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If you’re looking for a way to shake things up during this holiday sales season, consider adding a live chat feature to your website.  Many business owners think live chat is only for companies that have difficult to understand products.   The fact of the matter is that online retailers of all types can benefit from the power of live chat.  Consumers are impatient.  Even if information is easy to find on your website, they frequently want someone else to find it for them.  Here are a few tips about how and when to use live chat.

Use live chat to connect with consumers before they decide not to do business with you. If there’s a page on your website that is often the last one visited before prospects leave without converting, that’s the perfect place to put a live chat button.  You may be able to capture the questions and concerns that these people have before they leave your site.  Adding a live chat button to that page will provide you with the chance to turn a consumer that’s ready to walk into one that’s ready to do business with you.

Use cookies to cultivate. If you’re concerned about the cost of offering live chat to everyone who navigates to your home page, consider using cookies to ensure that you’re only offering live chat to a select group.  Offering live chat to previous customers is a great place to start.  If someone has purchased from you before, then the time spent on live chat can actually be a cultivation tool.  These people will often buy additional products or accessories after chatting with your sales reps.

Use live chat to convert. Another group to offer live chat to is anyone who appears to be visiting your website multiple times to conduct research.  Visitors who get to your site and click through almost every page and then return again, are a group who you definitely want to target in a live chat marketing plan.  Many of these people just need one bit of information or assurance about your product before they’ll convert.

Don’t miss out on one of the simplest ways to take your sales to the next level.  Make live chat an integral part of your marketing plan.

People love to buy things online primarily because of how convenient it is.  They can see the product they’d like to purchase being advertised at ten different stores without ever having to get in their car.  Just as online shopping has become a common part of our culture, so has a lack of trust for online retailers.  Most people have at least one horror story detailing an online purchase gone awry.  To keep themselves from getting taken advantage of, many online consumers will look closely at a couple of critical areas to determine a website’s credibility.

1. Can they reach you? If you’re selling something online, it’s critical that you have an 800 number that appears prominently on your website.  If consumers have to hunt all over your site to find your phone number, they very well may believe that you don’t want to be reached.  What company doesn’t want their consumers to call them?  A company that sells junk products.
2. Do you have a customer friendly return policy? Savvy consumers will read your return policy before they buy from you.  While no company wants to have consumers returning products that are old, banged up, and can’t be resold, you should still think of your return policy as a way to win their business.  If it’s clear that your return policy was written to protect you and not to serve the consumer, buyers will be wary.  Depending on the product, give a reasonable amount of time for consumers to make returns.
3. Don’t go overboard with fees. Requiring consumers to pay for their return shipping is only fair.  Charging 30% of the value of the original sale to put the product back on the shelf may be a little extreme.
4. Security and online sales go hand in hand. Consumers want to know that when they make a purchase on your website their credit card isn’t going to be used to finance a stranger’s European dream vacation.  Having a secure website is fantastic.  Advertising your website’s security is even better.

Even if a consumer will never meet you personally, they still need to know that they can trust you.  While they’ll definitely be paying attention to the claims you make about your product or service, they’ll also be assessing these four basic areas before they decide to do business with you.  If you follow these simple steps you won’t only gain the consumer’s trust, you’re also likely to win their business.

Many companies will spend countless hours researching and refining the perfect set of keywords for their business website.  That’s a good thing, because keywords drive search.  To put it plainly, keywords are the language of the Internet.  Without them, we can’t tell search engines what we want.  Without them, we can’t bring targeted prospects to our websites.

It does appear, however, that many people are only using their keywords in their content.  Parenthetical keyword usage is important, but there are four other critical places where keywords really matter.  Every website should be utilizing keywords in their title tags, meta tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags.  If these phrases sound like a foreign language, they should, because they’re HTML.  However, what they represent are some very basic locations within your website where you can use your keywords for maximum effect.

First, let’s talk about title tags. Every page on your website has its own separate title called a title tag.  Title tags appear in search results.  For an example, check out the image at the beginning of this blog.  They also appear in the top of your browser bar.  If you’re using Microsoft Explorer to view this blog page, then you should see the phrase “SurchSquad Blog – PPC Management and SEO Services for Small Business.”  That’s our title tag for our blog pages.

Meta tags are keywords that you can imbed in each of the pages on your website.  They can’t be viewed by people reading your website, but they can be detected by search engines.  These serve to tell the search engines what each of your webpages is about.

For an example of a meta description, take another look at the image above.  Every page on your website should have its own meta description, since Google indexes every page separately.  This means that when someone is searching for a company like yours on the Internet, the first page they find may or may not be your homepage.    They might first land on your services or about us page.  That’s why it’s critical to optimize every page on your website.

H1 tags are subheadings that separate your paragraphs.  Subheadings are great because they break up your text and make your content easy to scan.  Using keywords in your subheadings can allow the search engines, and your readers, to know what each section of your web page is going to be about.

Finding the best keywords for your business really is just the beginning.  Knowing where to use them can be the key to getting dramatically better search results for your website.

When working with clients to optimize their websites, we talk a lot about what they should do to increase their rankings with the search engines.  However, we rarely discuss the specific activities they should not do in order to not get penalized by the search engines.

There is a set of activities that, when performed on a website, are considered by the major search engines to be covert or “black hat” SEO techniques.  When the search engines find websites that are participating in these activities they will often delist them from their search results or, at a minimum, give them very low rankings for an extended period of time.

The only problem is that some of these techniques might appear to be smart from a beginner’s point of view.  To help ensure that you don’t step into a sticky mess with the search engines, let’s go over some of the more common black hat SEO techniques that you need to avoid.

1. Keyword Stuffing. Probably the biggest culprit is called “keyword stuffing”, which basically just means putting too many keywords on your website.  Don’t spam the search engines by overusing your most effective keywords.
2. Using Invisible Text. Another area where many websites get in trouble is they choose to include invisible text utilizing font colors that match the background of their webpage.  They do this to ensure that their page comes up for high ranking keywords, even if those keywords don’t relate to their business.
3. Link Farms. One of the areas Google assesses when deciding where to rank pages is how many websites are linked to or pointing to yours.  To trick the search engines, sometimes website owners will get together and agree to link their websites to each other, even though their sites are not at all related.

Stay away from these tactics, because they can get you in serious trouble with Google and the other major search engines.  Work strategically and ethically to optimize you site and, over time, you will see drastically better results.  To learn more about how to optimize your website, read our free guide “6 Tips on How Search Engine Optimization Can Help Grow Your Small Business.”