Another Great StoresOnline Merchant Resource

We usually bring our StoresOnline Merchants news about Search Engine Optimization and other helpful online business tips. We came across this website, StoresOnlineMerchant.com that has a lot of great StoresOnline Merchant information. There is a little bit of everything here: from SEO tips to Internet Marketing advice.

Here is an article that might help StoresOnline Merchants as strategically reorganize their internet marketing efforts in preparation for the holiday season:

StoresOnline Merchants Internet Marketing Tips
Injecting Internet Marketing Into Your Marketing Mix

A StoresOnline Website and online presence is one aspect of the marketing mix for a business. For the small to medium business, there is no reason for a StoresOnline Website to be the sole method of marketing – but by integrating a StoresOnline Website into your marketing plan you can drive new leads and generate new business that you wouldn't ordinarily reach using a single avenue of advertising. Web Address Inclusion Your StoresOnline Website can act as a point of reference for all of your leads and existing customers. Include your web address in all forms of your offline communication.

If you post physical products, ensure that the packing slips and invoices have the URL of your StoresOnline Website in a prominent position. Your StoresOnline Website itself can be used to answer many questions that customers might have, reducing the time and even resource needed to respond to problems and questions posed by buyers.

StoresOnline Internet Marketing Idea 1
Optimizing Landing Pages For On And Offline Leads
With any form of advertising it is vital to optimize your web landing pages. Optimizing a landing page means providing the content that your visitors expect. You should direct visitors to the most appropriate page on your StoresOnline Website to answer their questions or to make a sale. If you use direct mail advertising and are promoting a specific product then direct visitors to the purchase page for that product. If you are offering your StoresOnline Website as a place to get answers to questions or to resolve issues, direct them to the knowledge base or customer service page.

StoresOnline Internet Marketing Idea 2
Using Online Advertising To Advertise Offline
Business While some businesses are run predominantly online, many StoresOnline Websites are used to promote a bricks-and-mortar business. Whatever the purpose of your business, a StoresOnline Website usually offers some form of advantage. The Internet is a global marketplace and provides a genuinely affordable method to promote even the smallest business. Very few other methods level the playing field so clearly between small businesses and large corporations.

StoresOnline Internet Marketing Idea 3
Using Other Forms Of Offline Advertising In Your Advertising Mix
Newspaper and radio advertising provide a very direct form of marketing. Few StoresOnline Websites can realistically afford television advertising but flyers, direct mail, and less expensive advertising methods are a genuinely viable alternative. Again, the key to success in using these forms of advertising is integrating them within your online marketing mix. Only through good integration, directing visitors to the most appropriate page, and optimizing that landing page.

StoresOnline Internet Marketing Summary
Every business requires a good marketing mix. As well as considering the various forms of online marketing, such as SEO and PPC, the StoresOnline Website owner should consider integrating offline advertising into their mix. Direct prospective leads to pre-sell and sales pages to improve conversion rates or, alternatively, direct existing customers to support and technical pages to improve your customer relations and therefore enhance customer retention levels. By getting the balance of offline and online advertising right, your marketing mix will help provide everything you need to gain leads, increase sales, improve customer retention, and rocket your profits.

Visit StoresOnlineMerchant.com today for more helpful StoresOnline Merchant information.

StoresOnline Merchants: Competitive Research Tools

StoresOnline Merchants spend a good amount of time finding products and building their websites. Once the website is ready for online marketing, it is important for the StoresOnline Merchant to get an idea of what the competition is doing to market their products and services online. Here is a list of SEO tools that can help a StoresOnline Merchant do marketing research:

Alexa - shows traffic trends for competing websites. Alexa has a heavy webmaster bias that is nowhere near as noticeable at Compete or Quantcast.

Compete.com - shows you traffic trends for competing websites. Allows you to compare sites head to head. Also offers a paid search analytics tool which is both exceptionally useful and affordably priced.

Quantcast - shows site traffic and demographic trends and details. Also allows you to download a list of their top 1,000,000 websites.

Google Trends for Websites - free tool from Google showing traffic estimates, visitor country location, top 10 related websites, and top 10 related keywords. Only returns data for fairly high traffic websites though.

Google Search Insights - shows keyword trends, hot keywords by cateogry, and top geographic regions for a keyword.

Archive.org - see how old a website is and what it looked like in the past

DomainTools - see Whois data and how many times a domain has changed hands

SearchStatus - highlights nofollow links, shows PageRank, shows Alexa rank, and provides links to some backlink information

Xinu - lists some SEO related data plus more general web related data points like Alexa ranking and Del.icio.us bookmarks.

Research the Competition's Keyword Strategy
View our keyword research tools section, or use some of the following free tools to get a view of their keyword strategy.

Keyword Density Analysis Tool - finds common words and phrases on your site, or competing websites.

Page Comparison Tool - tool compares the page titles, meta information, and most common two and three word phrases between different pages. grab the source code Page Text Rank Checker - tool allows you to check where your site ranks for each phrase or term occurring on the page. grab the source code

Common Terms Keyword Rankings Tool - shows where your page ranks for it's most common terms. grab the source code

Spider Test Tool - shows the page size, source code, meta tags, page title, textual copy of the page, keyword breakdown by density (including 2 and 3 word phrases), number of words, number of unique words, and outbound links on a page.

Research the Competition's Link Strategy
View our link analysis section, or use some of the following free tools to get a view of their link strategy.

SEO Book Competitive Research & Keyword Research Gadget - use almost every useful competitive research tool from our free gadget. You can place this gadget on your site or on iGoogle.

Back Link Analyzer - free Windows based downloadable software allowing you to deeply explore through a competitor's backlinks.

Link Harvester - web based tool that allows you to dig deeply through a competitor's backlinks

Link Popularity Comparison Tool - allows you to quickly and easily compare your link popularity scores to other websites.

Myriad Search - allows you to search all 4 major search engines at the same time.

Competition Finder - tool looks at how many competing pages there are in Google's index that have your desired keywords in their page title and anchor text. learn more about Competition Finder

SEO Link Analysis Script - extend Yahoo! Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Central using this free script from Joost De Valk. It verifies the link is still on the page, adds PageRank scores, displays anchor text, and highlights if the link uses nofollow.

Search Engine Saturation Tool - helps you compare how many pages you have in the search indexes compared against competing sites. grab the source code

From the Search Engines
Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool - allows you to plug in a URL and shows you what keywords Google thinks the page should be advertising for Google Traffic Estimator - estimates the number of Google AdWords ad clicks and bid prices for the top ad position.

Google AdWords - if you bid broad match on competing brands you can track your ad impressions to see how much traffic they get.

Google AdSense - if your competitor is running AdSense ads on their site you can run a site targeted ad to see how much traffic they are getting.

Yahoo Mindset - let Yahoo show you how they can change results for commercial and informational queries

Yahoo Term Extraction - delivers a list of most important keywords contained inside a piece of text.

MSN AdCenter Labs - offers many keyword tools, including a content classification tool and demographic prediction tools

These may be more advanced competitive research methods for some beginning online business owners, but try to get started with one or two aspects of competitive research. It could give you a whole new perspective on your target market and your marketing direction as well.

If you have other SEO tools that you'd like to suggest to other StoresOnline Merchants, leave us a message here :)