By Jill Nagy
“Google, look at me,” is the name of the game for ecommerce merchants, experts say.
More commonly known as search engine optimization, marketing techniques are utilized help a website come up at or near the top of a list of search results on search engines like Google.
One way to get there is to tag the products on the site with proper schema coding, advised Sara Mannix of Mannix Marketing in Glens Falls. The tags allow a search engine to identify a product, down to the actual make and model.
The engines recognize the tags for the same reason the U.S. Postal Service recognizes zip codes: they designed them.
A tag can also identify a more general class of product, such as men’s sweaters, as well as specific items, such as men’s blue sweaters, size medium, in a specific price range.
She also recommends setting out “bread crumbs” to lead to the product in question—for example, clothing to menswear to sweaters to blue, size medium.
Other experts recommend listing a business with directories, everything from the local chamber of commerce to yelp. There are 70 or so of those sites and Google checks them all, looking for companies that are widely listed. This is especially important for brick and mortar stores attempting to attract customers.
Search engine optimization, “although not new, is truly one of the most integral aspect of marketing in ecommerce,” Mannix said. Today it’s important today to accompanying a website with a “vibrant social media presence, a high quality blog, a great PR campaign” and continually upgrading the website itself.
Mannix marketing is mainly engaged in digital marketing, i.e., helping businesses sell their products or services online to other businesses, such as an accounting firm offering its services to other companies. She defines ecommerce as selling physical products on line and said that there is very little of that in this area; most ecommerce is carried on by large businesses, like Amazon.
A new concern Mannix raised is compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. She recounted a lawsuit last summer in which WinnDixie, a grocery supermarket chain, lost a lawsuit claiming that the company’s website failed to comply with the law.
“The lawsuit claimed that the store needed to make the same accommodations as a brick and mortar store,” Mannix said, and warned people selling online that “Now is the time to make your site ADA compliant or risk a lawsuit.”
She noted that relevant regulations will not be published until 2018 and the federal courts are split, with the circuit that includes New York state tending to side with plaintiffs.
Requirements for ADA compliance concern such things as making tags accessible to assistive devices and providing benchmarks to guide such devices in finding and converting text and illustrations on a website. A number of online companies have developed programs to assess and improve ADA compliance.
Mannix and other experts also urge online businesses to keep in touch with the people who visit their site. One option she suggests is to add “live chat” to a website to provide informal communication.
It is also important to have a message on several platforms. “More people are shopping on mobile devices than ever before,” she said, “Yet, the majority of purchases are made on desktop machines,” so it is important for a message to follow the shopper from telephone to computer. Also critical, is responding to comments and reviews.
In short, important in the commerce and digital marketing worlds is to get noticed and hold the attention of potential purchasers, and companies such as Mannix Marketing are ready to help meet those requirements.