Google Shopping Goes Live October 17th!

Posted on October 3, 2012 by admin

Google’s massive shift from Froogle-style free product listings to PPC-style paid ads goes live October 17th. Commative has talked about this upcoming shift before, but with the actual go-live date fast approaching you should make sure your store, and your ads, are ready for the new way to go to market this holiday season.

Google has released a summary of information related to the Google Shopping launch that you should definitely read if you’re considering migrating to this new advertising platform. You can learn about creating individual ads, automating ad creation from your product catalog, and of course how to optimize for the most cost effective advertising strategy.

Take a look and get your store ready before traffic picks up.

The Commative Team

The Importance of Logos on Your Magento Store

Posted on September 4, 2012 by admin

Microsoft just did something they haven’t done in 25 years, they updated their logo. The change wasn’t extreme, but Microsoft spent a lot of time and money coordinating the release of an entirely new line of software with a look that embodied the direction they’re going.

Your Magento store may not have all the pomp and circumstance of Microsoft, but the logo is an undervalued representation of your company and you should definitely take it seriously. Studies show that customers always start in the upper left corner of the screen so your logo is the first thing they’re going to see.

Once seen, the logo is among the most memorable aspects of your company. You may have a clever name, but most people remember images better than words and the right mix of colors and lines can make the difference in jogging the memory of a customer from long long ago.

A company logo can also be thoughtful and representative of who your company is and what it does. In Microsoft’s case the logo is emblematic of their new Metro user interface that focuses on a collection of brightly colored tiles. For Commative, the logo’s central sphere represents a dense collection of connections (ecommerce) all wrapped in a symbolic gear (steady, reliable work).

Think about what your logo says about your you, how it looks, and how to make it memorable.

The Commative Team

Google Launches Trusted Store Magento Extension

Posted on August 31, 2012 by admin

Google has a little known program called Google Trusted Store that allows online stores to be rated for customer satisfaction. By integrating sales data with Google your store can collect metrics on shipping rates, complaints, and overall quality so that customers can get a better idea of who they’re dealing with.

Now Google has released a Google Trusted Store Magento Extension to help automated this integration, making it easier than ever to give your customers piece of mind when buying. The extension is free and well worth considering if you want to increase conversions and repeat rates.

We can’t stress the importance of reviews enough. Reputation regularly trumps price when it comes to online sales and everything you can do to assure the customer helps. A product or site with lots of great reviews is invaluable to being successful online.

The Commative Team

Google’s June/July Search Changes, All 86 of Them!

Posted on August 15, 2012 by admin

Everyone knows that Google is always hard at work tweaking and modifying its search algorithms, but until you start to keep track of it you don’t really realize the volume of changes they make. These updates cover the gamut of search topics and it’s important to stay on top of what Google is doing to make sure it doesn’t affect you.

Conveniently, Google has a handy Inside Search Blog that makes it easy to keep track of everything they’re doing (they’re as blog-happy as we are). For the months of June and July, Google formally submitted 86 changes to how its search engine works. Among the changes:

Improved HTML 5 resource caching for mobile devices
Update to comprehension of long-tail queries
Change to natural language detection for subjects related to “time”
Addition of new parameters for determining trusted sources
New functions for identifying freshly updated content

There may not be a whole lot of detail on exactly what has changed (Google is still a black box), but you can still get an idea of the things they’re doing and plan accordingly.

The Commative Team

Will Google Punish SEO-Optimization?

Posted on March 28, 2012 by admin

At last week’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX, Google made an unprecedented pre-announcement: Over the next few weeks and months, it will try to make Google search more relevant by limiting SEO over-optimization by “looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect”.

We at Commative are fanatic about SEO since our customers often live or die by being found on Google so this was something we took note of. In typical Google fashion no further details on what will change or when was disclosed, so it leaves lots of room for rumors and guesses. The good news for our Ultimento customers is that if Google is looking to reward sites that offer relevant content and great customer experience, they should see little change – maybe even improvement. We believe our template is not only set up to be found on the web but also to provide the information and products that shoppers want.

As always, we recommend that our customers be careful with key word stuffing or black hat link building (ie don’t pay for links). We believe fresh, updated and relevant content is always going to be favored. And most importantly: Keep an eye on your ranking over the next few weeks to see if the new Google algorithm affects you.

As always, let us know if you have any observations you want to share with the Ultimento network.

The Commative Team

Rich Snippets

Posted on February 16, 2012 by admin

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what a Rich Snippet was… I’d be broke. It may not be the most common term, but Rich Snippets are quickly becoming one of the most important factors in determining how your site comes up in Google, Bing, and Yahoo search results.

Rich Snippets operate just like HTML tags, but they’re specialized to highlight the select kinds of information that customers want to know about and search engines want to categorize by. If you have a site for a restaurant you’d want to put tags around menu items. If you were a musician you’d tag song titles and track times. If you happen to have a Magento site selling products, well then you’re going to want tags around products, reviews, prices, etc.

Google has a great guide on Product Snippets that you should check out to get an idea of where you should start putting tags on your site, and the sooner the better. If you follow the Google Insider Search Blog you’ll see they’ve even highlighted changes to search that are beginning to make Rich Snippets more important in results.

Commative thinks Rich Snippets are only going to become more critical to the future of search. We’re working hard to incorporate these tags in to our products and the next version of Ultimento is sure to have the feature built in.

Keep your eyes open for snippets!

The Commative Team

What is Pinterest

Posted on February 4, 2012 by admin

Ever heard of Pinterest? This once little known site for sharing products and pictures that people love has exploded! We at Commative hadn’t even heard of the site until a certain significant other used it to create a Christmas shopping list.

The site works on the idea that users can “pin” pictures of the things they like online and provide links back to where they found those items. Then their friends can see what they like, share their own items, and quickly get to the product pages of the items they want to buy. Needless to say, this is clearly a powerful product for anyone running an e-commerce site.

Even more important than the promise of another “social” avenue for increasing e-commerce is actual proof. According to a recent study on the growth of Pinterest, the site is now driving more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn, combined!

We’ve already done a few custom integrations of the Pinterest “pin” button on customer sites and you can bet that Ultimento 3 is going to have the feature included. The web is always growing fast with new sites and new ways of increasing sales and we promise we’ll always be on the cutting edge so that our customers have the best sites possible.

Happy Selling!

The Commative Team

Static is the New Dynamic

Posted on January 29, 2012 by admin

Magento is a fantastic content management system. You can add products and categories and all the necessary menus and links just appear. Store setup is quick and easy and you can have hundreds of products ready for sale fast.

For a lot of customers though its not just about your product, its about you. Customers want to know who you are, you’re history, what kind of support you offer, and more. It helps give a sense of professionalism and trust that your company knows what it’s doing. Plus, the more content on your site the more Google and Bing take notice and the higher your site will be ranked as you display your product prowess online.

Where’s the best place to put such content? At Commative we’ve always found that linking to informational pages from the same place you show product categories is a great way to make your pages prominent. There are two quick ways to do this and you can see details about the options on our discussion post on adding links to static pages in the product category header.

It’s quick, its easy, and it’ll make for a better site. Keep following us for more Magento tips like these on our blog, Facebook page, Google + account, and of course Twitter.

Now get writing!

The Commative Team

Don’t Forget to Tell Google You Moved

Posted on January 25, 2012 by admin

Virtually everyone who’s had a website for any length of time has moved a link, changed their hosting provider, and at some point probably blown up their entire site structure and started over. Change is good and its important to keep things fresh, but whenever you move you’d better remember to let the post office know.

In this case the post office is Google, and Bing, and Yahoo, and anyone who ever created a bookmark to your site’s page. You may think to yourself, “Hey, Google will just find me again. They’re good at the whole search thing, I don’t need to worry about it.” You’d be right, partially.

Yes, Google will find you again, but they wont know that the new you and the old you are the same you. If that happens all the history and ranking associated with the old you will disappear and you could find yourself back at the bottom of search results mountain. Even worse, if your old site is still running in any capacity and Google thinks you’re trying to mirror the same data on two different sites they can actually penalize you.

What’s a budding web entrepreneur to do? 301 is the magic redirect number you’re looking for. This is a standard code that all search engines use to identify an old address as having permanently moved to a new one. You simply set up a 301 redirect on your old site and make sure it points to your new site and you’re in business.

Happy Redirecting!

The Commative Team