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Sorry to interrupt Adam (hope I don't hijack) since I'm of absolutely NO help to you in this situation.

I have to comment - Chris's "organic visibility strategist" title is CLASSIC! Is that original content Chris or scraped?  Ubersuggest for "today's SEO" perhaps?

Brand Labs does excellent work but you may suffer some sticker shock.

I recommend contacting Convergent 7.  They are right around the corner from you, are very experienced with Volusion sites, they know development and SEO.

Then, I'd also suggest joining their Volusion forum where you'll find a lot of seasoned expert Volusion merchants.

Are you looking to hire someone in-house or contract for work on your site?

Your eCommerce software may automatically update your sitemap with new product url's.

In Volusion for instance, you just add the products and the sitemap is updated and crawled by Google.

We've got 15,000+ skus and don't add large volumes of products on a regular basis.

When I add new products I typically add them in GWT and submit them.  Generally, they appear in 2-3 days and more quickly than site crawls - especially if its a deep product.

We compete against those box stores and do really well in the local serps for long and some head terms.

I don't know if local applies, but there are battles in that space to win.

Can you believe the security head telling the guy he won't get paid?

It seems the security engineer shouldn't be paid.

No idea.

Incentivizing social is easier than incentivizing backlinks and there's a quite a bit of gray area in acquiring backlinks.

I hope Google is reading and adjusting social algo indicators accordingly.

There are a lot of talented people and reputable companies who participate in this forum and I hate to leave anyone out.

If you participate for a while you will identify people/companies you'd like to research.

The short list is a few I could find/think of if I were to look for help in the eCommerce arena.

Good luck.

As far as recommendations for eCommerce goes, here's what my short list looks like (minus about 3 others I can't find in the forums):

Everett Sizemore - seOverflow
Chris Menke - Metapilot
SEO 5 Consulting
Erik Ellsworth - Convergent 7
Thomas Zickell - Blueprint Marketing
Tom Roberts - So What Media
Robert Fisher - drumBeat Marketing

Agreed. I've checked out Site Tuners and the others the Moz community recommended in an earlier thread.

Thank you for expanding on your experience with them - they're in the hunt for sure.

Still wish I knew of reasonable/acceptable monetary cut-lines for small, medium and large on-line websites.

While researching conversion rate optimization services, I checked out Conversion Rate Experts because Moz used them a while ago and the experience was profiled recently in a Moz top 10 (if I recall correctly).

I double checked the fees for service in case there was a typo.  Their site says they don't just service the big boys but small and mid-sized companies.

We're a mid-sized outfit (at least I thought) and this is way out of our budget.  Can small or mid-sized companies swing this? Their site says $250,000-1 million in online sales are eligible.

Anyone know what a reasonable monetary definition of today's small to mid-sized online companies?

"Most companies engage us for either :

(i) Managed-service conversion rate optimization,

(ii) Full-service conversion rate optimization,

(iii) Full-service with walk thru conversion rate optimization

or

(iv) Full-service plus implementation conversion rate optimization.

We work on minimum 6-month engagements, starting from $26,000/month. We give all our clients a 3-month money-back guarantee."

I take a - to mean zilch...at least not enough to show up on Googles radar.  If the results are low you'll typically get a "less than" sign with the number 10.

Remember you can specify when entering the keywords if you want broad, phrase or exact match results.

I much prefer the old keyword tool that suggested keyword ideas with the match type already showing.

It's like Google decided to curb how much free stuff they give us and are shoving us in the direction of PPC.

Have you tried using ubersuggest: http://ubersuggest.org/.

The keyword "barbados villa" produced a lot of possibilities. Save all the relevant results in a txt file and check them out in the Keyword Planner.

Thanks for the input everyone.

I don't know that I have the time or the wherewithal for more do-it-yourself work. I might put some conversion rate gurus out of business.

I'd like to hire this out.  As an example, Moz has used Conversion Rate Experts and I'm getting their emails.

Any other 3rd party providers?

Who do you recommend for Conversion Rate Optimization services?

Yes.

It's the first thing I read on the page that tells me what they do.

I could have gone to an "About Us" page, "Our Mission" or "Our Guarantee" page and got the same/similar or something less informative.

In the process, they're also sending their homepage authority to pages they value.

The link to the sitemap is the least helpful link in that paragraph.

How does Google process a product page with description tabs?  For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on.

Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators?

Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?

Hi Rachel,

The "Did You Know" paragraph does not appear to be in the footer.

I clicked on a category and a couple of products and the content is not there, so it is not run-of-site.

The footer will appear on every page of a site.

I don't have a problem at all with the "Did You Know" paragraph on the homepage.

Indeed. I'll keep you on my short list.