28 February 2009

Keith Jones appeared today for the third time on Becky's Retail Therapy, BBC Radio Manchester's popular Saturday morning show. His advice on online shopping and trading came in a broadcast from the Trafford Centre.

Becky Want, programme host, quizzed Keith on what has changed for online consumers since the economic situation worsened. "While sales in the High Street have been impacted, online sales are holding up well," said Keith, "and we think that's going to continue, as people search for businesses and brands they can trust."

It's not a time when retailers can rest on their laurels, Keith told Becky. "The smart companies are looking at how they can strengthen their online image, providing better deals and better service, to increase customer loyalty. At Silkmoth, we're currently working with several major companies on advances in their use of the web."

Denise and I spent the day learning how to turn Customers into Assets yesterday. The course was run by Philip Parsons of 3rd avenue (yes, I've already got first dibs on his desperately needed new website!)

It was an interesting day, we met some interesting people. I think the thing that struck me most was that we should treat customers as we like to be treated ourselves. Blatently obvious I know, but sometimes you need to figure it out for yourself before it occurs to you. Phil did a good job of this!

So what does this mean? Well it means we have to try harder. As a customer I'm pretty demanding and by my own admission I have been known to grumble if one of my customers is very demanding - I'll view this in a different way now.

For the fourth quarter running Tyre Shopper has appeared in the Hitwise top 10 ranked websites in the Automotive category.

But what does this mean?

Well, Hitwise provide analysis on website usage based on the surfing activity of around 8 million UK internet users. So it's a good sized sample! They buy anonymised (is that a real word?) data from ISPs and collate it all and turn it into incredibly useful marketing intelligence - albeit it a bit expensive!

So when Hitwise say Tyre Shopper are a top ten site - there's no argument!

As expected the initial search ranking success following the launch of Feeds Direct has started to wear off.

In the past Google has been criticised for not being up to date. For instance whenever there's some global news event quite often Google would take a couple of days to catch up.

So it seems that new sites are treated a bit differently. Just in case they are the next big thing, they are artificially pushed up until Google assesses just how important and/or relevant they are. And that seems to be the case with Feeds Direct. Whilst we're still achieving respectable positioning it's not where it was a few days ago. It'll be interesting to see where it settles.

As you'll see from my last post on Thursday, I added some links to three new sites that we've recently finished building. Sheds and Hotel Soap were finished a little while ago and we've had an ongoing campaign to drive visitors to them (Adwords/PPC in the case of Sheds, email marketing in the case of Hotel Soap).

The other one, the animal feeds site, only went live on Thursday morning. About an hour before my blog entry.

It was a brand new website with no search engine positioning at all. Within 22 hours Google had visited, indexed it and it now sits at the top of the rankings for FeedsDirect and position four for Feeds Direct. Not bad eh?

What will be interesting now though is what happens next. We often see new sites hit the search engines in a blaze of glory followed by a period where they seem to disappear or drop quite dramatically before slowly and steadily moving up to a more stable position.