It's that time of year again when the SEO / marketing department here at Intelligent Retail get to present at some top-class events...

We're currently at the Spring Fair (NEC, Birmingham, UK), the World's largest retail fair (I'm reliably informed!) but over the next week we'll be moving onto Pure London (14 - 16th February 2010, Olympia, London, UK) and then onto SES London.

This third event is a new one for us this year, being a hard-core event for SEO personnel from around the planet. This year our own David Fairhurst is presenting on the 16th alongside some of the best known names in search engine optimisation on the 'Industry Specific Search Strategies: Under the Hood' panel on day 2 of the event.

This event will cover many different types of industries - David will of course be speaking about retail optimisation, specifically creating navigation structures for e-commerce websites which lead to higher conversions, faster product retrieval and hopefully more sales!

Click on the link above to go to the SES London website, or go to SES London

We had this question in from a new retailer which I thought was worth sharing.

I have taken over a shop with an existing epos system that provides lots of reports, whilst they are interesting what can they really be used for?

There are lots of ways to answer this question. I will look at one of the direct ways in which to utilise this information.

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Figures issued by IMRG and Retail Decisions show that 2009 online retail sales were at an estimated £49.8 billion, up 21 per cent from 2008. Up to thirty-three million consumers hit their computers. 30% of online sales took place in November and December, underlining the importance of the holiday period for retailers. The top 5 busiest days were all Mondays

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“Build it and they will come” might have worked for Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams but this not the recipe for a successful website. If you want to sell, you have to first be noticed. David Mackley looks at 7 of the top methods to get your website noticed.

So far in this series we have looked at; how consumers buy online, strategies for selling online and advice on choosing a good website design company. The next step in running a successful website is probably the hardest to get right; marketing your website. But when I speak to retailers about selling online, they rarely have any budget for marketing the website. There is almost an expectation that if they build a website people will visit it. I suppose there can be an element of truth in this, but typically for new websites if they don’t have any marketing sales will remain low for quite some time.

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Bing is the 'new kid on the block' as far as search engines go and Google is still the 'big daddy'... but that's not the whole story!  Our research leads us to believe that Bing is giving much higher conversion rates than Google, so if we had the same levels of traffic from Bing that Google currently enjoys our retail websites would be getting even better than their already class leading conversion rates!  Read on for more about this...

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Intelligent Retail's David Mackley along with members of the SEO team including David Fairhurst and Stephanie Jerome have just returned from a 4 day trip to the NEC, Birmingham for the International Autum Fair, one of the biggest retail fair's of it's type in Europe, which took all five halls at the NEC.

Whist there, we did a series of seminars all about the different aspects of selling online - infact everything from finding the right e-commerce partner to actually promoting the finished website with search engine optimisation and social media techniques.  Watch the video and read on for more, and keep coming back for the rest in the series!

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I have no way of measuring hits on my website. What is the best way of tracking performance and what are the main things to look for?

Google Analytics is very good and is free. They have produced it primarily so that those people who use AdWords (the service where you pay Google for every click), to monitor and improve their results. It is in Google’s own interest to do this because if they can help their customers get better results from Google advertising, their customers are more likely to spend more money on it. However Analytics can be used by anyone it just needs some code added into the website.

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This article follows on from the previous blog entry EPoS Software - Making the difference in tough times. It discusses how a good EPoS System can help make the most of employees' time in the shop.

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With the outlook still looking pretty grim, we can expect tough times on the high street. So what is an independent retailer to do? One approach is to batten down the hatches and hope the cold winds of recession will pass over. An alternative, more proactive approach is to use this time to make the business stronger, more efficient and better equipped to deal with the changing competitive climate in the years to come.

In the first of a series on this blog I will look at how retailers can improve business efficiency though EPoS software and retail technology. The reward for those who get it right is a thriving and more profitable business when the economy turns upwards again.

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With upto 25% of all searches done in Google being totally unique (meaning no-one has searched for them before!), it makes sense to target your website content towards capturing high page search results for some of these 'long tail' phrases which can bring your e-commerce website targetted, focussed traffic which converts well into sales. 

Don't just think about 'short tail' trophy phrases for your business - get into the mindframe that more (long tail search results!) are definitely better for business.

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Thinking about getting an e-commerce website?  Here are a few things you should know when considering your website design, including designing for multiple browsers and technologies, the limitations of the human eye and of course keeping the maximum number of website visitors on your pages!

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Here at Intelligent Retail we constantly strive to improve our EPOS Software with real improvements which make a difference to our customers. We've recently updated all of our customer websites with major improvements which will help with conversions, SEO effectiveness and objection management. Read on for details...

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This article discusses advice for retailers selling online. It includes advice from the Distance Selling Regulations and the Business Link website.  Please visit these website for more details.

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For a retail website owner, getting targetted visitors to visit your webpages is of course of paramount importance, but how what percentage of visitors get to your website from the search engines and what do your visitors do when they actually get to your website?  By use of some clever analysis and clever tools, we can peer into the mind of the average visitor and find out what, and why, visitors are likely to buy on your e-commerce website.

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Intelligent Retail believe in creating well written, relevant content when promoting websites.  Our Net+ approach to retail SEO adds to the user experience of all website visitors whilst providing a genuine resource for the whole of the web.  We don't believe in the fast and easy path (which produces short-lived results and high bounce rates) because we care about our customers' online reputations and of course... bad content leads to poor sales!

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