Why user-generated reviews matter in online retail

 

Earlier this month, eMarketer wrote about a study conducted by The e-tailing group and Power Reviews that again underlined the fact that a big chunk of Internet users research online before making any type of purchase.

They hold the opinion that conducting their own research online saves their time and makes them confident about their purchases. You probably knew that. Confidence, peer-to-peer, user reviews, influence, social media, trust, online media and information gathering prior to actual purchase are closely related.

The study also found that the sites of retailers play a critical role in the research phase of the buying journey of “consumers”. Now, isn’t that great news?

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HubSpot: website traffic is meaningless, unless it converts into leads

In a new slideshare presentation HubSpot presents some stats from the ‘Inbound marketing’ report it published earlier this year but the slideshare also contains interesting data and tips regarding SEO and Social Search.

According to HubSpot’s Mike Volpe, search is clearly going social. I quote: “SEO rank is now a meaningless metric”. Note that Mike says SEO rank, not PageRank or search engine position. That’s because Volpe wants to make clear that, as you know, search has gone beyond its traditional environment and involves a lot of real-time these days but there is more…

If you skip the first slides (unless if you don’t know what inbound marketing is), there are some interesting findings and SEO tips based upon data from Website Grader. For the record: that’s a free SEO tool HubSpot offers to get a report on the SEO status of your site and some social media data as well.

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