1. Adwords, position #5

If you’ve got an eshop you’ve probably got a Google Adwords campaign running and you are constantly monitoring and re-selecting keywords and bid prices you are paying.  In an expensive keyword niche (bids over £2.00 a-plenty) for a client of mine, I’ve been targeting position 5 with some success.

I’ve not been paying the ludicrous amounts that others are bidding on in this niche. But been tidily mopping up customers for my client at a decent pay-per-click rate. The theory is that your competitors want the top spots, and ad results results 1-3 appear in the main pane, making result 4 the top result in right pane, and a natural psychological target to aim for. However others may be aiming for this right-side top spot, so you can get much better value being position 5, one below this… Try it you can only save money.

2. The more of the internet you own – the more traffic you’ll get

Why not add product reviews and FAQ’s to each product? The more pages that you have on the web, that are related to each product, the more perceived relevance to the topic/item Google will adorn you with.

It’s fairly simple to add a product FAQ module to an eshop, if you have Magento or Oscommerce there are modules for this already. Writing FAQ text should be straightforward, what are it’s uses?, who else uses it?, things to consider?, etc, and it will extra keyword filled pages to your shop. Lovely.

Product reviews, likewise. You can get modules for your eshop and they are fairly easy to set up. But this time you’ll have to ask some of your trusty shoppers for feedback. If they’ve found your shop efficient, they will probably be ok with adding a product review, especially if you direct them to the right page, and thank them, and then you’ll have loads more google indexable lovely content.

3. Google Local

The increasing importance of the Google Locals results (those that appear as  a block in the natural search) can’t be underestimated. An sure you’ve seen them (if you haven’t just do a search now for “plumber <your local city>”). This means that you really must spend some time getting your local listing right. Add photos, opening times, customer reviews, It will all help you. If you have offices/home that is fairly central do add a place mark, it will also do you a favour.

4. Youtube product reviews

Google is integrating video results from Youtube (Google owns Youtube), into it’s search engine results pages (SERP’s). So if you’ve got a cam, and have time to add a short video reviews/road tests of several of your products, then do it! It’s all going to help add to your branding and number of results you have on page 1 of your keywords SERP’s.

Don’t forget to add an ident/branding to your company on the video so people can type the URL in afterwards.

5. Livechat

Am sure you’ve seen the “to speak to a live person click here”, and if you click, a dialog opens with a salesperson from the site. If you’ve paid for Adwords visitors you really want to be converting as many of them as possible into purchasing customers not throwing your money away.

There are several systems out there and they are all fairly easy to integrate. They could increase your conversion rate dramatically! Got to be worth a shot.

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Hope you have a few more ideas  how you can improve your eshop, and make it a success (when the high street  is suffering!)

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Brainstorm

So first, keep a notebook and brainstorm ideas that come to you as you are going through your day. Your goal is to think of niche’s within bigger search groups, or emerging markets that are likely to be bigger in the not-to-distant future.

Over 12 months ago, I could see that netbooks were emerging on the scene, and I thought, ‘well people are going to be searching google for these little things’. Rather than a site on the perhaps larger search term “netbooks”, I targeted a similar meaning but nich-ier target “lightweight laptop”.

So collect your ideas, whether they are “Scottish antiques”, “costa tropical hotels”, “washroom hand dryers”, “garden hoses”, “shitake mushroom kits” or “selvedge jeans”, Really think about anything and then think of a sub-branch of that idea.

Research

So you’ve got a list of say 15-20 ideas to look at. Your goal is to now find out 3 things:

1) Does the niche have traffic from google?
2) Is it crackable? In other words: is it possible to get to first page of google?
3) Would it be possible to monetize, once you have visitors

So let’s take “washroom hand dryers” and type it into google’s keywords tool:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

It says that there are an average of 73 searches a month, and 210 searches last month for this keyword. However, it now identifies related keywords, that might be worth targeted. It illustrates that “hand dryers” has 9,900 searches a month. A worthy target!

So then we go onto checking in it’s crackable. We do 2 basic things, first we check how many results it returns in your countries google. E.g Make sure you select “results from pages in uk”. Put the term in quotes (“hand dryers”) to limit the results to more relevant sites, and you get 38,400 results.

And also we get the web page result that’s 7th- 10th on the 1st page of google, and paste it into yahoo’s site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ ). This will then give you a guide to how many sites link to this site, and approximately how authoritative google perceives it. In this case, the 8th result in google (www.o3solutions.com/) has 71 inlinks from sites other than itself.

Is it worth it?

Now assuming that you got the traffic, is it possible to monetise this “hand dryers” niche? You could check out affiliate sites like affillatewindow.com or tradedoubler.com to see if there is a commercial vendor offering an affiliate scheme for commercial hygiene equipment. Or you figure, that once you’ve got the traffic you will approach independent retailer, and offer them your leads, for a commission.

Either way you gotta do the math. In the case of “lightweight laptops” 5,000 people a month searching generates 5-10 affiliate sales a month. So that’s a particularly low 1 in 500-1000 visitors produces a sale. So with hand dyers, if you sold 5-10 products a month. Would that be worth it if you were getting 10% from a sale? A hand dryer costs £200, so 10% is £20 x 5 to 10, so between £100-200 a month revenue.

Compile and compare

So you should create a table, or an excel spreadsheet of all your targets and new ones you find as you go through it, and you can then compare and choose:

With all your 20 keyword targets side-by-side, and the new related ones you’ve found, it should be clearer which one to target.

Of course there are some nuances to the tools mentioned above, but they are fairly easy to get to grips with.

So buy a domain & build a website

Now you’ve chosen your target, you should think carefully about the domain, and include the keywords in it if possible. Perhaps handDryersReviewed.com might be a good choice. You then want to set up a site, Wordpress is a good CMS that’s easy to setup, and choosing, and customising a relevant template is easy.

It’s worth at this stage knowing more how google ranks content, this is the best snapshot guide that tells you all about what’s important from title tags to image names: http://www.webconfs.com/15-minute-seo.php

Don’t forget to add google analytics, and a sitemap registered with google webmaster tools.

What’s your content plan?

So, blimey you’ve got a niche a domain and are ready to add content. You could write it all yourself, or perhaps you can place an ad on www.getafreelancer.com, and find someone on the other side of the world that will write for you for $6 an article. So best start as you mean to go on. I mean, are you really going to have the time to write 2-5 articles a month? Best just for you to plan the articles and outsource them to someone else.

Also remember, that genuine content brings genuine visitors. So really do think of real content around your topic.

Link build

You’ve got to now build links. I reckon the best way to start of with is to this yourself, aim for 2-5 links a week and you’ll soon build up inlinks. Some of the easiest strategies are, commenting on relevant blogs and forums or adding your site to relevant directories. Also look at your competitors sites via yahoo site explorer, where are they getting links from

You can then outsource this to someone on getafreelancer.com once you’ve got a style of link building.

Wait….

So you’ll need to keep monitoring your site, adding new content and link building for 4-6 months, but you should see it gradually creep up google, monitor it both in Analytics and Webmaster tools. You can of course start the next project so you are building up multiple revenue streams.

Page 1!

So there, once you are on page 1 of google, it is worth reviewing how you were going to monetize the site. So now plug in that affiliate, or cut a deal for leads from the site, or perhaps even sell it lock stock to a competitor. Good luck.

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