Re: Promoting a consumer oriented e-commerce site

From: Andrea Sternberg <andreasternberg_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Wed 13 Feb 2002 10:37:55 -0600

I've never posted here before, but I was compelled
to respond. The current economy has given me a real
lesson in where the biggest bang for my buck is
with online marketing. I'm a firmly believe in the
value of search engines so the following thoughts
are seo related.

Alex Tillman <alex_at_webtillman.com> wrote:

>What I really want to know is- if you were running
>Widgets.com, you offered no services on your site
>whatsoever- just middle-of-the-road priced widgets for
>consumers, you couldn't/wouldn't use traditional
>banner ad networks, you had a modest budget of say
>$1,500 per month, and you needed to double your sales
>by June, and quadruple them by the end of the year...
>what would you do?

My Approach:

I use word tracker (wordtracker.com) to get a feel for
how our target market searches. Keyword phrases as
opposed to single keywords generate targeted traffic.
It might be less traffic overall, but the pre
qualification of your visitors is worth it.

My conversions from the search listings are dependent on
the relevance of landing pages. The more applicable the
page is when the searcher arrives, the better your end
result. I can't tell you how many times I've contacted a
client about landing pages and they tell me "oh, the
homepage if fine". I'm dumbfounded that a company would
spend a money on a seo campaign and then throw away
conversions with the assumption that someone going to
spend anymore time searching for what they want.

You can see the fruits of your labor fairly quickly with
paid inclusions to the Inktomi index. There listings
server msn, aol, and several other big player engines and
the majority of sites are indexed in 48 hours. It's not
cheap to do this, I've seen decent results from only
submitting one page per product category, but having all
your pages in the index is preferable. I've used both
Verisign and Postiontech.com for submissions and
personally prefer PositionTech.

Get a good log analyzer to check the terms that are
generating traffic for you, a few I've used are
virtualtrafficmaster.com, webtrends and indextools.com.
All have done their job and offered the information I
needed.

I hope that was along the lines of what you were looking
for. My apologies if it's too elementary. Feel free to
email me if you need any links or information.

Andrea Sternberg
andreasternberg_at_earthlink.net




Received on Wed Feb 13 2002 - 10:37:55 CST