Not Ready
Your customers may not be ready to commit. What do you do about it? You can try to entice them with a better deal. Auto popup windows that offer a discount on their purchase or free shipping seem to work well. Entice the customer to buy and he probably will.

High Shipping Prices
Your customers may be ready to make their purchases, but the cost of shipping may stop them from committing. If after checking your site’s analytics you feel that high shipping prices are costing you sales, consider other options to help save your customers money.

Comparison Shopping
If your customers are bouncing because they want to see if a competitor is cheaper, beat them to the punch. It’s easy to put a comparison chart on your site showing that your website offers the best deals. Of course, your website will have to actually offer the best deals for this to be effective.

Saving for Later
If your customers are abandoning their carts early, they may be biding their time. They may not be ready to commit later, but they may want to save those items in their cart for when they are ready to buy. This is where follow up becomes very important. Nurture your customers and make it easy to remain in the backs of their minds. When they are ready to buy, let them know that their items will be waiting in their carts when they’re ready to return.

Too Much Information
Some customers abandon their shopping cart because the sales process asks for too much information. Customers these days don’t like it when they feel as though they’re being data mined. Ask for only the basic information you need to complete the transaction and that’s it. You may also want to study competitors’ check-out forms to see what types of questions they’re asking.

Confusing Checkout
Don’t make your customers jump through hoops to buy your products. Your customers should be able to make a purchase with minimal clicks through your site. And make use of breadcrumbs so that your customers can always go back one or more steps in the online shopping process.

The above shopping cart abandonment problems can be avoided by simply focusing on the needs of your customers. Make it easy for your customers to buy from you and try to pass on savings whenever possible. This will decrease shopping cart abandonment issues and increase conversions, guaranteed.

FirstBank QR Codes Help Unprepared Travelers
Around October of last year, FirstBank ran with a marketing campaign at Denver International Airport that used QR codes in a rather innovative way. During the campaign, several FirstBank posters were placed throughout the airport with various QR codes printed on them along with instructions on how to scan them. When these posters were scanned, unprepared travelers with smartphones and other devices with readers were able to download free content in the form of free Sudoku puzzles, books and crosswords. As you can imagine, the campaign was a resounding success.

This is just one great idea on how you can use QR codes in your own marketing campaigns. As long as you provide quality content that your customers want, your campaigns will surely succeed. And to help you get even more out of your QR code campaigns, here are a few top tips you may find helpful.

Stick To Offline Marketing
QR codes are best used on business cards, posters, menus and other objects that people can physically touch with their hands. The QR code shouldn’t just rehash your offline content. Instead, it should provide extra, hidden content that is only for QR code users. Make your audience feel special, like they’re part of the club.

Make Them Readable
Smartphone users must be able to scan your QR codes with their phones. This means they must be large enough and clear enough for devices to read. Furthermore, you should give a thought as to where smartphone users will be scanning the QR code. For instance, if you place a poster in an elevator, are your users going to be able to have the service to scan the QR code with their smartphones?

Let Users Know Where The QR Code Leads
Let your users know what they’re getting into. This will not only entice them into scanning the code, but it will decrease the bounce rate that always comes when you try to take your audience by surprise.
Test Them Thoroughly Before Sending Them Out
Before you publish your QR codes, test them thoroughly with various devices and using several different browsers. There are many different types of smartphones out there. Don’t alienate your audience that uses a specific type or browser.

Mobile Friendly Experience
When a smartphone user scans your QR code, the landing page that user is taken to must be mobile-friendly. Don’t take your audience to your regular site. Instead, have a mobile site prepared with all unique content. This may be extra information that wouldn’t fit on your business card, it could be ‘exclusive items’ for sale or it may be a video that teaches a trick, tip or technique. But that information must be optimized for the small screen and smartphone capabilities if you hope for your audience to stick around.

QR Code Awareness Is Spreading
QR codes aren’t used by all smartphone users just yet. But the technology is growing and awareness is spreading, which means your business should get in on the ground floor now. Before you know it, QR codes will be mainstream. Don’t let your business get left behind.

Are you using QR codes in your marketing campaigns? Have you found a unique and exciting way to use them? Leave a comment and let us know.

Targeted and Compelling Page Titles
All of your website’s page titles should be unique and they should include your main keyword phrases. The idea is to create titles from words and phrases that your prospects and customers will want to click-through when they appear in the search engine results pages. Just remember that every one of your pages should have a unique title.

Write Meaningful and Useful Descriptions
Never copy the manufacturer’s description or else you risk producing duplicate content. Instead, customize your product descriptions using your keywords and even by providing your own personal review of the product in question. Or, you can use information you’ve learned from your customers who have used the product. By creating unique descriptions for every one of your products, you set your site apart from any other sites who may be using the same or similar products.

No Waffling or Unneeded Pages
Keep your content useful, informative and unique. Don’t fill your pages with filler text and keep your product pages simple. It may be tempting to create new pages for variations in product color, size, etc. but that could earn you a penalty from big ‘G’. Don’t chance it!

Update Your Content Regularly
The search engines love fresh, unique and useful content. How do you update e-commerce content without changing your product names, descriptions, etc.? There are plenty of ways, such as:

• Putting a ‘Showcased or Featured’ item (or items) on your homepage each week/month.

• Offering on-site ads, promotions and special offers.

• Posting articles, blog entries, etc.

• Including reviews from consumers and experts alike.

• These are just a few ideas. Think outside of the box, try to be different and never stop producing!

Be Mindful of Image Searches
Each of your products’ images will need Title and Alt Tags so that they can be found in image searches. If you want the engines to properly index your images, use your primary keywords and keyword phrases.

Create Clear Calls-To-Action
One great way to increase your site’s conversion rate is to use calls-to-action that really speak to your customers. Unfortunately, there’s no perfect call-to-action. That’s why you need to be clear and you need to test your calls-to-action to see what works. What do your customers want? Do they want free shipping? Do they want to receive their packages by Christmas? Use these ideas in your calls-to-action and you just might see the increased conversions you’ve been hoping for.

Use SEO Friendly URLs
Your e-commerce site’s URLs should include your keywords and should include hyphens separating the words. Make them easy to ready by human visitors and search engine spiders alike. When your URLs are easier to read, they will also be easier to remember, which means more repeat visits. Also remember to use the right anchor text (also with your keywords) when creating links on your site. Your website visitors should always know where a link or URL is going to take them just by looking at it.

Choose Your Categories Carefully
When choosing your category names, think like a search engine. You should only have between 10 and 50 products under each category (use sub-categories if you have to) and each one of those products must relate to the category name you’ve chosen.

Link Your Best Selling Products To Your Home Page
By making it simple to get back to the home and main category pages, you can guide your customers to each of your best selling products, enticing them to spend even more money with you.

Conduct Careful Keyword Research
Using Google Analytics and customer feedback, start to pay attention to what your prospects and customers are searching for. What are they entering into Google and the other engines to find your site, products and services? These are the keywords you’ll want to use. Once you find the proper keywords and you put all of these e-commerce tips to good and proper use, you should see a nice and steady conversion rate increase.

Alt Tags provide many benefits, including:

• They provide additional information for an image or destination of a hyperlinked image.
• They allow people with disabilities to access your website.
• They give important and necessary information for people with web graphics turned off and for users who surf the web using only text-based browsers.
• They help users with slow connections navigate your site much more easily. When images take a long time to load, users can use Alt Tags to choose where to navigate.
• Now that we know why you should use Alt Tags, let’s look at a few tips for optimizing those tags for the engines.

1. Don’t Duplicate the Image Title
It is tempting to want to provide Alt Tags that list your product and image names in their entirety, but this may not be so conducive to SEO or good user experiences. Remember, Alt Tags are ‘alternative text’, which means that they have the potential to be shown instead of the image. If you have Alt Tags that read exactly like your image titles, you risk putting a lot of duplicate text on your users’ screens. Seeing the exact same text over and over again is confusing, annoying and it could be perceived as keyword stuffing in some cases.

2. Think About Your Visitors
When providing Alt Tags, you want to think about your visitors first. What would provide them with the very best user experience? What won’t confuse them? What about the disabled who need to have their screens read back to them? When you think in these terms, your Alt Tags will always come out sounding descriptive, relevant, useful and informative.

3. Never Keyword Stuff
Keyword stuffing only makes your website look like spam, to users and search engines alike. Instead of focusing so much on your keywords, focus on creating useful and informative content that uses keywords only when it calls for it in context.

4. Keep Alt Tags Short and Be Descriptive
Your Alt Tags should describe what the image is about in as few words as possible. Using ‘Cat’ isn’t as effective as ‘Orange cat playing with yarn’. The more descriptive you are, the easier it will be for people to find your images in Google Images and the other search engines.

5. Test Your Alt Tags Before Publishing
Google’s Webmaster Tools recommends testing your website in a text-only browser such as Lynx in order to see how your Alt Tags will be perceived by users and search engines. Look for confusing alts, alts that repeat, keyword stuffing and, above all, make sure everything flows together and provides for a terrific user experience.

With proper use of Alt Tags, your image-based website will fare better in the search results and you’ll provide all of your visitors, prospects and customers with a user experience that makes it much easier for them to become buying customers.

Magento Community Edition
The Community Edition is so-called because it is free to download, which means it’s available to everyone worldwide, but also because it relies heavily on the actual Magento Community. The Magento Community offers answers to complex questions, a community forum, a wiki, translations, bug tracking, an issues roadmap and even a job board. The major drawback to the Magento Community Edition is that it is unsupported by Magento, which means that you will need to spend your own time and resources solving potential issues. This is where the Magento Community forum comes in handy.

Magento Professional Edition
Magento Professional comes with everything you’ll find in the Community Edition with one major difference. This edition also comes with several revenue-generating features including PCI compliance, that can further boost your bottom line. Furthermore, the Professional Edition is under warranty from Magento and is supported by Magento Solution Partners, which means coming up with solutions to common problems is an email or phone call away.

Magento Enterprise Edition
The Enterprise is the Community Edition on steroids. With advanced features, deep customization and major functionality changes, this edition is perfect for business owners who require a production-ready, enterprise-grade, robust e-commerce platform with the full confidence of an SLA (Service Level Agreement).

The Enterprise Edition comes complete with:

• An Enhanced Content Management System (CMS+)
• Rich Merchandizing Suite (RMS)
• Private (Club) Sales Including Events, Invitations and Site Access Permissions
• Gift Registries
• Dynamic Customer Database (Attribute) Management
• Content Staging and Merging
• Search Web With Solr (Alternative Search Engine)
• Highly Tuned Page Performance with Full Page Caching
• Automated Email Marketing Reminders
• Assisted Shopping
• Order Archiving
• And Much More

Which Is Best For Your Needs?
We decided to partner with Magento because the company is open source, which we love, but it also knows the ins and outs of e-commerce. The company truly understands the needs of business owners, but it also understands what prospects and customers might be looking for in order to make an informed decision. Which Magento Edition is best? We recommend the Professional Edition if you are just starting out. But if you are truly serious about business and you really want to make it in the world of e-commerce, you will want to play like the big boys. That means choosing the Enterprise Editions which come with all the features and customization you’ll need to create your very own online superstore.
If you want to learn more about Magento and the various editions, contact us anytime. We’ll be glad to fill you in on how the platform works and with our expert Denver Magento developers help you get started.

What Is Magento Go?
Put simply, Magento Go is the easiest and fastest way to create your very own online store. There are no servers to worry about, no software and Magento Go will handle everything for you. And with Blue Riot Labs coordinating everything behind the scenes, you’ll have the best looking, best performing and best selling online store out of all of your competitors. But how does it work?

Magento Go’s API
Blue Riot Labs will create Add-Ons for your Magento Go marketplace. Using Magento Go’s Application Programming Interface (API), Blue Riot Labs will have your online store stocked and ready to go in record time. Our designers, coders and SEO specialists will work with you to determine the best look and feel for the store you have in mind, and you’ll then have full-access from that point on using Magento Go’s user-friendly control panel.

Why Is the Hosted Plan So Great?
Why did Blue Riot Labs partner with Magento Go? Mainly, it’s because we wanted to provide an easy way for our clients to see their products without any coding or technical knowledge required. Magento Go is also safe and secure. The platform is hosted on a premium infrastructure in top-tier US datacenters and uses free shared SSL certification. This provides a risk-free shopping experience for every one of your prospects and customers.

PCI Compliant
Magento Go is PCI compliant. The service supports a large number of credit card processing providers, as well as payment processors, such as PayPal, Authorize.net, OGone and more.

How Much Does Magento Go Cost?
Magento Go is completely affordable! There are several low-cost hosted plans to choose from and you may even qualify for the $1 Million stimulus program, where you will receive credit to your account each month for a specified period of time. And all you have to pay is a low premium each month. There are no processing fees or other hidden costs, which means that you get to keep more of the money you make.

The bottom line is that Magento Go is budget-friendly, safe and secure and it’s incredibly easy to get your online store up and running. And with Blue Riot Labs behind it all, you know that your store will always turn heads and a hefty profit.

We are very excited about this partnership and we look forward to all the great things to come. If you have products to sell and you’re confused about how to get started, Magento Go and Blue Riot Labs are here to help. With our expert design, coding and search engine optimization combined with Magento Go’s security, customization and ease-of-use, it won’t be long before your products are flying off of virtual shelves.

Creative Title: In order to separate yourself from competitors and to drive more traffic to your products, give each product a unique and creative title. The trick is to keep the original title intact and then leave descriptive text after it. This results in an engaging title that search engines love and that customers really respond to.

Images: Instead of using a single image, use multiple images. And do what you can to make your images unique and valuable. Take your own photos or use photo manipulation to create a unique image that people will find interesting. You can then license the photo and this will inevitably create more interest in your products, thus causing more people to link to them. Also, be sure to give your customers an enlarged version of your images so that they can see all the detail they need to make their buying decision.  Make sure to assign alt tags to your photos to capture even more targeted keywords.

Product Description: To really drive traffic to your ecommerce products and to cause more people link to those products, you need compelling, interesting content. Let your customers experience the personality behind the brand. If you truly care about the products and you’re passionate about what you’re offering, it’ll come through in your content and your customers will be blown away.

Interesting Statistics: People who are researching your products and shoppers alike will appreciate it if you provide interesting and useful stats.

For instance, you can provide statistics for each product that tell customers:
The times of year when most people tend to buy the product
The overall popularity of the product
Related products that people usually buy when they purchase that product
And many more

The trick is to glean data points from your customer database. This information is completely anonymous and yet provides interesting content that people will love to link to.

Comparisons: A great way to optimize your ecommerce product pages for the search engines is to provide product comparisons. By comparing similar products, you provide customers with a way to shop around for the best deals without ever leaving your page. By providing researched material relating to each product you compare, you’ll effectively provide authority, relevancy and trust, everything a customer needs to make a wise buying decision.

Social Media ‘Like’ Buttons: If you really want to drive more attention, links and customers to your product pages, you will want to link social media ‘Like’ buttons to each of the products you offer. That way, each time a prospect or customer ‘Likes’ one of your products, that product will show up in the person’s news feed and the news feeds of their friends. This will prompt more people to click on your products, thus inviting the potential for each of your products to go viral.

With these six tips, your product pages will be effectively optimized for the search engines and you’ll be that much closer to reaching every sales goal you’ve set for your e-commerce business.

The Initial Instructions
The worst thing you can do as a web design client is tell your designer to just do what he does. And in fact, you’ll find that most web designers won’t just go ahead with a project blindly. Instead, you will probably be given a questionnaire, or at the very least asked a ton of questions. This is where you need to speak up and make your voice heard.

The Website Details
The time to go into detail about what you’re looking for in the perfect website is before the design process even starts. You should talk about the colors you like, any images, you should discuss how you want your navigation to be, and everything else that will go into the working design of your new website.

But you must also give your designer details like:

• The intended target audience
• The website’s goals
• Examples of site designs you may have liked
• Examples of site designs you want to stay away from
• And anything else you can think of

At this stage of the game, the more ideas you throw at your web designer, the better. This will at least get the process started. But your job as a client isn’t over the moment the designer goes to work. Chances are that the web designer is going to have questions as the project progresses. And you may even see proofs as the designer completes certain benchmarks in the design process.
It’s very important to note that if you don’t like anything about the design, speak up when you see the problem. The designer/developer needs to spend a lot of time and effort getting your website exactly how you like it. You should never let the designer do work that you know you’re not going to like.

So if you want to be the best web design client possible, you’ll remember to speak up, provide plenty of details and you’ll want to remain a participating member of the design process from the beginning all the way to the end.
As a client, you are the one who dictates where the design and development process goes and you’re the one who is going to proof the final copy. So if you are not instrumental in the design process, the designer may have no idea what you really want. So the best thing you can do is work with your designer, ask plenty of questions of your own and you’ll find that your website comes out exactly how you envisioned it, or possibly even better.

Common Field Names
Most Denver WordPress Ecommerce sites use forms of some type, and those forms should be kept uniform so that customers recognize them right away. This includes using common names for your fields. This way, browser autofillers will always fill in the forms for the customer, making the shopping experience faster and more efficient. If you use uncommon names for fields, the browsers will certainly get the fields wrong and the customer will have to waste time fixing them.

Easy To Buy
Customers should be able to drop by your site and get what they want seamlessly and with very little effort. In other words, your products should be easy to buy. While registration is helpful to build a list of loyal customers, making registration mandatory for shoppers is annoying and can turn a lot of your prospects off. Instead, let your customers buy even without registering (of course, you’ll want to form incentives for signing in) and you’ll likely see a rise in your site’s conversion rates.

Two Clicks Away
If at all possible, make sure your products are never more than a couple clicks away. This means that your products should never be submerged under four pages of clickthroughs. Instead, implement a search function and make it easy for customers to get to your product in one or two clicks Maximum!

Details Optional
When it comes to your main products page, keep things minimal with the names and photos of your products only. Then, add a snippet of a description while allowing browsing customers to opt for longer descriptions if they wish. Or, you can make the description completely optional. A hover-over description or a completely different description page will keep your home page neat and organized and will make it a pleasant environment for every shopper.

Build Your Site For Shoppers
The WordPress Ecommerce sites developed by Blue Riot Labs are already optimized for the major search engines, but they are made for shoppers first. If your WordPress Ecommerce site is made for search engines first and shoppers second, you might lose some of the personal touch that helps to form a bond between you and your target audience. Using keywords on your main products page is fine, but include some personality and make your customers feel at home. Remember, the reason you’re optimizing for the search engines in the first place is to attract more human customers. Cater to those customers and you’ll enjoy much better results.

If you keep these tips in mind, your Denver WordPress Ecommerce site will see a drastic rise in traffic and sales. Of course, you can also call on Blue Riot Labs to create your WordPress Ecommerce site for you. With shoppers as the primary focus, and with search engine optimization not far behind, you’ll be more than satisfied with the results to your bottom line. Today’s consumer is incredibly Internet savvy and so the same old Ecommerce techniques no longer work. Hire a team that knows the nuances of the search engines and of WordPress Ecommerce and take your business to the next level.

Step 1: Planning and Research
Our Denver web design team will sit down with you so that a solid plan can be formed. Our team needs to know what goals you have for your site, who your primary audience is, what the purpose of your site is going to be, and so on. Your organization, your industry, your prospective customers and even your competition will be studied so that the ideal website can be planned from the ground up.

If you already have a website and you’ve hired our Denver web design team to give it an overhaul, don’t be surprised if we recommend that you start completely from scratch. Remember, the search engine optimization process begins at the planning and research stage. If your site isn’t optimized and you’ve already established a web presence, our team will transform that presence into one that builds instant authority and relevancy in your market. But this can only happen once the proper research and planning have been conducted. This is when our team will work closely with you to make sure that we adhere to your vision for the ideal site as much as possible.

Step 2: The Design Process
Once the research data has been tabulated, our Denver web design team will get to work building a site that your prospects will love to visit. But getting unique visitors to your site is only part of what you’re trying to accomplish. You must entice your visitors to stick around. That’s where our design team excels.

Our Denver web design team knows that first impressions are everything and so each design is created so that it captures each visitor and holds them in place. The site will then be easy to navigate, so that visitors can find whatever they need immediately. Whatever they can’t find, they can search for, and our design team will make it easy for visitors to do that, too.
If you’re selling inventory, we’ll make it easy for shoppers to fill up their shopping carts and click the buy button. If you’re offering services, we’ll make sure those services are as enticing as possible and that they always seem better than the ones competitors are offering.

Step 3: Authoritative Content
Once your site is designed, it will be filled with relevant and high-quality content that readers and search engines will love equally as well. The result is a website that dominates the search results for your chosen keywords, and that means you should prepare for lots of traffic and new customers.

Step 4: WordPress Set-Up
Our Denver web design team will manufacture your site from the ground up using the open-source and user-friendly CMS WordPress. Then, using fully-customizable plug-ins our team will make it so that your site does everything you need it to.
What’s really great about WordPress is that it’s free and easy to use, so you’ll have no problem maintaining the site once our Denver web design team has finished your project.

And that’s it. But wait, you may be wondering where number five is. The truth is, our job is never finished. We’re not interested in just designing your site and then walking away. We want to make sure your site performs as it should and that it succeeds. So our fifth step is essentially superior customer service, as we will always make sure you go far in all that you do, as long as you’re using a site researched, planned and designed by our Denver web design team.

Hopefully this answers any questions you may have regarding what we can do for your business. If your competition is ranking higher than you in the SERPs and you can’t seem to get visitors to stay on your site, contact us. Our Denver web design team will make sure you gain the authority and relevancy you need to dominate your target online market.