve got. The quest for a higher search engine ranking and more website traffic is much like athletic competitions. When you’re trying to get your site ranked higher in Google, you are not operating in a vacuum–you have competitors, whether you acknowledge them or not. Your progress is not only dependent on your own efforts at marketing your site, but the efforts of your competitors–if other website owners are more consistent, more reliable, and more focused in their marketing, there’s a good chance that they will outrank you. With website rankings, there is a constant jockeying for position, so it is extremely helpful when you’re trying to market your site and get a higher search engine ranking if you will use your competitors to your own advantage. Before you start your next link building campaign, take a look around the playing field and gather some intelligence about those you’re running against. How Can You Tell Who Your Competition Is? It’s actually quite easy to tell who your top competitors are–just do a search for each of your keywords in Google. What site is at the #1 position? Unless it’s you, that website is your top competition. Repeat this search for each one of your keywords. When you’re starting out, you may want to limit yourself to 3 main keywords whose competitors you’re keeping track of. That way you have 3 competitors to keep track of, and that will give you a good idea of how you’re progressing and also how far you need to go to catch up to the #1 position. What Type Of Information Should You Keep Track Of? Alright, now that you know who your top competitors are, it’s time to do a little investigating. Here are the main bits of info that will help you get an idea of where your site stands in relation to site holding the #1 position. 1) How many backlinks does the competing website have? You can do a backlink check by typing the word “link:” (following by a colon) and then the competitor’s URL into the Google search box. The results will be a listing of sites that are currently linking to their site, and at the top of the page you can see a total number of backlinks. 2) What is their search engine rank for the keyword? For the first month at least, their ranking is #1. Another thing that will be interesting to you is to see how the site that is ranked at #1 can fall if they are outdone by another site further down in the ranking. If you are consistent with your link building campaign, you can see your site climbing up the rankings each month, until finally your #1 competitor drops from the number one position and your site takes over. 3) What is the other site’s PageRank? PageRank (PR) is a tool Google uses to reflect the authority of a web page. The rankings go from 0-10, where 10 is the best. You’ll likely notice that a website does not need to have a PageRank of 10 in order to hold the top ranking for a keyword–many times sites with lower rankings hold the top position. Why is this? Remember, it’s all about competition–the top ranking website may have a PR2, but the other sites who are competing for top listing for that keyword have lower authority. Of course, there are many other factors that go into determining who has the top rank in Google, and only Google knows all of their criteria for judging. At any rate, it is helpful to know the other site’s PageRank, especially in comparison to your own. If you see that the competing site has a PR4 and your site has a PR2, you can set a goal for yourself to achieve PR4 or higher. With all of these indicators, it’s nice to get an idea of what you’re shooting for. Being aware of your top competitor’s stats can help you strategically jump up the rankings and keep your motivation going to earn the #1 spot.

The longer you stay in the field of internet marketing, the more obvious it becomes that customers are really your lifeblood. Even if you happen to create a website that focuses on content and passive income streams of advertising, it is still important to remember that keeping your site trustworthy from both a content and a security point of view is something that should be at the top of your list. One way to make your site trustworthy is to simply solve all of the problems that come up as they are addressed to you. Trustworthiness often has a lot to do with a sense of professionalism that customers get from vendors and with that in mind, it is something that you can easily create. Reply to all of the e-mails that are sent to you, even if it is just an acknowledgement, letting the people know that you have heard and appreciate what they have to say. Then, when the action required has been taken on the e-mail, you can go ahead and ensure that your customers now know that the concern they submitted has been dealt with. With that kind of attention to your customer, it won’t be long before all of the customers that have dealt with you start to spread out your excellence level and trustworthiness. Try to stay in touch with your customers. Don’t let your customers forget your business. One of the easiest ways to follow up with your customers is to find out if your customers are satisfied doing business with you. That way, if they are enjoying doing business with your company, you can ask for testimonials. If they’re unhappy, then you must try to set things right. By Providing great customer service you will increase your chances of getting repeat business from your existing customers and thus increase your sales and profits. Additionally, there is always the third party method for making your site trustworthy. Getting an independent audit of the security features of your website by companies that specialize in such things will show your customers that you are taking their security seriously and of course once you get approved you will be given the opportunity to display their seal on your website in a way that allows them to vouch for the safety of using your website. This affects different people in different ways, but it never ends up hurting your website’s popularity and therefore it is definitely something you will want to consider doing in the future. Finally, one more way that you can increase the image that you have in the eyes of your customers is simply through being consistent. If you have a content website, then make sure that you regularly update that website in order to ensure that your people keep coming back. If you have a sales website, then consistently make sure that things are in order, replying to e-mails and helping people to solve any problems they encounter. To Your Success!

When I talk with website owners who are starting to market their websites with article submissions and ask them what they hope to achieve, most of the time they will reference one or more of these benefits:

• A higher search engine ranking for your keywords
• More traffic to your website via the articles themselves (in addition to traffic garnered from the higher search engine rank for your keywords)
• Establishing yourself as an expert in your niche
• And going along with the status of expert, when someone does a Google search for your name, they are greeted with a list containing your website and your articles.

Each of these benefits is worthwhile and can help improve your business and your website, but out of all of them, which one can have the most dramatic impact on your website over the long term? In my opinion, the greatest reward of Article Marketing comes in terms of SEO–having a higher search engine ranking for your keyword terms. When trying to drive traffic to your website, you need to do something to attract the attention of your target market. This is what article marketing does–it places your website in a prominent position in an arena where your target market is hanging out. Where does everyone’s target market gather? At Google and the other search engines. Whenever you need information on a topic, you will go to Google or Yahoo or one of the other search engines and type your question or need into the search box. Your target customers are also Googling solutions to their needs. As a website owner, your goal is to be one of the top results when your customers type their search terms into Google. By being listed at or towards the top of the results pages, you increase your chances of the potential customer clicking through to your website. That is what called “targeted traffic”. Targeted traffic means that the people who are visiting your website are most likely to be in need of what you’re offering at your website. This is what you’re going for. What are the steps to rank higher in Google and the other search engines? 1- Figure out what your keywords are. Your keywords are not only words that classify the content of your website, but they are the very words that your target market most often types into Google when they are searching for a site like yours. When you know what those special words are, then you can work to position your website to satisfy those search terms. It isn’t hard to figure out what your keywords are, but it does require a bit of basic research. There are many great keyword suggestion tools on the web, both paid and free. To start with you can look at the Google Keywords Tool, WordTracker Keyword Suggestion Tool, Keyword Discovery, and Overture. 2- Write articles on the topic of your website. Oftentimes as you’re writing you will naturally use your keywords in your article, title and resource box, but it may be helpful to read back over your article after you’ve finished writing it, and see if there are any places where it would be appropriate to subtly use your keyword terms. The idea is optimize the article for your keyword terms, while doing so in a natural sounding way. Always keep your reader in mind, and write articles that will be helpful and easy to understand. Be careful not to go overboard with your keywords–keep your keyword density at 3% or lower. 3- Submit articles consistently for the lifetime of your website. This means submitting a few articles each month, month in and month out. This is perhaps the area where people most go astray–consistency is paramount. It’s a lot like embarking on an exercise program–you may work out hard and eat healthy for a few days or weeks or even a few months, but if you stop your new healthy habits that are propelling you towards your goal, you will not see the results you were looking for. Before long you will start regressing until you’re to the point that you were before you started working out. Article Marketing requires steadiness of purpose, doing the same action over and over again to reap cumulative results that can be quite astounding. The hardest part about writing and submitting articles is just sticking with it–if you can develop consist article submission habits, you can see dramatic results over time.

A lot of people can recognize good design when they see it on the web. But most people don't really know what makes that design good. How do you define "good design?" Is it subjective, like your favorite flavor of ice cream? Although there is some subjectivity within good design, there are artistic principles that good design is built from. Here are a few that form the foundation of good design. 1. Proximity Because items that are in close proximity to one another become one visual unit, items that are related to one another should be grouped together. Laying out related items on a website page this way helps the eye associate the information and enables the viewer to mentally categorize the information easily. The flip side of this principle is that items that are not related should not be placed in close proximity to one another. The purpose of the principle of proximity is to organize information in a way that enables viewers to quickly and easily comprehend. When information is organized, people are more likely to read it and respond. People are also more likely to remember information that is organized. How can you determine if items form a visual unit? Squint your eyes and look at the page on a website. Now count the number of times your eye stops as it views the page. On a page that is using the principle of proximity well, your eye will stop three to five times. In other words, there will be three to five groups of information for the eye to comprehend separately. 2. Alignment You've seen website page layouts where the text and graphics are placed wherever there happens to be space. The effect is messy, with no impact. Nothing should be placed on a page arbitrarily. There should be a visual connection between each item on the page. When items are aligned, it creates a cohesiveness that the eye appreciates. The purpose of alignment is to unify the website page. Imagine a well-organized kitchen. All the pots and pans are stored in the organizer, the fruit is nicely displayed in a basket on the counter, the spices are all on the rack – everything is in its place. A page layout needs the same thing. Look at a website page that you feel is good design. Now focus on the main visual element. Where does your eye go from there? Do you see how other elements are aligned with that one main element both vertically and horizontally? 3. Repetition Good design repeats some aspect of the website design throughout the site. It's this repetition that makes all the pages in a site look like they belong together. Color scheme, graphic elements, typefaces – all of these elements should be repeated – used consistently – throughout. The purpose of repetition is to create consistency and to add visual interest. Repetition creates a professional, polished look that the eye is drawn to. When a website design uses repetition and is consistent, it is more likely to be viewed and read. Here are some ways you can create repetition beyond simple consistency in typefaces and colors: Use some element in your logo as a major graphic element in the design. If you are using a ruled line, make the line more interesting visually by perhaps making it with tiny dots or dashes, then repeating the line element throughout the design. Create patterns that are repeated throughout the design. Take a small element and place it somewhere on each page for a whimsical look. Just be careful not to overdo the repetition, or viewers will be annoyed rather than pleased. 4. Contrast The principle of contrast states that if two items are not the same, then they should be different – very different. Contrast creates an organizational hierarchy of the information and graphics on a webpage. When using contrast, you can't be a wimp! The contrast must be strong to be effective. The purpose of contrast is two-fold: to create interest on the page, and to organize information. A page that is interesting to look at is more likely to be read. And contrasting elements will help a reader understand the way the information is organized. Contrast can be created in many ways. You can contrast large type with small type, a serif font with a sans-serif font, bold with light, smooth texture with rough texture, a small graphic with a large one, a dark color with a light one. A design that integrates these principles will automatically gain a professionalism and polish that it would otherwise lack. Next time you stumble across a website design that makes you say "wow", check for these principles – you'll find them quietly working to make that design a good one!

By Laura MacPherson