Yesterday was 'Cyber Monday', the day that everyone gets into buying online for Christmas in a Serious Way. According to Visa, the reason is that it's near Christmas, everyone has been paid (it being the end of the month) and perhaps more importantly, people have had the weekend to do their final research on the high street.
The latter is a key point, the whole ‘buying process’ said to be carried out in 3 phrases. First people do some research online to narrow down the potentials, then in 2 they go to the high street to view the items they are interested in, in the flesh. The third and most important part (for the seller) is the actual purchase, which is carried out online.
Take for example buying a digital camera. There are many models to choose from all very similar but with subtle differences, these of course making all the difference to people. For some it will be weight, for others the size or brightness of the viewing screen. Whatever, these things cannot be checked online, so a visit to a shop is a must.
If the above scenario is truly the case (and I have done this myself) then the high street shop does indeed have a place in the buying cycle, but not the one that the shop owners would have wanted I'm sure.
The real importance of the above is of course that once the model (or models) have been selected by the would be purchaser is what their next step is. The Cyber Monday predictors say this is to search online to find the best deals, which as you can imagine has major implications to what a site needs to be optimised for and thus found for on the Engines.
Things are a lot different at different parts of the buying cycle. At the start when people are looking for a camera, you’ll want to get found for generic terms like 'digital cameras' or 'canon digital cameras', but at the end, you will want to be found for 'Powershot 610' or 'Panasonic 57F' or whatever other model numbers are out there.
On one hand, it may look easier to get listed for such a definite term, but here you have to remember that many sites do not optimise their actual product pages very well at all, relying on the more generic terms to get traffic. This may well be a mistake, as even though they may succeed at getting traffic the start of the buying cycle, there is no guarantee that the visitor who finds them then will have any loyalty and come back to buy later.
Thus to be sure to get those sales, you have to optimise a site to get traffic for general terms and for specifics too. This brings its own problems as many sites rely on XML feeds from manufacturers sites to provide the descriptions of the products they sell. As this means that the words on their pages are the same as on other sites (because they all use the same feeds), they can easily get ignored by Google (who don't like duplicate content) and thus lose that all important listing for a specific model name.
Other sites don't have a problem with duplicate content, their problem being that the pages simply don't SHOUT the product number / name. The terms / words not being placed in the page Title or in any header tags, as is required.
So, if you want to be found on the Engines at the end of the buying cycle, do make sure that your site is optimised for those all important model names / numbers. Fail to do this and you could easily miss out on lots of business.
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