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Fellow MOZers, I run a small ecommerce business called mrpearl11.com, and I need assistance in outsourcing my SEO. A little about us: We sell a variety of import merchandise, but specialize in closeouts (buying merchandise at very low prices) which can translate into some real exceptional value to our customers.  The buying part of the business is strong, but our online presence is weak.  We have a decent high-level understanding of SEO, but I do not have the in-house skill sets necessary to truly leverage the SEO tactics and strategies that I believe we need to integrate into our processes. Thus we have a very weak SEO presence.  Basically starting from scratch. Right now, we are focusing on content.  Item-level content.  Subcategory and category level content.  General website content (about us, contact us, the checkout process, etc...) with the goal to provide a great user experience.  We believe we have the right prices on the right merchandise, and that if we can set a strong foundation of content so that the user experience is positive, our future marketing efforts will have a better ROI. However, keyword analysis and targeting, data-mining, A/B testing, link acquisition, etc etc etc, really don't exist as a part of our processes on a professional level.  I could try to train my in-house crew, but I think that from time a time and cost perspective, we'd be better served by outsourcing. My question to the MOZ community is how should I address my small business SEO needs? There are probably a lot of ways to go from here, but I want to start with a person or an agency, build a relationship, and move forward taking one step at a time.  I don't want to jump into some kind of commitment where we're spending big bucks out of the gate, but on the other hand if we can build a track record of proven results that have a good ROI, I'm not afraid to scale up. Please share your thoughts, and feel welcome to ask questions 🙂 Thanks! Adam

We write our own product descriptions for merchandise we sell on our website.  However, we also work with drop-shippers, and some of them simply take our content and post it on their site (same photos, exact ad copy, etc...).  I'm concerned that we'll loose the value of our content because Google will consider it duplicated. We don't want the value of our content undermined... What's the best practice for avoiding any problems with Google? Thanks, Adam

When you measure conversion rates, is the equation: conversion rate = visits/conversions or conversion rate = unique visits/conversions I ask because it can actually make a pretty big difference in the conversion rate.  For example, if you visit my ecommerce website 100 times before buying something (and assuming you're my only visitor), then my conversion rate is 100% _if I'm determining conversion rates by unique visits/conversions.  _However, it's only 1% _if I'm determining conversion rates by visits/conversions.  _Wow! Now this is clearly an extreme example, but it should serve to illustrate the point that in more reasonable cases, the way the data is measured can have a potentially significant impact on the conversion rate. Is there an industry standard for this? Am I missing something really basic? Also, here's a little bit of context for the question: I run an ecommerce website powered by the Magento CMS and I'm trying to measure my conversion rate in Google Analytics for individual products.  Google Analytics shows me my site wide conversion rate, but apparently I have to do some customization in order to measure conversion rates on the product level.  That's fine, but I want to make sure I'm measuring my product conversions in a standard way. Thanks for any and all help! Adam