Buried Treasure Fossil achieves 2X revenues by focusing on Magento store Maintenance

“Having the site page and product opening performance restored is great news. Thanks to Sigma and the team. I received 4 orders in the past 4 hours.”

– Gary Greaser
Owner, BTF

Buried Treasure Fossil is the place for new and seasoned fossil collectors, providing a wide range of incredible fossils to choose from. As a purely online business, BTF strategy is to offer great fossils at great prices, and super service for customers across the USA. The relatively young company is owned by Gary Greaser, an avid enthusiast, and collector of the fossils. Having realized that migrating to Magento Opensource from Magento 1.7 could enable him to boost his sales while delivering an excellent customer experience, Gary chose Sigma to migrate their site to Magento Opensource which was completed and went live in 4 months.

The team worked hard to ensure that all features and functionally made it easier for customers to navigate through the site. Some of the enhancements like Featured Category on the homepage and filtration of the fossils by species enabled customers to find what they need in half the time that was required earlier. By using landing pages for product categories, customers could see all relevant information about a specific fossil on the product page, and add it directly to their cart.

Present Business Need

Launching an e-commerce site takes a lot of work, and so does effectively supporting, maintaining, and evolving it. Proactive maintenance, site updates and applying security patches are a critical part of managing an e-commerce site.

As with many companies, Buried Treasure Fossil does not have the in-house tech team to keep a modern e-commerce site running effectively and securely while the business is growing. To bridge this gap, Sigma is responsible for keeping their site running optimally – both from a technology and a marketing perspective.

Support and Maintenance

The team defines and prioritizes the site updates, functional improvements, patches and site issues when they arise. For every task, we have a turn around time of 4 to 8 hrs. We track these changes and issues within our issue tracking tool – JIRA, assign a unique tracking number to each task and get them done. We have regular status calls and generate weekly reports in order to track the progress of all support issues and to ensure the process is being followed and most importantly, expectations are being met.

Sigma’s client support activities include a combination of the following activities:

• Ongoing website maintenance
• Troubleshooting for technical issues
• Magento training to clients hold of their Magento store
• Performance improvement
• Website speed optimization
• Feature up gradation and installations
• Security patch updates
• Suggestions and solutions for improved search engine ranking
• Solution to the server or hosting related problems
• Daily status reports and weekly progress reports

Sigma Magento Experts are always ready for any kind of Magento support and maintenance. We work as the client’s go-to experts and help them with up-gradation of software and improved functionality with new and updated features in the E-commerce website.

Based on customer requirements and hourly support they need, we offer customized Magento maintenance and support monthly packages. We discuss clients’ requirements and agree with them for a particular number of hours per month and make a schedule as per their suitability to catch up during business hours through telephonic, email, chat, video chat and face to face support.

How inevitable is SEO for your business?

Research has shown that about 68% of the world’s population relies on internet searches for almost everything. The use of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tested strategy for helping business to be front-runners in search engine results through the use of a good architecture website that contains the right content. Investing in this SEO strategy ensures that a customer reaches out to your business over your competitors due to the traffic generated strategically on your website.  Google receives over 57,000 searches per second on any given day, and almost 93% of Google users do not step beyond the first page of search as they deem all other content immaterial. The use of SEO strategies ensures visibility, branding, credibility, traffic generation, exposure, cost-effective mode of marketing, demographics based targeting, ROI, customer trend analysis, and the edge over competitors.

According to Sam McRoberts, CEO of VUDU Marketing and a widely published expert in the SEO field, “SEO is far from dead. It’s changed so drastically that people really need to learn to think of it as less of a marketing tactic, and more of a branding play.” An SEO optimized web infrastructure that is mapped as search-engine friendly, ensures the existence of any business which might otherwise become obsolete in the technologically fast-paced world.

Two main reasons why SEO is crucial to businesses are:

1. SEO is evolving: Although there have been changes regarding organic traffic in the recent years, SEO strategies are progressing towards focus exclusively on optimal user experience by generating higher positioning on search engines. Even video and audio files relevance on the search engine results are based on keyword searches. Having SEO strategies in place ensures that a business’s website is built soundly on rich content with tactical keyword placements without which the business could end up on an irrelevant page. Moreover, mobile optimization is on the rise as customers have started relying on smartphone searches for their immediate needs. This has paved the way for local search optimization techniques via SEO to ensure that the business’s relevance in its own locality is secure. This technique also helps with specific placement and positioning of the business’s brand on social media platforms, which in turn increases organic traffic on the main website. All these advantages need the proper installation, use, and regular updating of SEO stratagems to ensure maximum ROI.
2. SEO in the long term: Most common reason for the failure of businesses that employed SEO strategy is the expectation of results overnight. The employment of SEO tools helps to prepare for the adaptation and placement of the changing algorithms of search engines. Having a dedicated module towards SEO along with regular updating of website content and maintenance of website infrastructure generates the results eventually. To quicken the process, the website should be focused better in terms of content, and also be regularly cross-checked with market trends since online algorithms are constantly evolving. It is also important to have an update of competitor strategies for better placement. Proper maintenance ensures that the current customer base expands and also passively accrue traffic by being listed in the business’s top 5 search words online.

All these strategies will only pan out if the right SEO tools are employed for prime results. The tools employed should include analytics review, keyword research, competitive analysis, on-page analysis, content and link audit, and technical site analysis. Some of the top rated SEO tools available in the market are: Reload SEO, Magento SEO Suite Pro extension v4.4.0, Advanced SEO Suite by Mirasvit, Free Magento SEO Extension by Creare, Ultimate SEO Suite by AheadWorks v1.3.8, SEO Suite, SEOSpace Ultimate Magento Extension, etc. The use of these tools helps to analyze the on-page factors, generate content words, identify structural mistakes on the webpage, study traffic trends on the website, among other functions. Using professional help may go a long way towards successful use of SEO.

Staging Module Significance in Kentico

So you are all set with the content updates for the web page. Great! But are you sure on how the content will be appearing live? That’s where the staging module will come into the picture. Staging module allows you to easily transfer changes made to pages or objects in a Kentico instance on one server to a different instance on another server. You can also perform complete synchronization of all pages and objects. All connected instances must use the same version of Kentico. Staging is particularly useful if you need to synchronize multiple environments during development, for example:

Development  > Testing/Staging  >  Live (production)

WHAT IS CONTENT STAGING

Content staging is the practice of deploying changes to one or more servers outside of the development environment, such as content review, quality assurance, security validation or performance testing, before deploying to production. Despite the name, content staging is not just about staging visible content.

Why stage content? Organizations have many reasons for wanting to stage changes prior to deploying to production:

• Does the content adhere to organizational compliance policies and standards?
• Is the content grammatically correct?
• Have accessibility requirements been taken into account?
• Has a custom component/code been tested?
• Does a new template or layout adhere to organizational or departmental design guidelines?
• Does the content duplicate existing content?

KEY ADVANTAGES OF STAGING MODULE

● Review All Content Before It Gets Published

The Staging module synchronizes content from your authoring environment to the live server. You can review all changes made to the site on your local server before showing them to the visitors.

● Separate Authoring and Live Environments

Content staging not only adds extra approval and QA steps to your publishing process, but it also separates the authoring and lives environment. It means you can disable the administration interface on the live site and make all changes on your local server to increase security.

Having an internal authoring server also improves the user experience for your content administrators as they access their internal server, instead of making changes on the live server.

● Publish Content to Geographically Distant Servers

Since you can synchronize content to multiple servers at the same time, you can run multiple geographically distant Kentico CMS servers around the world and keep their content synchronized with your authoring server. It’s useful when you need to run servers in Europe, North America, Australia, and China at the same time while providing site visitors with a highly responsive website.

● Deploy New Templates and Other Code Across Servers

As with content, you can also synchronize development objects, such as page templates, CSS stylesheets, transformations, and others, across servers. This makes incremental updates of the website possible with only a few clicks.

References:

https://docs.kentico.com/k9/deploying-websites/content-staging

https://www.kentico.com/product/all-features/development/staging-and-synchronization

How Magento Makes you Festival Ready

The last quarter is undeniably the busiest season of the year for every e-commerce retailer as the beginning of festival sales opens the channel for growth and surplus sales to ramp up revenues and build up your customer base. Letting your website exist as it is, hoping that your e-commerce site gets all the needed attention by itself will not allow you to be a part of the festival league. Having a pre-planned and tested strategy is the only fool-proof method that can tide you through the season with customers having seamless and hassle-free shopping experience to choose you over your competitors and return back for more without any second thoughts.

After all, the first impression is indeed the best impression. According to Statista and the National Retail Federation, the holiday season accounts for around 20% of the retail industry’s annual sales and can account for as much as 30% of an individual retailer’s total sales. The shopping days beginning from Black Friday through Christmas pulls in almost 50-100% more revenues than any other shopping periods during the normal course of the year. E-commerce retailers can enhance their website’s presence and visibility by getting into the following practices for ramping up their sales this season:

• Integrating the rating module using Magento’s development tools can aid with building a trust factor with the customers by enabling them to view the previous reviews. Trusting a 100% online portal depends purely on the feedback of its regular users.
• Hiring a Magento developer to take care of all your social media promotions. Today world is highly driven by the opinions and promotions on social media. Cashing in on this platform to regulate one’s business requires proper integration of sources and captivating marketing.
• Keeping the e-commerce site’s social pages buzzing with the season’s celebrations by promoting contests, offering freebies, etc, will definitely drive the traffic of the website and definitely regulate sales if the expectations of the customers are visually appealing and fairly priced.
• Customizing using Magento themes and installing google analytics into the e-commerce platform will the business to thrive by building upon sales via promotion of these commonly sought after products which are advertised extensively through the internet.
• Build the brand by displaying all laurels won by the e-commerce platform. This helps the customer to know that your e-commerce platform is also free from scams and establish yourself as a genuine customer portal.
• Keep the promotional offers interesting. One size does not fit all, and there should be good incentives that will drive your customer for more purchases rather than being bored with just a few promotional offers on repeat. Getting creative and enabling these promotions through Magento’s tools will prove effective.
• Integrating SMS API will enable text promotion which will be driving factors for sales in last-minute shoppers looking for sales at the closing. Last minute offers are always tempting to the customer and this method of promotion is the fastest since most of the population is hooked to the phone.
• Having an in-house Magento developer will be beneficial, especially during the festive season, because the developer will be able to constantly update and keep track of the website’s progress for zero-downtime sales.

While these pointers are sales boosters, some of the other preparatory steps to take note of to boost the holiday performance include; theme modifications, working payment portals, responsive customer service team, upgraded server capacity, device compatibility for apps, customization offers portal, including accurate product descriptions with product videos, and a interactive homepage with top brand lists based on customer trends.