I was contacted by a gentleman in New York to do an evaluation of an e-business that caters to the luxury market in niche metropolitan areas.  Mrs. Strong Stationers provide high quality, high margin gifts and stationery through their website.

Below is my evaluation of their project:

MrsStrong.com

Search Optimization

META Information

Description

The Description tag needs to be adjusted to accommodate proper (but non-exploitive) repetition of critical keywords.  Reliance on mottos and standard phrases should defer to crucial keywords in order of precedence.  Instead of

Keywords

Keywords need to be analyzed in terms of conversion ratio per dollar spent.  When I search for “fine stationery” the site is not on the first page.  The initial strategy needs to rely on paid search initially to generate the required revenue boost and traffic load necessary to seed the natural search (see natural search below).

You are not capitalizing on misspellings, which are going to be more than common with the word “stationery”.  While the proper spelling is classy and elite, we want to be sure that we are diverting all traffic to us (regardless of grammatical correctness).  Consider registering domains and emphasizing keywords for “stationary” as well, even if they are demoted or concealed.

Keywords need to be analyzed for KEI compliance.  There are many combinations that should be leveraged throughout the home and landing pages.

Title

The title is key real estate to deliver your branding message and you are only delivering the name “Mrs. John L. Strong”.  Consider adding a keyword laced message next to it: “Mrs. John L. Strong – purveyor of fine stationery”.  This delivers powerful influence on the naturals.

Search Results

Prime Visibility

You are invisible on the search engines.  If you aren’t on the first page, you either don’t exist or you aren’t credible.  If PPC budgets are a concern, then we can take tertiary strength keywords and fund them (very inexpensive).  If budget is not an issue, then we launch a frontal assault on the higher ranked pages immediately with a well funded PPC campaign.  This will let them know that we’ve arrived and we’re not going anywhere.  Once the competition starts to figure that out, it will put pressure on them to up their budgets and start an arms race.  While we just increased the costs of our competitors, we will quietly be vacuuming up all the secondary and tertiary keywords that are inexpensive but have far higher conversion rates.  Our $ per conversion will increase while theirs will decline substantially.

We need to tune the natural search carefully to drift somewhat away from the “what we are selling” element to the “how your life will change by buying our products” tone.  This will give us ample opportunity to channel the search engines to that rich keyword-laced content, while the “shoppers” are not diverted from buying.  This is done with a carefully constructed pattern of NOFOLLOW and precedence placements in your layout.

Standout Imagery is not being utilized on the search results and skyscraper advertisements.  By layering in Google Checkout as part of your payment offering (very plebeian I know..) it provide outstanding visibility of your PPC placements on page 1 of the search results.

The Homepage is very focused on branding and is torpedoing the SEO power of the home as the primary landing page.  It does a decent job of segmentation, but fails to deliver proper search engine visibility due to keywords being embedded in graphics or FLASH, choosing look over function, and other factors.   We can re-engineer the page without losing the “style” but it must involve certain sacrifices.

Consider layering in <div> injection on the FLASH so you can stream useful text to the search engines while the customer sees the graphical immersion you want.

Page Mechanics

Load Speed

The page loads are interminably slow.  You are selling “lifestyle” to people that hardly have the time (or interest) to wait for anything.  If you want to preserve the “style” then move the primary DNS of the site to an edge caching network which sources from your original origin servers.  I will have to do an analysis that verifies that this won’t pollute your viewstate or postback integrity, but once that is done your page load will decrease from 21.54 seconds to 0.5 seconds. That is a whopping 4200% increase in speed and must have an impact on your conversion ratio.

I found as I was “browsing” the catalog that I didn’t want to wait for even the product thumbnails so I ended up cruising through the site without seeing the products at all… Until I ended up on the product detail page.

FLASH Considerations

Your use of FLASH has pros and cons, but the current implementation lacks the proper Javascript for modern browsers that “activates” the FLASH.  This adds an unnecessary click and an annoying popup on all modern browsers… see below:

Page Compression

Modern browsers support GZIP page compression which your website is not utilizing.  This leaves your modern browsers with an experience that is as slow as the older browsers for no reason.  This could cut your page load speed down significantly.  Speak to your hosting provider to enable this for your site.

Page Weight

The size of your page is an astronomical 3,121,587 bytes.  Compare this to the target size which should be 100,000 bytes.  The longer a page loads, you exponentially lose conversion power.  This also has various other disadvantages (chances for errors go up, bandwidth costs exponentially rise, local machines slog through your site, etc).

Consider a cleanup where images are streamlined and made web-ready, FLASH is demoted from integrally packaged images to asynchronously called from web services, dynamically cached constructed images, etc.

Rewritten URLs

You are not leveraging URL aliasing.  This eliminates an extremely powerful influencer on the natural search penetration of your site.  Nobody is going to search for “.php?ID=746” to find your site… so don’t show that to them (or the search engines).  Consider the URLs like www.mrsstrong.com/catalogue/page.php?cPath=23_32 and then compare that to www.mrsstrong.com/gifts/calendars/Pagoda_Calendar .  It’s clear to see which one would provide better conversion and natural search rankings.  Consider the use of a standardized URL Rewriter with database lookup so it’s automated and you don’t end up out of sync with manually maintained URL rewriting configuration files.

Traffic

Traffic Profile

The site came on the scene in 2007 and is fading in the face of steep competition from the other sites.  This is 100% due to lack of an effective PPC, affiliate, and natural search strategy.

You should analyze the crane.com and finestationery.com websites for competitive intelligence.

Analysis

Analytics

I note the use of Google Analytics, but no use of Website Optimizer or Conversion Analysis.  You need to expand your analytics penetration to flag landings and conversions.  I also highly recommend cart interim analysis tags that can help you determine cart abandonment rates and other factors (like conversion values, etc).

Pull Marketing

Email

Cart Abandonment

Your site doesn’t leverage cart abandonment which is a critical step that carries an additional 20% conversion “re-bonus” if it’s implemented properly.

Email Registration

The instant email confirmation email is timely but has several flaws (See the incomplete domain information):

The email is also lacking any analytics or tracking beacons that will enable you to measure email acceptance.  This is an important strategy in email conversion rates.

Branding is always important.  This confirmation email is a perfect time to layer in graphical or stylistic branding.  Consider a stylized signature and elegant HTML wrapping that is compatible with the majority of email clients.  This can also facilitate proper beaconing.

New Account Registration

The new account registration as placed can act as friction to the ordering process.  Because of the likelihood that a popup will distract the customer from completing their order, it makes sense to put a “continue your purchase” link in the email that direct the customer (if they click on the popup from their mail client) back to the ordering process they were distracted from.   This is effectively a “dead end” page that interrupts a very important process flow.

Branding in this confirmation email could be tastefully done and would facilitate more beaconing.

The suspension of disbelief is important to maintain.  Calling the storefront an e-boutique rather than boutique has the tendency to shock them out of the disbelief that they are actually “in a boutique.”  Consider treating the website as a normal boutique in the phrasing and tone of the site.

The additional “thank you for registering” page is an unnecessary click and interrupts the process flow of the site.  Cart abandonment is the most difficult challenge, so eliminating this in lieu of a thank you message on the cart is preferable.

Checkout

Security

The Gift Options tab exposes the internal database customer ID value that is otherwise concealed in the osCsid.  This could be exploited by a savvy hacker to reveal information about the customer.   It also makes it somewhat easier to decrement the value and try to “surf” other customers.  Having sequential customer IDs is rarely a good idea.

Shipping

The concealment of the shipping rates can cause a customer to click “back” once they are at the checkout_payment.php page because they may not be sure what the shipping rate is.

I like the implementation of the multi-ship feature.  It may make sense to have the chosen shipping address to persist for items added subsequent to the shipping address being chosen.  Drag and drop would be very elegant here.

Payment

There is no confirmation of the payment amount at the time the credit card is being asked for.  This can have a significant impact on conversion.

Customer Memory

The browser forgets the user if the session is lost.  This requires a customer to log back in, even though the session timeout wasn’t met.  Anonymous checkout will resolve this to some degree, but you need to have a longer term cookie for persistence so you can capitalize on personalization.

Account

Anonymous Purchase

Not everyone wants to deliver their full profile information just to shop on your site.  Certainly you will harvest certain data from their credit card information, but the anonymous checkout feature has the benefit of reducing friction in the order process.  This will increase your conversions.

Payment Methods

Gift Certificates

There is no method of redeeming a gift certificate online.  This can be a powerful conversion tool, particularly for past-deadline shopping (too close to Christmas)

There is no method of obtaining an electronic gift certificate.  I realize this may fly beneath the level of the type of class the site is attempting.  There may be a “classy” hybrid where the online gift cert is designed to work with an iPhone for example, so we are borrowing some corollary brand equity from someone else that reinforces and “floats” the brand without drifting into the “tech” branding.