I haven’t done any stats, but I know that our maths shop http://www.kidsmathstore.com get a lots more sales than our jewellery shop http://www.enchantingjewellery.com .
At the moment the jewellery site is PR3, well the main page and the maths site is PR2.
I’m just wondering if that pad file stuff I do has anything to do with it.
Thoughts?
by JM
Its just occurred to me, that maybe I’ve been using the adwords tool all wrong.
When I’ve done keyword , in the past, I’ve looked for keywords which don’t have a full bar of competition, I then look at other things. But I don’t touch keywords with a full bar of competition.
As a result these tend not to be popular keywords from a traffic point of view.
I’ve always thought those keywords are unachievable as there is high competition. However, maybe I CAN gain a slice of the traffic?
Maybe I could work on said keywords and improve further ?
by JM.
We’ve been bouncing a few emails around over the holidays, looking at my stores and the keywords.
Its difficult to know what to do to improve your site.
However, most of my keywords that i’ve optimized for are working for me. But they aren’t popular keywords which bring in lots of sales.
With online shops you generally have a lots of products and therefore finding keywords which work for a lots of products would be almost impossible or VERY time consuming.
However, keywords bring free traffic so its worthwhile contiuing to find good keywords.
The quickest way to prove keywords is to run an adwords campaign, however this costs money.
The main aim here is to bring in traffic which produces sales.
So anything which bring in traffic could produce sales. Mike has for a long time suggested competitions which create interest in the product and hopefully people who don’t win will consider buying instead. However, competitions are short term.
Its easy to blame your keywords and assume that your ranking is to blame for your lack of sales. But if you haven’t yet found the right keywords you must continue your search and find new ways to bring in traffic to your site.
by JM
I’ve setup a couple of sites in the last year or so where I’ve done some keyword research using the adwords keywords tool. I found keywords which seem relevant to my products and had produced traffic.
However, these keywords have not produced orders for me.
Looking at my google webmaster stats top queries seem to have proved the most useful. I’ve looked at the landing pages for those keywords and optimized further on those pages for those keywords.
So I think I finally may have cracked it 
by JM
I was thinking earlier how I could get more traffic and sales to my site for free. I thought link building, then I thought this isn’t what google wants. It was you to become an authoritative site.
I was thinking about google products and sites which give you something for free.
Then I thought about softtester, its taken a long time to where it is today. However, the initial idea was to get me traffic for my products. I created advertising space and gave it away to anyone who wanted it, on a first come first served basis.
Then things stagnated, but the site was in a good position.
I guess my question is, if you give links away and give away free advertising and create an area where people want to visit over an over again, then people will naturally give you links. I guess that means a forum.
However, I don’t know how this formula applies to online stores or software sites.
Also, I guess you need to make the site attractive in the first place.
Thoughts?
by JM
I’ve just done what seems to be my bi-monthly task, of looking at link building task at the top of my to-do list. Then wading through the topics on link building here, which is made easier as last time I created a new category called link building.
Firstly, what I’ve just read here which has caught my attention, briefly…
- Blog comments can definitely help make your site rank for keywords. They are no more a scam than any other kind of SEO really.
- People giving you links.
- You don’t need a lot of links, but they need to quality.
- Run a competition perhaps with a competition site.
- Give something away for free.
My thoughts.
- We find blog commenting is very difficult and it hard to find the motivation to keep going.
- I think an ideal was for people to give me links would be from customer purchase reviews. I haven’t been able to find a review site which does this. Yes I have found sites which list your products, where you pay a fortune.
- If I were to give something away for free I’d have to benefit somehow.
- I’ve just been thinking about our own product review service on a sub domain but I doubt there would much more benefit that having it on the main site.
So this doesn’t leave me any further forward really.
Any thoughts?
by JM
I’ve just been looking at analytics and webmaster tools, specifically at keywords. I’ve compared our 2 shops.
The jewellery site is about 6 months old and the maths site is over a year old.
About a year ago I created pad files and submitted the site using mikes directory submitter.
If I look in AllTheWeb for each site, as you’d expect I have lots link for the maths site and a handful for the jewellery site.
In analytics the traffic is almost identical, the graph never goes beyond 40 visits per day.
So the pad files and directory submissions have givwn me no extra traffic and PR is the same.
by JM
I’m not sure what to do, I’m short on good keywords for product pages on our jewellery site.
In the past on the old site, I found reasonable keywords which I had to squeeze into the content. But those keywords aren’t those that people would use.
I’m just wondering whether I should just use the same keywords on multiple pages?
by JM
I’m a bit disappointed at my lack of progress, due to no fault of my own, with problems submitting my comments on blogs and them not appearing. Even then, if I did succeed, they could be rejected as spam.
I’ve always found forum posting, something I can do and keep doing.
So do the same things apply to forums as with blog commenting?
by JM
I find it really hard to look at stats and information in analytics. When I do Ican’t decide whats important.
Also, I never make a note and see if I’ve improved.
I was thinking earlier today, that recent results have shown that generally people can use my software without problem. So I began to wonder why I don’t get more sales.Also, what stats I should be looking at to try and find out why I’m not getting more sales.
Theres lots of things I could look at, but I can’t decide whats the key items I need to look at.
Thoughts?
I’ve had help setting up goals in analytics in the past, but again, this information looked good, but I’m not entirely sure that it was useful.
by JM
