Kristi:driving traffic to my store

Hi everyone,

I am writing this from a hotel room in Birmingham. I’m here for the Printwear & Promotion exhibition this weekend. Long way from home and after having dinner in the pub by myself, thought I might jot a few thoughts down here…

I mentioned a while ago how I was surprised to start getting orders, before I really thought my store was ready. This was all due to Google Adwords, and I continue to get orders regularly from all parts of Australia. The cool thing is, I can see what the referring sites were and what keywords people have used.

You do have to be careful though – I ended up spending too much money on the Adwords. This was because I was getting high ranking on very general, popular keywords like “cheap tshirts”. I was also targeting people wanting to make shirts for all the music festivals on in summer and this was attracting a lot of traffic too.

I have scaled down my Adwords, and am now focusing on schools, and sports uniforms, since it’s the start of the school year in Oz.

You can see the effects by the stats shown here.

Speaking of site traffic, I also mentioned last time that I was going to experiment with Facebook for drawing traffic and creating awareness of my store.

Firstly, I figure – I want to show my friends and family my exciting new little business, so what better way than putting it on my facebook status.

And yes, it worked! Look at the top referrals for that week:

Now, these are particular online marketing ideas I have used. But there’s still the best and free way to be found – and that’s through plain old Google search results.

The trick with this is, that Google has to find your site, and think it’s relevant enough to show it in search results.

In order to best optimize your site for what’s termed “Organic search results”  – ie natural, not paid, it’s good to think of it from the searcher’s point of view.

I think of it as hiring a private investigator. I really need to find something/someone, and I dont have the resources or time to find them. So I hire my trusting PI – Google. Now, I need to brief Google on what I am looking for, so – I enter the keywords that best describe what I’m looking for. Often, I am only looking for things in a certain geographical location, so that’s why I might choose to search only UK sites, or only Australian sites.

So I might tell it: sports uniforms, and search australian sites only

Now, how does Google find results that are going to be useful to me? Well, again, they’re not experts on the subject matter and they dont know who the best sports uniform suppliers are in Australia so they rely on:

- what websites contain those keywords

- what sites others have recommended (how many times has this site been listed or mentioned on another website or in a blog, forums etc)

- it also looks at how active the site is and how often it’s content it updated. This is a good sign that it’s a useful site.

There are lots of other more technical things it does too, but let’s not get overwhelmed here

So, essentially, I ask my PI for some sports uniforms suppliers in Australia, and Google gives me a whole list of results, ranked in order of relevance.

Back to the site owner: what does this mean for me?

Well, it’s the same:

- make sure the keywords your target market are using in searches, are well covered in the body of your website. This doesn’t mean dodgy lists of hidden keywords, but useful, well written content that describes the products and services you offer. (This is one reason why sites made of just images are not good at returning search results)

- submit your site to local business directories, or any site related to your business. Ie, a sports uniform supplier might be listed on the Sports Assocation websites for example. Also, the more your site is talked about in forums, or blogs, the better. Google is moving towards relying on social media as a source for relevant search rankings.

- make sure your site is updated regularly! Google visits your website to see if there are changes. If there are none, it will visit your site less and less, meaning your search ranking will go down. Basically, it will see your site as not relevant. On the other hand, the more you update, the more Google thinks “this is a happening site, I’ll keep checking back on it for updates”.

So there you go. I don’t profess to be a SEO expert (Anh has a lot better knowledge than me) but just sharing my experiences and th0ughts. Also – I refer exclusively to Google in this post, but just for simplicity sake. You could replace it with Yahoo or Bing or whatever, bearing in mind that each search engine works a little bit differently.

So long for now!

Kristi