Why Email Marketing is an Essential Part of Successful Ecommerce Store?

By | Date posted: | Last updated: February 9, 2022
Email Marketing for Ecommerce

Ecommerce is the fastest growing industries in the world. Globalization and digitization mean more and more transactions are made online. New ecommerce stores are emerging and established retailers are increasingly relying on business on the Internet. In addition to a good website and a suitable store system, direct communication with customers and interested parties is the focus of the providers. In this blog you will find out why professional ecommerce email marketing is an essential part of success.

why ecommerce email marketing is so attractive?

Newsletters score with relatively low costs and decent performance of marketing. A study shows that newsletter readers have bought at least one product that was advertised in a newsletter in the last three months. This makes email marketing one of the most efficient marketing channels in ecommerce.

But newsletters don’t just perform like that. The newsletters, which are tailored to individual target audiences, score particularly well in addition to creative content, good subject lines and a call to actions. The more interesting newsletters the better the performance for individual recipients. This is where functions such as segmentation and personalization come into play.

Email marketing tools offer the possibility of dividing recipients into different groups. Recipient segmentation is usually carried out using personal data and behaviour-based characteristics.

A strategic division helps to get a summary of your own recipients and to send individual campaigns and newsletters to specific groups. for example, newsletter subscribers are often segmented consistent with age, place of residence or gender (personal static data) or consistent with the number of purchases, product category purchased or newsletters received (behaviour-based characteristics).

The more information about recipients is available, the higher individual mailings can be tailored to them. Additionally, to segmentation in groups, individual blocks of the newsletter also can be personalized for specific customers. For example, this is useful for presenting various products inside a newsletter to the individual recipients. The customer-oriented adaptation of newsletter content is an important component for successful email marketing.

In the era of WhatsApp, Facebook and Telegram, classic newsletters are one of the older measures of communication. Some providers now provide newsletters for the WhatsApp. For example, why should use email marketing over other marketing activities?

As of now, newer channels like WhatsApp newsletters cannot yet compete with email marketing. this is often due on the one hand to the type of use of the various messaging services and on the other hand to the target group. While WhatsApp newsletters tend to appeal to a younger audience, email is an established channel and has virtually no limited target group. At the same time, consumers see WhatsApp and Co. as a very personal channel, so that only very sporadically is the newsletter function utilised.

Currently, mobile messaging services such as WhatsApp cannot replace email marketing with limited target groups and few subscribers. Therefore, most companies providing a newsletter by WhatsApp only use it in addition to the email newsletter.

With its reach and efficiency, email marketing is one of the most important marketing channels in ecommerce. With the right strategy and a professional newsletter tool, email marketing can become a high-performance channel in any ecommerce.

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What is Duplicate Content & How to Fix it for Higher Search Engine Rankings?

By | Date posted: | Last updated: May 28, 2021
Fix Duplicate Content

Why duplicate content affects your search engine ranking?

Many website operators have already heard of this ominous “duplicate content” and that it is really bad when it comes to SEO. But what exactly is “duplicate content”, how does it arise and, above all, how to avoid Duplicate Content SEO? Because one thing is clear, duplicate content is actually a problem for the ranking of your website.

1. What is Duplicate Content?

Duplicate content is understood to be content/text that appears unchanged or very similar several times on a website. Also, there can be different URLs on a website that have exactly the same content. This is called internal duplicate content or, in the case of very similar content, of “near duplicate content”.

Of external duplicate content is when the same text can be found on different websites. This is the case, for example, when posts appear on multiple platforms.

For a good ranking on Google, the quality and uniqueness of the texts are crucial, i.e. content that is relevant to the user and does not appear anywhere else in this form.

2. What types of duplicate content are there?

2.1. Different versions of a URL

Different versions of a URL are classic duplicate content for Google. In practice this does happen that seldom, depending on the web project, e.g.

  • Upper and lower case: example.com/example1 and example.com/Example1
  • Different versions of the start page:
  • example.com and example.com/index.php
  • At the end, or not with “trailing slash”: example.com/example1 and example.com/example1/
  • Different protocols:
  • https://www. example.com and https:// example.com
  • Various URLs of the same content, and only a few changes to the content, e.g. for events: example.com/event-xy-2020-06 and example.com/event-xy-2020-09

2.2. Filter in URL parameters and session IDs

Filters in ecommerce store often produce many URLs with the same content, e.g. due to variations in colors and sizes. This can be prevented by telling Google which page contains the original article. The so-called “Canonical Tag” is used for this and refers to the original page. This is usually integrated in ecommerce store, but it can also happen with non-ecommerce websites that many additional URLs are created here.

2.3. Boilerplate content

Boilerplate text (binder) is a text block that remains the same, usually at the end of a text. This should be avoided, especially if it is longer than the main text of the website.

2.4. Print versions

If the option to print the page is given on a page, another URL may be created which, apart from the images and the sidebar, has exactly the same content as the original, which is also duplicate content.

2.5. External duplicate content

Store often adopt the manufacturer’s texts, which is a problem as these can often be found on the Internet. Of course, it is clear that an ecommerce store with thousands of products cannot formulate all the texts itself, at least not right from the start. But in a smaller ecommerce store that has to compete against large providers, good product texts can have a positive effect on the ranking, quite apart from the fact that they are of course usually much more appealing to consumers.

If press releases or specialist articles are published on different platforms, this is also a case of duplicate content. However, if you want your own page to rank, it is advisable to first publish the article on your own website and only a few days later on the other platforms. It is important that Google records your website first.

3. Which duplicate content is not an issue?

3.1. Same content in the footer and in the sidebar

The fact that there is footer and a sidebar with the same content on every page is a completely normal thing and Google also gets along well with that. In this context, it is also important to know that links in the footer and sidebar are not seen as relevant as links in the main part of a page.

3.2. Translated content

If there is e.g. For example, if there are English and other language pages with translated content, this is of course not duplicate content, as these are different languages. However, you should make sure that the hreflang attribute is used, with which languages are specified in the HTML code. There are various plugins for WordPress that automatically insert this attribute.

4. Does duplicate content affect the ranking?

If there is too much duplicate content on a website, it can negatively affect the ranking. If many pages contain the same content, Google will not find any positive signals, such as the quality, the added value for the user or the uniqueness of the content. The duplicate content can prevent Google from quickly finding new and valuable content.

Another problem is the one-to-one copied content appearing on other websites. If your text is also published on other websites, it will be very difficult for your page to appear in Google search results. Because Google simply wants to show users the best page for their search query that offers real added value and satisfies the user. And that might not be your own page, but that of another website. So don’t expect your site to rank well if your own content appears on other sites. The same of course also applies if you publish the content of other websites on your own. Check out Content Optimization Tips to improve Google rankings.

5. Does duplicate content penalize the website?

Google claims that there is NO penalty for duplicate content because duplicate content is simply part of the internet. However, as mentioned above, they can negatively affect ranking.

Google would only penalize a website if it is the intention of the website owner to manipulate the search engine. However, this is often not the case and the duplicate content arises more from ignorance.

6. What about duplicate content on blog pages?

Blog systems such as WordPress generate teaser texts/marker texts on category and keyword/tag pages. Each category and each tag forms individual URLs. So if an article is assigned to several categories and several tags, there may be many URLs with the teaser text. The text appears several times on the website. Google has no problem with that, it’s not duplicate content.

The problem here is that there may be only one article under each URL. Google would then judge such a page to be of little relevance and describe it as “thin content”, i.e. as thin content that offers the user no added value.

If there are too many such pages on a website because there are X categories and tags, the website may not rank well. Therefore, for example, tag pages in WordPress are mostly excluded from the index. In WordPress this is done with the help of SEO plugins like Yoast’s.

7. Does text spinning make sense?

If you have the same content that should appear on several websites, the so-called spinning of texts, i.e. the easy adaptation of original articles, is no solution. Because the mostly automated changing of texts by replacing tiny text passages, filler words or the use of synonyms are still duplicate content for Google and the corresponding page will not appear well in the search results.

8. How do you check whether there is duplicate content?

The Google Search Console provides an overview of the pages that are in the index. With the help of an XML sitemap, you can tell Google exactly which pages should end up in the index and which should not. This saves you crawling budget and allows Google to find out which pages are important. A plagiarism tools are used to determine whether there is duplicate content on the website.

9. What should you watch out for in order to avoid duplicate content?

The best option to achieve a good ranking is of course to avoid duplicate content and to write unique texts specifically for your own website. Google wants to see informative and high-quality content and rewards it with a better ranking. The quality standard that Google sets here has steadily increased in recent years.

Some steps you can take to avoid duplicate or thin content include:

  • Exclude categories and tag pages from the index, especially if you have a lot of them, but there aren’t that many articles for each category and each tag
  • Pages that do not contain any added value set to <noindex> or exclude them in the robots.txt (please do not use both methods, just select one)
  • For product pages with several variations, make sure that the canonical tag is set on the original page
  • Make sure that the content management system does not output multiple versions of a URL
  • Either avoid print versions of the website entirely or also set them to noindex or exclude them in robots.txt (or do not offer a print version at all).
  • Avoid and consolidate very similar content on the website

Conclusion

As far as SEO goes, duplicate content is a problem even if there is no website penalty. But Google lacks positive signals when there is little unique content that could add value for consumers. In the absence of these signals, your website doesn’t have that many chances of ranking well. Copied content in any form is also not an option for a sustainable SEO strategy. It is important to get rid of or at least reduce duplicate or near duplicate content.

If your website might be suffering from duplicate content issues, without you even knowing. We are happy to assist you. If you are looking for content writing, content marketing strategies, SEO content marketing, SEO, online marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization services, digital marketing services, PPC campaign management service and more, Please Explore our SEO Services!

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Online Marketing – Dos & Don’ts you must know!

By | Date posted: | Last updated: May 28, 2021
Online Marketing

SEO, social media, chatbots, usability – online marketing has developed into a broad field with countless measures of the most varied characteristics. Used correctly, it can significantly increase awareness and sales of the company.

The digital jungle often poses major challenges for many small and medium-sized companies, because their core business is often a long way from online marketing. Which tools are relevant? Which channels have to be used? Who is my target group and how do I reach them? And most importantly, how can online measures boost offline business? Questions that SMEs have to ask themselves if digitization is to be successfully mastered.

Because one thing is clear: Online marketing today includes much more than owning a Facebook page and doing a little SEO. Buzzwords such as affiliate marketing, programmatic advertising, automation, big data or influencer marketing are circulating in countless blogs and specialist magazines and are declared as must-haves. However, which instruments ultimately contribute to the company’s own goals and are specifically relevant for SMEs depends on various company-specific factors – there is no such thing as a “one size fits all” solution. Nevertheless, local providers can orientate themselves on a few dos and don’ts.

DOs in Online Marketing

1. Know and understand the target groups for online marketing

The times of linear communication are over. Like no other medium, the Internet offers the possibility of constant feedback and transparency about the activities of individual target groups. At the same time, however, this also means that customers expect direct dialogue and tailor-made offers. Every page view, every click and every scrolling can be tracked on the web, thus allowing conclusions to be drawn about user behaviour, which in turn can be used in the next step for precise target group segmentation. In this context, the correct and data protection-compliant collection, storage and processing of data play an important role, after all, they contain valuable information about the target groups, for example about their buying or surfing behaviour, their needs, their whereabouts, their habits and preferences.

2. Create a network for online marketing

Connectivity creates strength – that is what makes networks on the Internet so important. It is therefore advisable for local providers to join strong, collaborative networks such as rating platforms or online marketplaces. The advantage: Individual players in the network benefit from synergies and swarm strength. An offer that would hardly get any attention on its own becomes relevant through the bundling of many interesting offers on the online marketplace and thus gives the provider visibility and access to various target groups. At the same time, the network benefits from every additional partner who joins it, as it expands the offer, and the reach and attractiveness of the marketplace are growing steadily.

3. Content is key for online marketing

Nothing works on the Internet without good content, however much the individual marketing measures may be state-of-the-art. Unique and authentic content that offers added value for the target group is indispensable for online, after all, marketing activities should lead the generated traffic to their own channels. The most important channel is the website, only here is direct customer contact. In addition to providing all relevant information about the company, it is important to take up the topics of the target groups in the form of high-quality content in order to adequately collect and convince customers according to their specific needs. Good content creates credibility and trust and helps to tell interesting stories,

Don’ts in Online Marketing

1. Leave the marketing to laypeople

Online marketing is not a hobby or something that you can teach yourself through a few YouTube videos and forums. A deep understanding of the tools and know-how in dealing with online marketing is necessary if the measures do not cause additional costs, but rather increase efficiency and effectiveness. Smaller companies in particular often set wrong priorities here and leave the entire marketing to the managing director, who, however, sometimes does not have explicit knowledge. It is important to set up a team of specialists or to commission external service providers. Even if many companies initially shy away from investing, the professionalization of online marketing will pay off.

2. Missing or inconsistent strategy

Marketing based on the “shotgun principle”, i.e. the broad to the indiscriminate distribution of individual marketing measures, will not lead to the desired success on the Internet. A sustainable and secure strategy for how online marketing should be used and which goals it has to pay is the most important and first step. The strategy serves as the red thread of every measure and is based on the individual issues that the company has: Should new customers be won, applicants won over, awareness increased or products sold? In the strategy, various online and offline measures are combined into a functioning marketing mix.

3. Do not monitor

Current surveys show: Many smaller companies operate little or no web monitoring. The abundance of tools and the lack of knowledge about how to use them are often daunting. Web monitoring is an essential part of online marketing, after all, it can be used to check in real time whether the measures are fulfilling their purpose, the selected target groups are being reached and advertisements are being perceived. In addition, direct changes can be made if necessary. Monitoring measures are much easier on the web than in the offline area, so that wastage is minimized and marketing can be used more effectively and in a more targeted manner. The results of the monitoring can in turn be used for further strategic planning.

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Top 5 Reasons Why Website Pages are not Being Indexed by Google? How to Fix it?

By | Date posted: | Last updated: May 7, 2021
Website Index in Google

You have finally put your new website online and are excited about the visitors. But nobody comes – because after months your URLs still don’t appear in Google search results. In this article, you will learn more about possible reasons and learn how to fix errors. For a basic explanation of how Google Search works and how pages are crawled and indexed, read the following blog.

A crawler – what is it?

Even the most beautiful web presence has to be indexed so that online readers can discover it. The prerequisite for this is that the Googlebot crawls it: A program controlled by algorithms finds your website and lists all the links that should be crawled. The Googlebot takes the information and sorts it in an index with regard to its relevance and possible target groups.

Your page is never directly indexed

It repeats this process at regular intervals, so your website is not crawled just once. So, don’t panic if it doesn’t work right away – the Googlebot needs time with the mass of web information that has to be processed every day worldwide. Due to a limited crawl budget, it often does not search the entire website, but only selected pages. You can find a clear statement about this in the Google Search Console Forum. However, if too many of your pages are being ignored, you should find the sources of the error. Google does not crawl all pages on the web, and it does not index all of the pages it crawls.

No indexing: first quick measures

On the one hand, Google supports you in the search for clues in the Search Console in the “crawling” area. In the “Crawling Errors” report you can find out whether errors have occurred in the last 90 days. They could have prevented Googlebot from accessing certain areas of your website. The heading “URL errors” indicates missing 301 redirects and pages not found (404 errors). The “site query” on Google gives you an additional overview. To do this, first enter your domain in the following format in the Google search:
site: exampledomain.com

Check which pages are affected

If you are asked whether you own this domain, you should first register the page in the Google Search Console. Log in with your login and select “Add property” on the start page. Here you enter the domain. You will receive information on how to confirm your ownership. The best thing to do is to download the given code and upload it to your website. However, if your site is already “known” to Googlebot, you will see your indexed URLs at this point. Does the number of pages roughly correspond to the number posted online or are there major deviations? Check the following five points if there are any discrepancies.

1. Non-existent XML sitemap

Web crawlers like Googlebot scour the Internet for new content and wander from page to page. At least one link should lead to your page, otherwise it will remain invisible to the bot. This is not a problem with good on-page optimization – every new page will be found at some point. However, to speed up the search process, you should create an XML sitemap for Google as an indexing aid.

This is XML and this is how you work with it:

XML sitemaps are standardized text files that contain the structure of your website in machine-readable form and that search engines can easily interpret. Not only do they convey the URLs to Google, but also the date and frequency of changes, and the priority or hierarchy of the page content. Content management systems such as WordPress offer plugins and tools for creating a sitemap, but you can also create them manually. If your uncompressed sitemap is larger than 10 MB, you have to break it down into several smaller sitemaps and submit them in a sitemap index file.

Add a sitemap: Here’s how

The easiest way to submit them to Google is to use the Google Search Console’s Sitemaps tool. Log in to your account and select the relevant website. In the left tab you will find the item “Crawling” and under its “Sitemap”. If one has not yet been submitted, you will see an error message. If you click on “Add sitemap”, your URL and an empty field will appear in which you can insert the created sitemap. Google will suggest other ways for you to submit a sitemap as well. If you have a good knowledge of code changes, enter the path to your sitemap by adding the following line anywhere in your robots.txt file: sitemap: http://exampledomain.com/sitemap_location.xml

Possible sitemap errors

Even if you have already submitted the sitemap, errors can occur, which you can also identify in the “Sitemaps” area of the Search Console. Below are some of the problems that Google lists under “Sitemap errors and solutions”.

  • URLs not accessible / URL not allowed

    Check that your file is in the right location and on the right level. Make sure that all URLs start with the same domain name as the location of your sitemap, i.e. uniformly with www., Http or https.

  • Unseen URLs / 404 errors

    Google cannot process your sitemap completely. This happens, for example, when some URLs contain too many redirects that the Googlebot cannot retrieve. Get rid of your broken links and set up permanent redirects.

  • Invalid or incomplete URL

    URLs are invalid if they contain unsupported characters, i.e. are not coded in a legible manner, or if the formatting is specified with https: // instead of http: // (or vice versa).

2. Duplicate content

Also, check to see if Google has indexed your preferred page or a different version of the domain name. If http://exampledomain.com was not indexed, add http://www.exampledomain.com and the possibly existing https version to your account. Click on your website on the Search Console homepage and enter under the gear icon “Website settings” which page Google should index.

Set the canonical tag

Also use the canonical tag to avoid duplicate content: It is placed in the header of the source code and shows the crawler which of the URLs is the original source. This can then look like this for the preferred domain:

<link rel = “canonical” href = “http://www.example.com/example.html” />

But be careful: the canonical tag is not necessary everywhere and it can cause gross crawling errors if handled incorrectly. It may not appear in the body area of the page source text or be used twice in the metadata. Check out the guide on importance of Canonical Tags in SEO.

3. Technical requirements for indexing

Status Codes:

Also deal with the HTTP status codes of your site: Check regularly whether 301 redirects are not working or whether 404 status codes exist. Pages with this status cannot be found for potential readers and web crawlers. Links that refer to such sites are called “dead links”.

Robots.txt file:

The problem may also be in the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is a text file that can be used to specify which areas of a domain may and may not be crawled by the search engine’s crawler. Webmasters can use it to influence the behaviour of search engine crawlers. Directories that should not be indexed can be marked with “Disallow”. The Comprehensive Guide to robots.txt File for SEO.

User agent: * Disallow

With this command, you tell web crawlers to ignore entire areas of the page. You can also find out whether the Googlebot is being blocked by the robots.txt with the “Access as by Google” report in the Search Console. By the way, after a relaunch at the latest, a thorough check of the robots.txt is generally recommended.

Metatag “noindex”:

With the entry “noindex” in the meta tags, a search engine robot is informed that the visited page should not be included in the index. With “noindex” webmasters have the possibility to influence the indexing of their pages. The use of the noindex tag can be useful for:

  • internal search results pages
  • double category pages
  • copyrighted content

“Nofollow” attribute:

The rel = “nofollow” attribute is a micro-distinction in the HTML code of a website. It is used to mark-up certain links so that they are not included in the formation of the Google index. The rel = “nofollow” attribute tells the search engine robots that crawl a website that they do not have to or may not follow this link.

4. WordPress settings

If you use WordPress as a content management system and your blog is not indexed, the solution can be very close. Check in the “Settings” area in the left column whether the “the Search Engine Visibility” function is not activated. Check the option. Save Changes, and it is! WordPress will update the robots.txt file to you automatically.

5. Bad Neighborhood

When you’ve bought a domain, you’re immediately wondering which backlinks are used to get new traffic to your site. Link farms or purchased links are of course, out of the question, rather high-quality links with a thematic reference. If your page is still not indexed, look into its history. Have previous owners possibly placed bad neighborhood links, spam or hidden elements on the site?

Explain the change of ownership to Google

If a bad link points to a website or an outbound link points to a website with many bad links, then that website is in a bad neighborhood and is losing its trust from Google. It can be a bad quality link if one of the websites violates the guidelines of search engines such as Google or Bing. If the site has received a previous penalty from Google and has been deindexed for this reason, submit a ” Request to review the site ” and explain to Google that you have unknowingly taken over a domain that unfortunately did not meet Google’s guidelines. Checking and re-indexing is possible, but may take some time.

Conclusion: indexing is mandatory

The indexing of the homepage and subpages are essential for your success on the Internet. So, take the time to check for any web crawling errors with the Google Search Console. Follow the webmaster guidelines, avoid bad links and hidden text. Technical pitfalls such as incorrectly programmed robots.txt files, “nofollows” in meta tags or multiple indexing are also common reasons for poor visibility. And of course, the content has to convince Google! This rarely works with a simple landing page without links.

Do you need any help regarding How to Get Website Indexed by Google? Or want to fix them? We are happy to assist you.

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