subject: E-commerce To Do List For 2010 - Part I [print this page] Now that the new year's celebrations are over it is time to create your 2010 to do list for accomplishing your online business goals. What should be on that list? Let us start by looking at what makes an ecommerce website successful.
Credibility
Credibility is by far the most important competitive factor online. When people are watching their money closely they will only buy from companies and websites that they trust. Credibility depends on how well a site is architected, how many other trusted sites and networks link back to your site, how much social media and buzz surrounds a domain, how often a site goes down, how unique a site content is, and how fast a site loads.
To Do List: check social network sites for discussions about your niche and try to contribute with useful content while redirecting users to your site. This builds up credibility in both the eyes of your potential customers as well as machines like the search engines.
Search Engine Rankings
Of course organic search engine rankings are clearly at the top of the list for importance. Who would not want searchers to find your site in the number one position when people search? But the number one position is generally a very hard place to achieve unless you happen to have enormous financial resources to keep your site consistently top rated in terms of content, links, new material and so on. How can you as a small retailer hope to compete with the likes of Amazon and Play on the Internet?
The best way is to use another highly regarded strategy: keyword research. You may not be able to get top rank on words such as toy (136,000,000 results on Google) or cat (690,000,000 results on Google) or even catnip (1,950,000 results on Google) but if you sell homemade catnip-filled toys you can probably do fairly well on the keyword phrase catnip toy (379,000 results on Google). People who use that phrase are very likely to be looking for what you sell, and you have narrowed your competition from 136 million sites to 379,000 sites. Now you can still narrow down further, but you are getting there.
To Do List: Review your keyword analysis regularly by using tools like the eSources Market Research Wizard, the Google Keyword Tool, eBay Pulse, and Google Trends. Reviewing your keywords means that you are using the best keywords to attract your target audience.
Pay Per Click Ads
There is more than one way to get on the first page of the search engine results. Pay per click ads are widely viewed as one of the best uses of money in terms of return on investment. As in keywords, it is very hard to compete on the most generic terms, but frankly you don't really want to do that anyway. You will pay too much money for browsers who are not interested enough in your product. Do you really want to compete on words such as cat and toy? Instead you want to continue your targeting into your pay per click ads. So your next 2010 job is to take the information you obtained when you did a new keyword analysis, and use it to finetune or change your pay per click ads.
Of course, the second part of the success of the pay per click ad is creating an ad that encourages people to click and buy or register. It can be hard to know what words will draw attention, that is why you need to do some A or B testing. A or B testing is the process where you create two ads with different wording and track which wording is more successful. This is one of those marketing chores that can get left behind in the hustle and bustle of adding video and blogging, but since pay per click has such an excellent ROI this tedious task deserves your attention.
To Do List: Setup ad tracking in your conversion pages; construct and test some new ad language to identify best performing pay per click ads. Analyse the effect on traffic and conversion.
