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10Improve Magento Sales With Better Search ResultsAuthor: Kevin - Posted on October 23rd, 2009

While attending the Best eCommerce Tests webinar recently hosted by Anne Holland at whichtestwon.com, she referenced a Marketing Sherpa study about the behaviors of on-site searchers. A few key takeaways from those studies:

Searching has become the predominant method for users to find products on websites. While navigation tools and site architecture are almost equally important, more and more, consumers are using your on-site search to find what they are looking for quickly.
Searchers are almost twice as likely to convert as non-searchers in a given visit.
More often than not, a vertical listing format on the search results page converts better than a grid layout.

Suffice it to say, the search results page on an eCommerce site is something that is of high importance and something that deserves your attention. Specifically, I want to cover how you can improve the performance of your site search within Magento Commerce – although the tactics can be applied to any eCommerce platform with similar capabilities – but Magento has some fundamental, out of box features to help you improve your search results.

Improving Magento Search Results

One of the great features that Magento Commerce offers above and beyond other eCommerce platforms in the small to mid market space, is the ability to actually modify and control your search results page. While, admittedly, these features do not compare with the advanced business intelligence and merchandising features of many enterprise eCommerce platforms (although it looks like Magento is moving in that direction especially with the enterprise product), they do nonetheless provide any online retailer some relatively advanced capabilities that allow you to control your destiny when it comes to the quality of your search results page. Here are some tips on how to improve your search results page in Magento to improve the conversion rates of your visitors performing site searches:

Setup your products with best practices to begin with. Too many times I see merchants trying to take shortcuts when it comes to product data. They have 100 different models of virtually the same product so they plop everything in Excel and use that dreaded “fill down” feature for meta data. Take your time with your data, and be specific with each product and provide as much detail and information as possible.
Configure your attributes to match the user behaviors of finding products on your site. Carefully analyzing which attributes are available via quick search, which attributes show in the layered navigation of the search results page, and even the sorting order of those attributes on the search results page (more important filters towards the top) you can craft your search results page with user friendliness in mind in a few simple steps.
Leverage Magento reporting to know and understand what your users are searching for, and what results they are seeing. Identify high volume search terms, commonly misspelled terms, or any search terms that are not coming up with the correct amount of results
Look at your Google Analytics data. That’s right, under the content tab, filter out content for any pages containing the text “catalogsearch” (any search results page in Magento, whether via quick search or advanced search has “catalogsearch” in the URL). This data should resemble the search reports you run out of Magento in terms of hits (at least relatively speaking), but the additional detail this provides is in the data nuggets that will help you identify the performance of individual search terms. Identify search terms with high bounce rates, high exit rates, or lower $ indices and improve those pages (see bullet point below).
click image for full size view
Probably the most important step in this process – modify your search results to make improvements. This is where Magento actually shines, in the ability for you to control what is actually shown to users when performing these searches (going forward). Let’s face it, automated logic to determine search results doesn’t always come up with the best results – just ask Google! The functionality in Magento actually empowers you, as an administrator, the capabilities to alter the logic, and improve it. I’d start at your highest volume search terms first, working your way down, but go through the searches and analyze the results
- Is your site returning the best possible products for that search term?
- Are there other products that should be appearing?
- Is there enough volume for that term to justify creating a custom landing page for a specific search phrase?
Take action, add the necessary synonyms to include related products, adjust your product data so that products show up in the necessary searches, or even redirect a search phrase a specific landing page, category page, or even a specific product page (if applicable). The end goal here being is that just like you spend time properly categorizing your products, you should also spend the appropriate time in configuring your site search so that the best possible results appear, thus improving conversions and sales.

Extra Credit: Configure Google Analytics to Track Magento Site Search

Many people don’t even realize that Google Analytics can be configured to track and report additional data on the performance of your Magento site search, you just need to tell Google Analytics the querystring Magento uses (q) for search parameters.

For more information see setting up site search in Google Analytics

How Well Does Your Magento Search Results Perform?

When you first put together your site, you probably spent a great deal of time organizing your site in terms of architecture, and navigation. Maybe you even went through a card sorting exercise to help you in those efforts. But ask yourself this – how long have you spent optimizing your search results in Magento? For most, the answer is none – beyond the original setup of product data and attributes. Magento empowers you to actually control your search results, and given the importance of these results as noted by many studies and researchers, you should be spending more time optimizing these results than you do organizing your categories. Let’s not forget, this is not intended to be a one-time fix, you should continually set aside time, to evaluate these results with the goal of continuous improvement and growth of sales generated from searchers on your site.

Posted in Magento Features |

21Magento Quickbooks Integration OptionsAuthor: Kevin - Posted on May 28th, 2009

Magento Commerce has been out a year now, and as the product has matured, and more companies have adopted it -from mom and pop shops to international, multi-channel retailers – the demands of many users still grow. With the introduction of its enterprise platform, Magento has looked to fulfill some of the demands of those companies requiring such features as user level permissions, auditing (logging) of administrator actions, content staging, among other features. While the featureset of both the newly branded “Community” edition, and Enterprise editions is expected to continue its growth with the support of Verian, there are a few significant holes that many online retailers leveraging the platform have significant difficulty with. And in defense of Magento, this hole exists with most eCommerce platforms: its integration with merchants’ accounting / ERP systems. This is typically something reserved for third parties to develop.

Strides have been made, and recent developments indicate that solutions have arrived, finally. Smile has developed an OpenERP module, and a few others have popped up here and there for various other ERP platforms, but the most widely adopted accounting package for small businesses (at least in the US) – QuickBooks – still lacks a clear leading solution for integrating with Magento. But let’s cover the options that are available for merchants to integrate with QuickBooks

Available Quickbooks to Magento Integrations

T-Hub: One of the early options available for Quickbooks integrations, T-Hub (developed by Atandra Systems), and has been in the order fulfillment / Quickbooks integration market for quite some time. While I cannot say that I have personally used the software with Magento, with other eCommerce applications – I’ve heard some unfavorable remarks about the support provided by Atandra on this product. However, because of Atandra’s long-standing in the market, it certainly provides a valuable option for those looking to not only integrate Quickbooks, but also improve their order fulfillment processes. It is not what I consider a straight Quickbooks integration, and may include more functionality that necessary, but it certainly has the capabilities to synchronize the data between the applications.
Magento Data Link: This seems to be the first “straight” synchronization between Magento and Quickbooks, however falls well short of what I’d expect just in terms of available information about the product. No documentation, no valid reviews (lots of people complaining about the price though), not even a screenshot. Warning signs to me to steer clear of this one.
eCC: One of the later contenders in this market, eCC is developed by Webgility, and much like T-Hub, is more than just a Quickbooks integration. With a full set of order fulfillment capabilities, it can also be configured to not process shipping so that users can bypass those steps which lead to a direct integration into Magento. Webgility is fairly new to this market, but appears to be aggressively targeting retailers looking for a solution to their order fulfillment and integration woes. One thing that impresses me greatly with this company is the service provided (I was on the phone recently with a sales rep for 20+ minutes who was very helpful), their focus on quality, and the helpful information on their website. When you compare their website to Atandra’s (who hasn’t even taken the time to update their copyright data in the footer for over 3 years), with the videos, and documentation, it goes to show the effort that Webgility puts into the product. However, when it comes down to it, the proof is in the pudding and we’re looking forward to testing this product against T-Hub in the next week (stay tuned for that post).
Magento Order Export Module: This Magento extension allows you to output XML or CSV formatted order data to be manually processed or imported into a variety of different backend applications. While this requires a manual process to be executed, it is certainly a viable solution to bringing down your order information into Quickbooks.
Stone Edge Order Manager: A well-known solution in the order fulfillment arena for small to medium sized businesses, there is a beta version of the software available that integrates the order fulfillment solution with Magento, and again, backend integration into Quickbooks.
Custom Development: None of the above truly present a seamless, automated solution to integrate Magento with Quickbooks. The community had started some initiatives a while ago in creating a Quickbooks sync group however one year later and the project has seemed to stall. The costs to develop this for an individual project or client would be a big pill for a client to swallow, and there aren’t any signs of any development firms (aside from the group) really stepping up to the plate (at least not that I’ve caught wind of).

My past experiences with enterprise software have proven that integration projects and software can be difficult and riddled with problems. Which is probably why you see such few options available for Magento (also why we don’t develop one ourselves). This has been the number one request from our Magento clients, but again, this is certainly not something unique to Magento, most eCommerce platforms in the small to mid market rely on third party software (like T-hub and Stone Edge have done) to tie onto their software, and usually it is just a matter of time before they do.

Over the next few weeks, we will be trying out more of these solutions, and we’ll make sure to report back with our findings. If you have other recommended solutions, or have feedback on any of the above, please share your experiences in the comments below!

Posted in Magento Functionality |

12Magento SEO DevelopmentAuthor: Kevin - Posted on May 12th, 2009

Magento Commerce is certainly an “SEO-friendly” shopping cart – but just like much of its brethren, there is still room for improvement. Granted, it has come along to fix some of the issues we pointed out in our first Magento review, and a few in the community have put together some extensions to further that along. Yoast has even gone so far as to creating a beginner’s SEO guide for Magento which does a great job of covering some of the basic setup points for those setting up a Magento store that might not be attune to some of the intricacies with SEO on an eCommerce platform. But we actually take that a step further with some additional tips and tricks that we utilize to ensure our Magento projects are search engine optimized. I’ll try to avoid regurgitating the steps already recommended in the Yoast guide, and focus more on some of the additional steps we take when optimizing a Magento theme for SEO.

Magento SEO Theme

We start off with using the Blank SEO Theme, which takes the blank theme (which we’d typically start from) and improves some items with more semantic coding, cleaning the header, and some no-following. We also go through the already detailed steps of:

re-routing non www traffic to www
301ing /index.php to the root
implement canonical URL extension
generate XML sitemap

At this point, there are a few other recommended changes we make to the base theme that haven’t yet been detailed. First, we remove the table-based layout for the product grid, we prefer using div blocks to organize our products and allows for cleaner code. We also make a few changes to the semantics of the header tags actually used in that theme. I’ve seen many SEOs do the same thing, they make the logo an h1 tag, title it with some keyphrases, and use it on every page of the site. While this may semantically help keep your site structured, my opinion is that you’re doing yourself a dis-service by practicing this technique. The h1 tag should be unique on every page, and should only be used when providing value to the user. The blank SEO theme makes the logo an h1 on the homepage, and an h4 on all subsequent pages. Which in itself is a comprimise, but does break the semantics of the page, because on subsequent pages, the h4 appears before the h1. If you do not have a “natural heading” on the homepage, I might recommend wrapping the logo in one there and only there, but if you do, then, there is no purposed for the logo being wrapped in an h1.

In addition to this, we also go through and no-follow layered navigation links, sorting and paging links, wishlist, compare, as well as any other necessary links.

Magento Pagination

We wrote up a pretty exhaustive article on the issues of eCommerce pagination and a few methods to remedy any duplicate content issues that may arise from that. Like most other eCommerce platforms, Magento’s pagination techniques presents the same set of issues. Without redeveloping the entire pagination system (not yet at least), we make a few tweaks to how the existing pagination works in two primary ways. First, we alter the title tag of each page to prefix “Page [2] of…” so that each page contains a unique title tag. In addition, you may not even notice it, but there is actually a duplicate URL for your first page. Follow me in this process, browse to a category with multiple pages, advance to any page greater than one, and notice the link back to page 1 – it appends a querystring parameter for page one instead of using the default URL. For example, if we sell blue acorns (goodbye blue widgets), our page URL might be /products/blue-acorns where each subsequent page being /products/blue-acorns?p=2, the pagination actually links back to page one as /products/blue-acorns?p=1 – creating an exact duplicate of /products/blue-acorns. We resolve this by adding a nofollow attribute to the page 1 link. An even better solution would be to change the pagination model so that it does not use the p=1 querystring parameter.

SEO for multi-store Magento implementations

One of the great capabilities of Magento is its inherit ability to support multiple web stores. Through one administration and one interface, you can manage all of your orders, all of your products, everything. Many online retailers setup multiple niche storefronts that may sell overlapping products, and Magento provides an excellent interface for doing so. However, be careful in how you setup your product data. If you sell the same products on multiple sites, and use the same exact information on each site, you’re walking a fine line between duplicating yourself, especially seeing that all of your multiple sites will most likely be setup on the same IP block depending on your host. So it would be easy for a search engine to tell that these sites are not only related, but really, one in the same.

This is more of a tip for those of you running multiple sites on Magento than it is a Magento-specific tweak, but I highly recommend mixing up the data on each site. Don’t use the same titles, headers, and descriptions and even price on each site. I realize this takes a great deal of effort to maintain, but if the whole reason to run multiple sites is an attempt to achieve greater “reach” in the search engines, you’d be shooting yourself in the foot if you just used the same data on each site. You’d be better off building up the authority of one single domain than setting up multiple sites and hindering each of them.

301ing disabled products

Consider this scenario. You sell a great, useful amazing product, everyone loves it. They love it so much that the product goes viral and you’ve got thousands of inbound links to it. A year later, the product is no longer available, and you disable it from your website. What then happens to users that click on those links? What happens to search engines the next time they spider your site? What happens to all that link juice being passed to that page? The answer to all of the above is… 404

This is a pretty common issue we come across with eCommerce platforms, when products are disabled, and a user tries to go to that now defunct URL, they get a 404 error. While we do recommend customizing your “not found” pages to at least include a search or related pages, what would be more effective from an SEO perspective, and a user’s perspective is if they got directed to another page that was related to the product that is no longer available. What we do is actually create a means for which Magento administrators can setup a “redirect to” product (or category) so that when a product is disabled, instead of the user (or search engine) getting a 404, they actually get taken to a product that might have replaced it, a related product, or even the parent category if you no longer carry that product. This will help retain any search engine positioning that product was getting, preserve any link juice that was being passed to that page, as well as creating a better user experience. A win all the way around.

SEO and eCommerce Platforms

All in all, while you might be thinking to yourself, “wow, Magento really isn’t SEO friendly” – don’t let this article confuse you. Magento IS search engine friendly, just as much as the next eCommerce platform. The reality is, almost all eCommerce platforms we work with have the same issues. And when it comes down to it, the platform itself only does so much for you. A search engine optimizer needs a platform that allows them to have the freedom to exercise on-site optimization, and Magento does just that. The biggest sales pitch by eCommerce platforms right now is that they are “the most SEO friendly” – yet I’ve yet to come across one that stands out any more than the rest. In reality, most platforms have matured to the point that the tools needed to manage an SEO friendly site is all (or mostly) there, and there are only minor variances that separate one from the next. But we’ll save that discussion for another time.

Posted in Magento SEO |

6Magento Commerce ResourcesAuthor: Kevin - Posted on April 28th, 2009

For our first Magento blog post, we thought it might be useful to consolidate a list of Magento resources that have aided us in working with the application. These may be links to Magento specific blogs, Magento partners’ blogs, twitter accounts, or the Magento site itself, etc. Feel free to add your own in the comments (no spam please, must have informational content to be valid).

Twitter:

Blogs:

Forums:

Other:

Stack Overflow (Q&A)

Posted in Resources |

2Introducing the Blue Acorn Magento BlogAuthor: Kevin - Posted on April 26th, 2009

A little over one year ago – a little eCommerce platform was released that revolutionized how businesses approach eCommerce – it’s name, Magento Commerce. We had been following the development of Magento (for short) for quite some time, and had deep interest in working with that platform extensively. Shortly after that day, we wrote up a brief Magento review based on our first impressions, and became a Magento Silver Partner. The popularity of Magento skyrocketed, and since that original posting, we’ve had many follow up questions regarding many of the valid points we raised way back when.

After some training, a number of implementations, and some deep custom work with the application, we felt the need to share some of our experiences with the community. While the existing eCommerce Blog on our site was a great opportunity to do so, we decided that the audience of that blog wouldn’t be as interested in Magento-specific issues. So we’ve dedicated this part of our site for the Blue Acorn Magento Commerce Blog – specifically for Magento tips, techniques, customizations, and common issues. We hope that this blog serves to help others find solutions to puzzling questions with Magento (trust us, there’s a lot of them), provide guidance for those administering the application, and discuss technical issues that arise from its implementation and customization (and free code samples to boot!).

So subscribe to the Magento blog feed, and participate in the discussion!

Posted in Magento Commerce Blog |