Atlantic Business Technologies, Inc.

Category: Development

Here, you’ll find insights on programming languages, frameworks, and techniques that shape the web and software landscape. Whether you’re a developer looking to refine your skills or simply curious about how things work behind the scenes, this space offers practical knowledge and thoughtful perspectives.

  • Five fixes for your top eCommerce SEO challenges.

    Five fixes for your top eCommerce SEO challenges.

    Local or service-based SEO is fairly straightforward: you optimize service pages, start a Facebook page to drum up local interest, build some relevant links to pages, write some keyword optimized blogs, and ultimately cover the SEO basics.

    But for something like an online learning system, a media platform, or eCommerce; SEO presents new challenges. The sheer breadth of these websites is a challenge in itself. All SEO tasks will have to be prioritized by effort and impact, regular audits become essential to stay on top of site health, and you’ll likely be coordinating with several internal or external marketers to keep things afloat.

    Aside from page volume, eCommerce websites have a unique structure that presents industry-specific challenges. Digital ads will be closely tied to your revenue and technical SEO becomes a priority.

    Take a peek at 5 of the top challenges that eCommerce SEO experts face and how they are handling them.

    1. Implementing custom product descriptions.

    Custom product descriptions are an opportunity to create unique content on product pages. Custom descriptions will also help you add several relevant keywords in one place.

    Better still, you can incorporate some tricks in your product descriptions to make them convert – such as using sensory adjectives or suggesting some common product uses, helping buyers picture a product in their everyday lifestyle. 

    Here are some methods to create a consistent practice of unique product page content.

    Train site users for SEO.

    Train the people who actually upload products and add descriptions in keyword research. For example, we wrote a blog on SEO basics for this reason. We can share these simple tips with clients who have larger site sizes so that they can train blog writers to incorporate best practices.

    A blog post isn’t always the best way to train. Try having an SEO expert audit some existing pages and show teams how they would fix them. Showing tangible examples is usually easier to digest than having people read an overview.

    Make sure you house a writeup or presentation as an internal resource. SEO is complicated, and you’ll need to make it easy for learners to refer back to this material.

    Automate unique descriptions.

    A unique description does not necessarily need to be manually written. There are a plethora of tools and AI solutions that could be implemented to help. For example, these four software businesses offer Natural Language Generation (NLG) product descriptions:

    Boost custom product reviews. 

    If you have enough good reviews on a page, you may eliminate the urgency for a custom description. 

    While a high quality product may generate reviews on its own, using a tool like Power Reviews to ask for feedback after a purchase is a better way to ensure ratings.

    Remember to ask customers to write something a few paragraphs long… or provide them with an example. 

    2. Prioritizing keywords with thousands of products.

    There’s no single correct way to zero in on certain products. But here are some options to help you prioritize:

    • Pick keywords around your largest revenue-driving product
    • Pick keywords involved with a new product you are trying to grow
    • Pick keywords that are the easiest wins for your business – or “keyword mapping”

    eCommerce keyword mapping.

    Pick an “easy win” keyword by looking at traction you’ve already built. Do you have any page 2 rankings for promising keywords? You might be able to bring them to page 1 with a simple internal linking strategy.

    Focus on product landing pages.

    Another approach is to manually optimize product landing pages, given there is a manageable amount. These will be your high level category pages.

    Optimizing these landing pages eliminates the issues of having similar products compete with each other. If your site offers a high volume of similar products, this is probably your best bet.

    3. Defining an unclear blog strategy.

    What is the goal of your eCommerce blog? Likely, you’ve discovered that a blog is the easiest way to get unique content on your website in bulk. It’s also a great way to attract organic traffic from buyers in the “awareness” phase. 

    Maximize the ROI of your blog by using it for internal linking opportunities and faster conversions.

    Boost sales by internal linking in your blog.

    Backlinking from external sources can help boost the authority of your web pages and demonstrate relevance. Internal linking is an easier way to do the same thing, helping you capitalize on the authority you’ve already built.

    First of all, find blogs that have the most or highest quality backlinks to start with. These will be easy to pick out because they likely generate the most traffic.

    Then, link these top blogs to products that you’d like to focus on using keyword anchor text.

    The keyword anchor text will signal relevance to search engines, and the blog posts’ backlink authority will pass through to the product page.

    Conversion optimization in your blog.

    Boost product conversions throughout your blog by incorporating featured product callouts, adding a recommended product widget in the blog, or adding popups with limited offers and coupon codes.

    You could also go the longer (but less pushy) route: gather newsletter signups on your blog and nurture them with emails including offers and featured products.

    4. Optimizing URL structure.

    There are a couple of optimal URL structures for eCommerce.

    Most optimized eCommerce stores today are using one of these two structures:

    • storename.com/category/sub-category/product-name
    • storename.com/product-name

    Using the first option works like a breadcrumb, showing users exactly where they are on the website. 

    On the other hand, the second option can keep your URL short and reduce confusion (especially if you have many levels of categories on your site). To give you some more schema markup opportunities, you can use a breadcrumb on your product page along with this shorter URL.

    For instance, Best Buy uses this URL structure for a product page:

    https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dyson-cyclone-v10-animal-pro-cordless-stick-vacuum-copper/6373040.p?skuId=6373040

    Also note that Best Buy is a large website with similar products. They need to add unique identifiers like an SKU in the URL to prevent duplicates. 

    Should you restructure if your site is organized differently? 

    Changing your site structure and implementing a high volume of redirects will hurt your SEO initially. However, cleaning up your website should pay off over time if you’re willing to take a temporary hit. And if you’re already suffering in the organic department, you have nothing to lose!

    5. Third-party scripts are slowing down your website.

    With sales tied closely to marketing spend, you probably have all sorts of third-party scripts to track conversions (Google ads, Linkedin, Facebook, etc.). An easy precaution to take is uploading scripts in Google Tag Manager so that marketers can pause them  when they are not in use.

    A Google study proved that  53% of mobile ad clicks immediately exited when load times exceeded 3 seconds. Now calculate your site conversion rate and average sale to determine the revenue impact. 

    Site speed is worth the investment! And as frequent deployments can affect your site speed, the only way to stay on top of it is to perform regular audits. We recently compiled a prioritized list of 6 key factors to boost website performance to give your team a starting point.

    Marketing and Development are tied closely together.

    You’ve probably noticed that all of these SEO best practices are closely tied to eCommerce web development. For this reason, you’ll need to rely on a development team that is well-versed in eCommerce SEO, or make sure that you’re investing in appropriate training. 

    Ready to get the ball rolling?  Give us a call – we offer free consultations to get started building your eCommerce digital strategy.

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  • What makes YOU a good fit for Atlantic BT?

    What makes YOU a good fit for Atlantic BT?

    We find the following characteristics to be strong indicators that clients will collaborate well with Atlantic BT to create highly successful projects. 

    • You want to be an engaged part of the process. We are experts in web solutions and consulting, but you are the experts in your business. That means we need to work closely with you to leverage your expertise for maximum effect.
    • You understand and appreciate team efforts. We find the collaboration of many minds across disciplines to be highly effective; this requires teamwork as a part of the process, from workshops in discovery all the way through to deployment.
    • You appreciate an analytical, data-driven approach to developing strategy. We always want to know what your business reality is, rather than making an assumption. This can be challenging, as it sometimes forces a re-examination of existing practices and policies, therefore, the next point is important:
    • You embrace being challenged. To be truly innovative, we have to challenge existing assumptions; change can be uncomfortable, but it is better to drive data-driven change than react to market changes later.
    • You have a continuous process improvement mindset. In today’s web environment and competitive marketplace, the only fixed truths are that change is constant and competition is fierce. A once-and-done approach will lead to a solution that could quickly become dated and ineffective. Instead, our most successful clients are constantly monitoring their key metrics, looking for opportunities, then leveraging new solutions for the opportunities they find. That done, the cycle repeats anew.

    When you watch the Atlantic BT team in workshops, whiteboard sessions, and presentations, you can see all of the above in action. We are most excited by digging into understanding customer needs and providing innovative solutions. If you approach your business the same way, we’re eager to get started on our partnership.

    How do we engage customers?

    We are open to lots of flexible contractual engagements to help you with your digital initiatives. We want to work with companies that understand the value of their digital platforms and can measure the impact on their business.

    What size company do we prefer to work with?

    There is no specific size of company that we target, we work with individuals and small businesses all the way up to Fortune 500 companies.

    How do ABT’s costs compare to others in the industry?

    Our costs are fair and we measure success by the value you get from our team. We are transparent with our billing practices and will report on where we are in the process.

    We see clients as partners and are flexible to work within your needs – whether we need to pivot focus during a pandemic or feel that we can transition you to a partner who is a better fit.

    What technologies does ABT focus on?

    All of them! No really, we spend a fair amount of time looking at all the offerings whether it be an IaaS, PaaS, new framework etc. We may not be able to do the work in the technology we discover is the best fit for you, but that’s ok because we play well with others! 

    Want to learn more?

    Think you’d be a good fit? We’re happy to hear from you! Reach out for a free consultation and let’s get started on your digital journey.

  • Recognize and fix different types of technical debt.

    Recognize and fix different types of technical debt.

    I have been thinking a lot about technical debt lately – weird I know, but these are the things you think about when you deliver code to customers that power their businesses, digital initiatives, and websites. 

    I am also celebrating with our IT Team the decommissioning of our datacenter footprint. For decades, we had physical servers running in a local datacenter. As we deployed new projects to AWS; we let our servers and equipment age out, running fewer critical services on it over the years. But back to the point…

    What the heck is all this technical debt?

    Traditionally, technical debt means that choosing a quick and easy solution now reflects an implied cost of additional rework down the road. Without recurring updates, any software can incur technical debt over time.

    It’s a bit easier to think about technical debt in terms of physical infrastructure or hardware. Think of your phone or laptop. While it may be shiny and new now, in a few years it’ll need more memory to even browse the Internet (we will cover PWA’s and SPA’s in another post)… or the phone may need to be replaced altogether. 

    What kinds of technical debt are out there?

    Here at Atlantic BT, we have to think not only about technical debt in the cloud servers we run, but also in the code that powers the web-based software we build. The technical debt in code is a bit more abstract to think about. 

    Over the years, we have learned many IT tricks to keep legacy code stable, maintain security, and keep applications resilient. Implementing these tricks can be highly effective in extending the lifetime of the application. 

    However, nothing lives forever, and applying these techniques can be misleading. It’s possible to actually hide the growing technical debt accrued due to advances in the surrounding technical environment. 

    Technical debt in software design.

    There is a lot of talk about the tradeoffs at the software design stage of a project and how that translates to technical debt – while that is where the debt starts, it’s usually easier to manage at that point. 

    Planning is critical. That’s why we take a preventative step of having developers discuss solutions with a team, write out their feature specifications, and create acceptance criteria.

    Technical debt in software maintenance.

    The technical debt that I want to focus on is the kind where we don’t invest in properly maintaining software over time and how that builds the technical debt snowball. We all have those skeletons in our proverbial IT closets… those applications that only one person actually knows how to build, deploy, and support. The ones we leave out of our DevOps pipelines because the systems can’t handle infrastructure as code. 

    This debt builds over time and if not addressed can lead to issues in recovery time objectives (RTO) or recovery point objectives (RPO) in disaster recovery and business continuity plans. 

    You will incur all sorts of costs: time, inability to deliver business value, security, or reliability. Some of this technical debt may exist in legacy applications where you are also having a hard time finding quality candidates to support or change these applications.  

    What kinds of decisions create technical debt?

    In my opinion, technical debt is simply a tradeoff between money, time, and objectives. It’s like the PM triangle of speed, budget, and quality where you can only pick two options for your project.

    These types of decisions will affect technical debt, creating high risk and future costs:

    • Not investing the time to bring in a diverse team to design software.
    • Not investing time in refactoring something that works to make it more testable or elegant.
    • Not spending time on documenting the feature specification and acceptance criteria for a story and jumping right into writing code.
    • Not spending time thinking about security. 
    • Not leveraging real enterprise design patterns to build new components based on legacy decisions. 

    At the end of the day, technical debt is simple: it comes down to money over time, just like debt in real life.

    What can I do to assess my current technical debt?

    The best way to get a handle on technical debt is to audit your application stack, IT infrastructure, and business processes. Look for weakness in the observability of the security and health of these items.

    With today’s continuous integration systems, it’s fairly straightforward to assess your core code with static and dynamic analysis, Linting, and unit test coverage reporting. There are also many tools to facilitate, such as visual regression. 

    Microsoft author Paul DiLascia wrote an article that offers these guidelines for good code:

    • Simplicity
    • Readability
    • Modularity
    • Layering
    • Design
    • Efficiency
    • Elegance
    • Clarity

    A third party code audit can help you gain insight with a fresh pair of eyes. Assess whether or not your code possesses the above traits, shedding light on documentation weakness (both within the code and in user guides) and other poor coding practices.

    A third party can also have conversations with your stakeholders or internal teams around coding practices, software development methodologies, CI/CD, and DevOps.

    How do we fix technical debt?

    Like any debt, technical debt needs to be calculated before it can be fully addressed. Once the magnitude of the technical debt is known, it’s all about time and money.

    Start crafting a plan to address technical debt in core areas of the business that generate revenue, provide your X factor, or support your team.

    There is no simple answer, but today’s IaaS, PaaS, code frameworks, and developer tools all provide jumping off points that can mitigate technical debt while allowing you to focus on your core business.

    Part of our business is helping you in this area. So if there is any acute digital pain or technical debt you’re experiencing, let’s have a conversation!

  • Take full advantage of the new Instagram Shopping.

    Take full advantage of the new Instagram Shopping.

    Instagram has slowly been increasing its features for advertisers and sellers. The new Instagram Shopping experience provides an additional revenue stream for the app itself (as they charge a fee for sales). But it’s also providing a whole channel for brands to gain exposure and drive sales!

    Read on to learn more about the ins and outs of Instagram Shopping and see what brand value is in store for you.

    Whats the new Instagram Shopping experience like?

    Instagram Shopping began with the rollout of tagging products within posts and video descriptions. Users were able to click on these products and either save for later or click through to purchase on the brand’s website.

    But this month, Instagram began rolling out a whole new shopping experience in test phases.

    How do users get there?

    Instagram shops are now a tab in the interface, letting users browse products when they’re in the mood to purchase.

    How do users browse products?

    Products are organized into collections, making it easy to stumble upon appealing items. Product recommendations are based on the brands that Instagram users are following, meaning this shop is completely customized towards an individual’s preferences.

    What other features should I know about?

    Instagram influencers and creators are also able to tag products in their own posts. This means that affiliate programs are now more useful to sellers than ever before.

    Better still, users now have access to a seamless in-app experience. Since all of their information is already stored in Facebook pay, the checkout process is simple.

    How does Instagram Shop benefit eCommerce sellers?

    Bypass larger brands – get exposure through targeting your niche.

    eCommerce is a growing, competitive space; especially since Covid forced many stores to rely on digital sales. 

    While you are enjoying the benefits of more people shopping online, you likely noticed that traditional channels are becoming more competitive at the same time:

    • Search engines driving organic traffic
    • Paid ads targeting through custom audiences and search intent
    • Social media exposure through relevant hashtags or the Instagram Explore page

    Now, Instagram Shop provides a channel with less barriers to entry. Focus on growing your Instagram following and affiliate partnerships to tap into a ready-to-buy audience, without worrying about search engine bloodbaths or the Instagram Explore page’s ambiguous algorithm.

    Tap into an audience that is more likely to purchase.

    Not only are Instagram users getting an extremely personalized shopping experience while they’re in the buying mindset, they also have a convenient checkout experience. 

    Buyers shop with Facebook pay, meaning there is no hassle to input all of their billing information. For you, that means less cart abandonment.

    How do I set up my Instagram shop?

    If you’re new to social media selling, make sure your domain is verified through Facebook Surfaces and Instagram Shopping. Then, connect to a business Facebook page.

    Next, you’ll need to connect a product catalog to your Instagram Business Account. You can either manually upload your products, or you can sync your website if it’s built with a supported platform (like Shopify or BigCommerce).

    Heres an example of syncing your catalog through Shopify.

    Once you’ve configured your catalog, you can submit your Instagram account for review. If your account is approved, you’ll be able to enable shopping in your settings.

    What’s next for Instagram Shopping?

    With new features that make Instagram’s shopping experience streamlined and personalized, this is becoming an essential branch of eCommerce strategy.

    And it doesn’t stop at setting up your Instagram store. Live shopping is coming soon! That means that influencers using an Instagram Live can tag products within the video.

    This is valuable real estate! When someone posts a live, all of their users are notified immediately (jumping to the top of everyone’s feed).

    It’s a great time to start setting up influencer marketing programs to take advantage of upcoming features.

  • Try these 5 SEO quick wins for your blog.

    Try these 5 SEO quick wins for your blog.

    As businesses improve SEO techniques over time, the competition to rank has intensified. You’ll want to rely on an SEO professional for advanced link building, site speed optimization, and well-researched keyword-optimized blog posts. 

    If you’ve never invested in SEO resources before, there’s a few things you can do to clean up your blog and get a jumpstart all on your own. 

    Our 5 SEO quick wins to optimize your blog are:

    1. Perform keyword research.
    2. Optimize URLs.
    3. Optimize meta tags.
    4. Use purposeful headings.
    5. Incorporate internal linking.

    1. Perform keyword research.

    Many of our tips include optimizing elements of your blog – but you can’t keyword optimize without performing research.

    We also know that it’s not possible to keyword optimize your entire blog retrospectively. Instead, find blog posts that are already bringing in some traffic and see how you could improve. Then, implement keyword research for all blogs going forward.

    Choose keywords and topic areas that you think would be a good start. Then, either plug them into Google’s keyword planner or the tool Ubersuggest (they’ll provide similar results).

    Browse the suggestions for easy wins. You want to choose keywords with high search volume (at least 50 average monthly searches) and low competition. Choose 1-3 keywords for each blog post. 

    Now that you’ve mapped out which keywords go with which blog, you can continue optimizing the content, URLs, and meta tags. 

    2. Optimize URLs.

    Including keywords in your URLs will definitely give you a competitive edge. However, you might not want to change the URLs of your older blog posts. You would have to implement some 301 redirects, and too many of those could slow down your website.

    So for your upcoming blogs, make sure you implement optimized URL structures before publishing.

    Aside from including keywords, you’ll want to balance length with relevance. There is no “end all be all” for how many characters a URL should be. As a rule of thumb, make it as short as possible while including keywords and letting users know where they are.

    Using the Yoast plugin’s automated URL for this blog would have read:

    atlanticbt.com/insights/try-these-5-seo-quick-wins-for-your-blog

    However, we’re targeting the keyword “blog seo”, so we shortened the URL accordingly:

    atlanticbt.com/insights/blog-seo

    Users who see this short and relevant URL are more likely to click.

    3. Optimize meta tags. 

    Title tags

    A title tag is an element of HTML that specifies the title of an article to search engines.

    A title tag should be 50-70 characters and include 1-2 keywords. It’s highly unlikely you will rank for a keyword if it’s left out of a title tag.

    Many businesses also include their business name in the title tag for brand exposure.

    Meta Descriptions

    A meta description is an HTML element that summarizes a page’s contents in a snippet.

    Your meta descriptions won’t necessarily help you rank. However, if they are compelling, they will encourage people to click through once rankings are achieved.

    Meta descriptions should be 100-160 characters and include action words. That’s because users are more likely to take action if they’re told what to do! Use verbs to drive clicks – like “Explore,” “Learn,” “See how,” “Access,” “Unlock,” etc.

    Alt text

    Alt text is HTML code used to describe an image, typically just 1-4 words.

    Make sure you train designers and content specialists to use keyword-optimized alt tags. This tag will tell search engines what an image is in your words.

    It will also allow people who cannot see images (or whose browsers struggle to load images) to gain some context for what the image would be.

    4. Use purposeful headings throughout your blog.

    In order to rank, you need to write blog posts that are a minimum of 800 words. But your competition might be writing even longer articles. In fact, according to Hubspot, the ideal length is 2100-2000 words.

    You should naturally be using your keywords throughout the content, especially if you are focusing on length. 

    Headings throughout your article are an even more effective place to add keywords and boost engagement by helping readers skim. 

    5. Incorporate internal linking.

    Some of your articles might have strong backlinks that help them rank. If you link a top performing article to another page, the backlink authority will pass through.

    While some internal linking could be automated with recommended article features, manually adding links can give you control of the anchor text. Using keyword-optimized anchor text can also tell Google your article is relevant to certain keywords.

    Need help building a digital strategy?

    From improving site performance to increasing organic traffic and eCommerce conversions, Atlantic BT is here to help you tackle your business challenges. Contact us for a free consultation with an expert.

  • When should I use Gatbsy?

    When should I use Gatbsy?

    What is Gatsby?

    Gatsby is an open-source static site generator (SSG) which is used to build lightning fast Progressive Web Apps and websites. SSG frameworks are appealing to many business owners because they are cheap and extremely performant.

    While there are several static site generators that are written in different programming languages, Gatsby is the most popular JavaScript SSG.

    Who is using Gatsby?

    More and more businesses are beginning to recognize the benefits of using Gatsby:

    • The Braun website – a popular manufacture of shaving products
    • The Reactjs website that provides documentation
    • The Spotify Design website for sharing UI tips

    Many of these businesses started with a WordPress website and sought a faster solution. For reference, here’s a comparison of Gatsby matched up with WordPress.

    In what scenarios should I use Gatsby?

    Performance is a priority.

    Gatsby comes with a variety of built-in features that empower you to out-perform your competitors. For example, using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), page caching, and minification are all factors that boost speed.

    Security is crucial.

    Gatsby doesn’t run off a database, which is a common gateway for hackers. Furthermore, you can easily enable XSS protection and access control to prevent DDoS attacks.

    You are looking for affordable hosting and a low-maintenance setup.

    Because you’re only serving static files with Gatsby, there are free hosting options available. Other options may cost as little as $5/month.

    Static files are also low-maintenance, freeing up costs associated with building complicated server infrastructure. Let your managed host worry about infrastructure so you can focus on strategy.

    In what scenarios should I not use Gatsby?

    Your website uses dynamic content.

    Gatsby handles dynamic content by doing client side rendering (CSR). This type of dynamic content is difficult for search engines to crawl, putting you at a disadvantage for SEO.

    You update your website multiple times a day.

    Gatsby is a high performance option because all of the work is done at build time (before the website is published). On the downside, that means that each time you publish changes, the website could be down for several minutes.

    You want to develop in-house, but you don’t have a team of skilled developers.

    Gatsby is implemented with JavaScript and GraphQL. If your team isn’t skilled with either of these complex technologies, you’ll have to rely on a partner.

    A partner experienced in many frameworks can guide you.

    Need help evaluating your situation or choosing the best way to build a website? Reach out for a free consultation with one of our experts. We’re happy to help you get started with your solution.