You may have a beautiful website but that doesn’t matter if you are not getting any traffic or sales. Sounds pretty obvious to most, but there are many many people out there who do not think past the design of their ecommerce shop.
Many people when looking for a web designer will have a rough idea of what they want there website to look like, what they want it to do and how that will represent there company. But what very few will think about is what next…? So this beautiful website i have spent a pretty penny on means nothing? No we are not saying that. Our argument is simple, you will take sales providing you have traffic and almost any standard of website, you may not take many, but providing your prices are not ridiculous, your traffic is of decent quality and the product you are selling is wanted, you will take sales. You will not take sales from a great looking website with no traffic – FACT!
Many ecommerce website owners will fall in to one of two categories:
1) They think they have a great product
2) They think the internet is a easy place to make money – You only have to build a great looking website and i know what i’m selling will sell because i have bought one, or they sell on Amazon.
The key is to try think about the website and traffic as being one, neither are more important or less so than the other. To begin with your ecommerce website will not be ranking in the search engines for any big traffic keywords so you need to consider at this stage whether to run a budgeted PPC (pay per click) campaign, a radio/newspaper advert, flier round local businesses and houses depending on what you are selling. This will hopefully bring in some much needed revenue and basic exposure at the beginning. An often overlooked source of income is from friends and family, do not be worried or embarrassed by showing off your website and encouraging friends and family to use it and recommend it. You will pick up some sales and they might suggest a few things to add/change which can be invaluable before “real world” visitors hit your website.
During this stage it is important to try and get as many high quality links as possible. A link is basically another website giving your website a vote of confidence. In essence this signal tells the search engines that this other website likes yours and then the search engines will decide how much emphasis to place on this link. Depending on how many other businesses are targeting the keywords you would like to rank for depends on how many of these links (votes of confidence) you will need. It is also very important to remember that not every link carries the same search weight. A link from a high authority website like the BBC or a national Newspaper is worth 10’s, possibly even 100’s of links from other “normal” websites. This is because websites like the BBC and national Newspapers have a lot of trust and the search engines know that you cant just ask for a link from these guys. Your website has to have something that will offer great value to its readers and therefore be worthy of a link.
The above is only a very small snippet on link building, you can get links from a wide variety of places and we would actively encourage you to do so. Examples of places to get links from include:
- Similar websites to your own
- Industry related directories – We can go through the best related directories for your business and submit your website/business here.
- Article websites – We can write an article on your business and distribute it to 25 of the top article websites.
- Video submission websites – We can create a simple 2-3 minute video of us using your website using a video capture software for a small fee and distribute it to the top Video Submission websites.
- Press releases – Often an area over looked but can be a golden source of those hard to come by trustworthy links! Again we can write this according to press release guidelines to make sure it has the best possible chance of being picked up and distributed through the networks.
- Competitions – Everyone likes a competition and if done correctly this can be a great tactic for harnessing high quality links from sources that might not otherwise link to your website.
The above form part of any SEO campaign we take on, a diverse link profile is a more trustworthy link profile so bare this in mind when deciding whether to do SEO on your own website.
We have a proven track record of taking ecommerce websites from zero through to 6 and 7 figure sums. We dont stop at just building your website, we will be on hand offering advice every step of the way, after all your success is our success to.
If you would like to find out more about any of our web design Cardiff Packages then please contact us for a quote.