Armando Roggio

Articles by: Armando Roggio

Armando Roggio

Armando Roggio is the longtime senior contributor to Practical Ecommerce. He's a global ecommerce authority and a practicing merchant, developer, and journalist.

Since 2008 he's written over 1,300 articles for Practical Ecommerce addressing all matters of ecommerce and presented dozens of webinars.

His previous positions include director of ecommerce for a regional retail chain and marketing publications manager at Micron Technology, a publicly-traded computer-chip manufacturer. He holds a B.A. in English Writing and Journalism from The University of Pittsburgh.

Contact Armando via email or LinkedIn. Follow his ecommerce tweets at @ecommerceboy.

Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for May 2019

April 2, 2019 • Armando Roggio

From science fiction to education to research, there are plenty of ways to connect with consumers through content marketing in May 2019. What follows are five content ideas for your business to try in May 2019.
Marketing & Advertising
4 Marketing Tactics to Get the Next Ecommerce Sale

March 29, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Online retailers have the opportunity to transform every new visitor into a long-term, loyal customer who makes dozens or even hundreds of purchases over several years. What follows are four inexpensive marketing ideas to help your ecommerce company make the next sale and earn more profit from existing customers.
Customer Retention
Analyzing the Impact of Customer Retention on Profits

March 26, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Customer retention is a good indicator of an ecommerce business’s potential for long-term growth and success. With this in mind, ecommerce owners and managers should consider making customer retention a ...
Conversion
The Many Benefits of Live Chat for Ecommerce

March 21, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Live chat may be one of the best ways to answer questions, overcome the barriers to an online sale, and even discover where your website needs improvement. And these are just some of the benefits.
Code
How to Stop Sniply and Similar Services from Framing Your Content

March 19, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Social sharing tools such as Sniply, Backly, and similar put other companies' ads right on top of your popular and well-prepared content. But you don't have to let it happen. There are ways to stop these services from "framing" your content.
Google Ads
Boost Google Ads’ Quality Score for PPC Success

March 14, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Google Ads' quality score is a bid multiplier that can make purchasing ads on the popular pay-per-click advertising platform less expensive. A high quality score is also a strong indicator of PPC success, so boosting an ad's quality score could lead to more interactions and sales.
Google Ads
How to Structure Google Ads Text Campaigns for Ecommerce

March 11, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Text-based, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a fundamental part of promoting an ecommerce business. These seemingly simple ads can appear higher on a search results page than organic listings and they can target potential customers actively seeking the products your business sells.
SEO
SEO: Tell Google Which Pages Not to Crawl

March 7, 2019 • Armando Roggio

The typical goal of search engine optimization is to have your site's pages show up on a Google results page in answer to a query. But there are pages that should not be included in search results. Removing them from Google's index might actually increase search engine traffic.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for April 2019

March 5, 2019 • Armando Roggio

In April 2019, content marketers could pitch spring gift ideas, write about important political issues, play a prank or two, offer tax help, and recognize China's contributions.
Keyword Research
How to Find Seed Keywords and Explore Topic Clusters

February 28, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Creating a short list of seed keywords is fundamental to search engine optimization, content marketing, and pay-per-click advertising. But for some marketers, the task of identifying seed keywords isn't clear.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for March 2019

February 19, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing is meant to help your business connect with potential customers, building long-term relationships. The goal is to attract, engage, and retain those prospects with content that your business creates or curates, publishes, and distributes. In this post, I will discuss five content marketing ideas your business could try in March 2019.
Marketing & Advertising
The Power of Customer Testimonials for Ecommerce

February 12, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Customer testimonials can be a powerful, conversion-boosting, profit-driving tool for ecommerce companies. You just need to collect and share them. There are many surveys and reports touting the impact customer reviews and testimonials.
SEO
How Does Google Find and Index Web Pages?

February 6, 2019 • Armando Roggio

When a potential customer enters a query on Google, searching for the products your business sells, she is not actually searching the live internet. Rather, she is looking up web pages on Google's index of the internet. In a sense, this consumer is searching the recent, known web rather than the real-time, live web.
Business
6 Leading Ecommerce Business Models Explained

February 1, 2019 • Armando Roggio

In this article, I will briefly explain six ecommerce business models. When you think of ecommerce, you probably think of the B2C business model. It is simply retail sales made from a business entity to an individual. Much of Amazon.com uses this business model.
Marketing & Advertising
A Survey-based Marketing Campaign for Ecommerce

January 29, 2019 • Armando Roggio

In this article, I will outline the major steps to run a survey-based PR campaign. This campaign is meant to inspire at least of few journalists to write about the survey results. The articles they produce may include backlinks for SEO. And those articles could introduce potential customers to your business.
Content Marketing
Helpful Tools to Find Shareable Content

January 21, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Curating content can be like finding a needle in a haystack, if not a stem or leaf in a haystack. Fortunately, there are many software tools to help content marketers discover good articles and videos to share.
Content Marketing
Dos and Don’ts for Curating Content, to Grow an Audience

January 18, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Discovering and sharing useful and interesting content from sources outside of your business can be a good, low-cost, and easy way to meet content marketing goals. The content your company curates should be focused on one or more of the topic clusters. Initially, this will probably require a lot of research.
Content Marketing
How to Invest in Videos, Apps, Big Content

January 14, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Even a simple video may cost several thousand dollars to produce — with no guarantee of success. An interactive app might take a few months to develop. It, too, has no guarantee. You could take that risk, toss thousands of dollars at a video or similar content project, and hope for the best.
Email & Text Marketing
Want New Email Subscribers? ‘Sell’ the Content

January 9, 2019 • Armando Roggio

When a customer or prospect subscribes to your email list, that person expects something of value in return. It may be exclusive offers, special discounts, or useful, informative, and entertaining content.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for February 2019

January 2, 2019 • Armando Roggio

Want to increase site traffic and engage potential customers in February 2019? Consider creating articles, videos, and podcasts that entertain, inform, and just plain help out.
Business
Edwin Perkins Needed a Shippable Product

December 31, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Perhaps you hadn't known or guessed that Edwin Perkins, overcoming obstacles, invented Kool-Aid. Every ecommerce business will face problems and setbacks. But a problem doesn't have to lead to failure.
Link Building
4 Sales Lessons for SEO Link-building

December 28, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Search engine optimization professionals may think of themselves as marketers but not salespeople. Nonetheless, a good salesperson can teach us at least four lessons related to the SEO process of obtaining backlinks.
Business
The Impact of California Prop 65 on Ecommerce

December 23, 2018 • Armando Roggio

California cancer and birth-defect warning requirements that took effect in August 2018 have stopped at least some online merchants from selling products to state residents.
Content Marketing
The Key Requirement of Content Marketing

December 19, 2018 • Armando Roggio

The key requirement of content marketing is to be engaging. Without engagement, content cannot fulfill its potential as a marketing tool. In this article, I'll explain why.
SEO
How to Choose Topics for an SEO Cluster Strategy

December 14, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Topic clusters are a strategy for search engine optimization and content marketing. The approach — organizing a site's content around topics and subtopics — can be effective if you choose the right clusters. What follows is a process I've used to create retail topic clusters.
Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for January 2019

December 5, 2018 • Armando Roggio

This list of content marketing ideas for January 2019 is built around the theme of "national days." In each case, try to come up with a creative way to connect a particular national day to the products your business sells and the keywords you target.
Content Marketing
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy for Ecommerce

November 29, 2018 • Armando Roggio

A clear content marketing strategy defines its purpose, who it serves, and its format. For small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses, a content marketing strategy may be the documented and thoughtful answers to several questions or thought exercises.
SEO
SEO: Topic Clusters Improve Rankings, Traffic

November 21, 2018 • Armando Roggio

Topic clusters are a search engine optimization strategy meant to improve site architecture, help search engines discover important pages, and improve rankings. Topic clusters work like this.
SEO Tools
3 Tools to Analyze Content for Marketing, SEO

November 14, 2018 • Armando Roggio

A successful content marketing program often begins with creating and maintaining an inventory of every page on your site. There are several ways to conduct a content inventory. In each case, you begin by getting a list of all of the pages. Here are three of the best tools to generate that list.
Marketing & Advertising
5 Ecommerce Marketing Trends to Watch in 2019

November 8, 2018 • Armando Roggio

The way you market your ecommerce business today may not work tomorrow. Here are five ecommerce marketing trends your business should consider in the coming year. None of these are new, but they should be effective.