I just got back from a week’s vacation in St. Augustine, Florida and while at the beach, I walked in on a conversation my parents were having with another couple. The first thing I heard was, “oh, well have you checked that out on Yelp?” Sadly, this got me thinking about work and what my next blog should be.

So the big question this week is, are local search listings really that important? The answer is yes and for many reasons!

While sites like yellowpages.com and superpages.com are still out there, their relevance continues to decline as Google has turned to Google Places as a way to provide high quality and highly trusted business results. With Google Places, Yahoo! Places, Yelp and others, users are able to receive so much more useful content than they have in the past.

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We were excited to compile some of the most interesting social media tools and best practices out there for our July webinar. We highlighted several ecommerce websites who are “doing it right” and even illustrated examples of practices to avoid like “death by sharing”. Attendees learned how to capitalize on the integration of social media within their websites.

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At Groove Commerce, when we analyze websites we are always thinking in a multi-pronged way. One is of course, the visual look and feel of the site. Do the colors work, are columns aligned correctly, are images captivating? The next is usability and conversion. Is the navigation hierarchy optimal, are there clear calls to action, is the font readable? And last but certainly not least, we are thinking about SEO. The search engine rankings of a site are perhaps the most important aspect of the site design because as we commonly say, you may have the most beautiful and high converting site in the world but if no one can find it, it will never generate revenue. Read Full Article

We are over a month into the newest social game changer, Google +, and it’s already off to a steady increasing start. The Google backed social network which has close to 20 million users sharing over one billion items per-day still has yet include or even allow profiles for businesses. Although Google has promised business profiles are coming to Google Plus in the near future, pages managed for businesses on the other dominant social sites like Facebook and Twitter are very beneficial in creating awareness, customer loyalty, and driving traffic, are being shut-out. Google has also made it very clear that it will not allow business pages before their official say so and have even begun deleting accounts of businesses set up as traditional users. It is clear that Google wants to maintain the integrity of their new network by not allowing these backdoor business profiles but it begs the question, what do they have in store for Google Plus Business Pages? Read Full Article

Recently, I had the extreme pleasure of traveling to the Bahamas for some summertime R&R. Like most other people in the 21st century, even on vacation I have trouble unplugging. So, I found myself in my hotel room trying to buy myself internet access. And, lucky for the hotel and internet provider, I was pretty desperate to get online, and I trudged through their insecure checkout process. Read Full Article

One of the biggest concerns with any ecommerce platform is performance. A fast-loading site is important to both traffic and conversion. Google recently added site speed and page load time into the algorithm which controls website ranking, meaning that a site that is a millisecond slower than a competitor may have trouble reaching the top of a search results page. Speedy ecommerce sites convert better because online shoppers are on the move, they want to find what they want, purchase it and move on. To an online shopper, there is no bigger turnoff than a slow checkout. The most common concern we hear is that in a default configuration and environment, Magento isn’t completely optimized for site performance out of the box. Here are some of the quickest ways to make the most out of your Magento install. Read Full Article