Retail Global and dodgy SEO
Welcome back Rankers! I just got back from Retail Global and damn it was awesome this year! Seriously. If you missed out, you missed out big. So, for those who were asking if it was worth going, yes it certainly was this year. I think the main reason was that it was bigger, there were more people, the exhibition felt a little bigger, but there were a lot more people there. It felt like it had gone up a notch with retail in Australia, and maybe that’s because Amazon is coming in. Amazon were there and running workshops and those sorts of things. For those of you worried about Amazon, and there were a couple of people in one of the Amazon sessions who were heckling the poor Amazon bloke and all he was doing was telling people how they go about getting on Amazon. These people were yelling about Amazon coming into the country and how it’s going to ruin their businesses. Life’s tough. They’re coming and they’re not stopping because you’re upset!
Don’t Waste Your SEO Dollars
There was a lot more interest in people taking their businesses to the next level, and certainly Retail Global has gone to the next level as far as I’m concerned. I’m locked in for life. I’ve come back so inspired. I was on a panel with Wayne Baskin, who is the Deputy CEO and Chief Technology Officer of Booktopia, and Gareth from Adore Beauty. They were helping people review sites and those sorts of things, and had some great conversion hacks. The biggest thing for conversion is speed. We all know that. One of the things Wayne was saying is that if they can get the site a 100ms faster, it equates to about $86,000 dollars, so it’s worth doing.
It’s all these little things. You have to measure of course to know that, but if you’re not measuring then you aren’t going to know that. Other little things like getting the price next to the ‘Add to Cart’ button, and don’t let that button be below the prices and all those sorts of things. The other thing, and this always upsets me when this happens,
I ran a workshop and there was one person there that had spent fifty thousand dollars over the past twelve months on SEO, and in her words she thought she got nothing. Another bloke said a similar thing.
Google has the video that tells you how to select an SEO. And if you are looking to select an SEO, I would highly recommend you watch that video. One of the things that Google says to do is to get a site audit, and maybe two audits from two different firms, which is not a bad idea. We have site audits. Just go to our website and you’ll see at the bottom it has the SEO site audit link where you can go and see what ours is about and how we do it.
Part of the confusion, and we had a lot of people come up to us at our stand where we were doing site review after site review as that’s what we do at the show, free site audits all day. There were so many sites that had paid money for SEO and had lots of little issues. There was one that we looked at where she had 2000 SKUs but 21,000 pages indexed. That’s insane. If you have 2000 SKUs you don’t really want to have more than 2500 pages, unless you have a huge blog or something and then you might have a lot more pages. There was a lot of that, and these people are paying for SEO for a long time.
Makes no Sensis
Now, I recently took Sensis to task during the week and I mentioned it to you last week. Mainly because they rang us and were trying to sell us a bit of advertising, which is fine. I get that. But then they followed it up with an email, which I found was verging on misleading, which is why I took them to task (on Twitter). One of the things the email said was that I should have more PDFs because that would increase my “Online Rating.” So I’m thinking, “What’s an ‘online rating’?” It was a bit odd. In another part of the email, it said that if I had FAQs on my site they could help me appear higher in online searches. So obviously I was wondering what it all meant.
So I kept asking them for clarification as I wasn’t happy with Emma’s response, until eventually I got an answer from a different person stating, “Hi Jim, no this isn’t correct. The more content you have (e.g. FAQs & PDFs) on your YPOL (Yellow Pages Online) ad, the higher it may rank on the YPOL website.” I’m happy with that as they were talking about Yellow Pages Online. My point was that it didn’t read like that, as they were talking about ‘your site’, which it said in the email. So Emma got back on board and admitted that it didn’t read correctly and would have to be fixed. Yeah, it does.
Just be careful out there when heading into this. Get educated and go take a look at that video. You can probably just Google, “How to choose an SEO.” Then select videos. Unfortunately, their video isn’t ranking. Knobs. It actually ranks for, “How to hire an SEO.” They need to add more keywords! Just make sure it’s the Google Webmasters channel one as someone else may have scraped it. Watch the original. Go and have a look at that. It will tell you all about it and then come and see us.
Hopefully that’s helpful. We’ll see you next week and we’ll see you next year at Retail Global. Thanks very much. Bye.
Early bird Discounts for 2018
The Retail Global peeps just told about this deal. Tickets for next year are half price at $495 until June 15 http://bit.ly/2r3TRYd That really is awesome value.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
