Upside Downturn

Thought I’d post a few of my less-written-about ecommerce tips for your eshop. There should be some superfly marketing ideas here for even the most maveric eshop owner, all helping you maximise your business in this crappy economic climate.

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!)

Paolo ecommerce, marketing, recession, strategy