Shopster's Dropshippers, eCommerce, and Selling Online Blog

Finding Your Brand’s Voice

Your brand voice is the way your company sounds to your audience. It is highly dependent on your perception of your audience. For instance, a brand that caters to financial analyst should be informative and authoritative. On the other hand, a brand that speaks to teens should be more relaxed and casual.

Brand voice is essentially your identifiable personality as a company. It spans everything from the words you use to the tone and attitude that come with it. It shapes the overall feel of your communications.

But before we get into the details of how to use it, ask yourself first: have you found your brand voice? If the answer is no, then it is time to do some brainstorming. Here are some things you can do to find your brand voice:

1. Write down how you perceive your own brand, using specific adjectives that you can relate to.
2. Ask other people in your company what they think of when they hear “Brand X”
3. Next, go outside your company walls and speak to your audience. Send out a quick survey to find out more about  how your customers perceive your brand.
4. Last but not the least, take all the inputs and finalize it. Take just a handful of the most important characteristics that truly define your company and work with those.

Another  good exercise to do in relation to finding your brand voice is to create a market persona. This is a person you name and give characteristics to that embody your target audience. Knowing exactly who you are working with can help you better define how your brand should sound to them.

Once you’ve defined your brand voice,  we suggest creating guidelines to ensure that everyone who communicates with anyone using your brand employs the same set of standards. Your brand voice should be evident in every part of your communication – whether it’s the ads you use on the internet, banners on your website or brochures you give away at your local store or the posts you put up in your social networks. The key here is consistency in usage.

 

Creating SEO-friendly Blog URLs

Google’s recent Farmer update has a lot of people worried about their rankings and the number of visitors they get on a daily basis. While Google is really out to get those content and link farms that serve up nothing but junk to the general public, we’re sure you’ll be safe if you’ve been heeding our SEO and online marketing advice on this blog.

The main point is to create unique, relevant content for your customers. One way to do this is to write your own copy for your online store. Create a welcome message on your index page, target broad keywords in your category pages and re-write what you get from manufacturers and suppliers on the product pages.

As we’ve said several times before, it is always a good idea to run a blog. Here, you can talk about anything from industry trends to the products that you sell. If you have specific care instructions, you should also do posts about that. Open it up as a forum for your existing and potential customers to communicate with you.

Aside from all that content work, we’d also like to introduce a new concept to you: creating SEO-friendly URLs. This can be easily done by changing the permalink structure of your blog. How you go about it would depend on your blog platform. We find it easy to do with WordPress.

To do this:

1. Get the latest version of Wordpress
2. Log-in to the Dashboard
3. On the left side, click on Settings>Permalinks
4. Your default would usually be just a page number. Click on the radio button next to “Custom Structure” and type in: /%category%/%postname%/

Depending on your template’s write access, once you hit save this should automatically change your URL structure. In some instances, you will be required to change the .htaccess file of your blog. You can get this from the root of your blog folder. The code that will need to go in there will be generated by WordPress once you type in your preferred permalink structure.

For other blogging platforms that do not have the admin panel for changing the permalinks, you can do so directly using the .htaccess file or via a mod_rewrite function, both would require a little bit of coding knowledge.

Changing the permalink is just half the battle. If you want your URLs to be optimized for your target keywords, you need to add those to your categories. The new structure presented about will pull out details from your categories.

Even more important than that, you also need to optimize your post titles. Doing so won’t just be good SEO for your URLs but also for the post itself.

Happy blogging!

Preparing Early for Mother’s Day 2011

The uptrend in searches for jewelry, flowers and gift ideas for Mother’s Day 2011 have started to show once again.  This year, the retailer-friendly event is happening on May 8. Whether you sell shoes, apparel or even food, you can take advantage of the growing searches and purchases for that special woman.

We suggest you start catching the wave early by setting up a special category for Mother’s Day gift ideas – here, you can include anything for women young and old alike. Have banners that depict mothers in a kindly way to entice potential buyers to purchase from you knowing you understand how they feel. But much more than that, be prepared to offer special rates on products or discounts for items that you know will sell in good volume given the right price.

For the advertising aspect, we suggest you start targeting holiday-related keywords as early as now. If you’re doing pay per click advertising in Google AdWords, Bing or Yahoo, you can target these keywords and even create new campaigns for particular holidays and promotions only.

 

If you want to score even more brownie points with your potential buyers, come up with shipping promotions. Holidays are often rush purchases and consumers today prefer to purchase items over the internet than suffer the heat, long lines and bad traffic that come with these events. Give yourself that competitive edge over other retailers who are also preparing for Mother’s Day by coming up with bulk shipping or better yet, free shipping for products for moms.

You might also want to feature some cool add-on products like gift wrapping or gift cards as these are a no-brainer for holidays that encourage the giving spirit.

That holiday peak in your sales is all about preparation.

Happy selling!

Optimizing Product Images

The product images in your online store can add so much value for your site but you’re probably missing out on its ability to attract the right audience and to convert them into buyers. Don’t worry, you’re not the first one who didn’t realize it’s true worth.

Let’s start with the SEO value of your images. If you go to Google today, you’ll notice that left side of the topmost portion has several links: web, images, videos, maps, news, shopping and more. These are the different types of search you can do within Google. Images play an important role in the search world. In fact, images actually appear even in the web searches.

With that, spending the time to properly optimize your product images can mean additional quality visitors to your website. Here are some tips to help you get on the right path to optimized images:

• Limit the file size – If you look at the overall size of your webpage, you may be surprised to find that your individual images take the bulk of that size. Use a photo editing software likeAdobe  Photoshop to get the best quality at the smallest file size. This will improve the downloading of your web pages.
• Use good quality images – This work towards your conversion goals. In most cases, a buyer would want to see what the product looks like. As a web merchant, you are already at a disadvantage with the local stores given your target audience won’t get to “feel” the product as they have no physical access to it, don’t make matters worse by not having the right pictures in your site for your products.
• Put it in context – Any other merchant can get a product image from the manufacturer. If you want to go the extra mile of differentiating your store from the rest, use the item in context and take a picture. For instance, show how you can use a pair of shorts by having a real person model it. It may sound silly, but it can actually improve your conversions.
• Use your alt tags – Aside from improving accessibility for disable web users, alt tags are an additional area of text that search engines crawl. A fair warning, do not use this area for overstuffing with keywords or any form of spamming as you may get penalized by search engines.
• There’s strength in numbers – If you are able to provide more than one image, go for it. Show the product in different angles and in different types of lighting. A gallery of photos is always better appreciated than the single hero shot.
• Rename your image files - Don't use just random numbers as your file name for your image. Try to use the proper keywords when renaming your file, such that it isn't just searchable via the alt tags but by the actual file name as well.

Happy selling!

 

 

Understanding Remarketing Campaigns

We’ve recently noticed some strange ad behavior and you probably have, too. I think most users of the internet today would, at some point, feel that some ads are following them. This is due to the latest advertising genius brought to you by the likes of Google. When ads seem to stalk you, chances are, the remarketing campaign has been triggered for those.

A big percentage of today’s abandoned carts are due to 1) Distraction or; 2) Intent to purchase at a later time. This is the ad platform’s way of letting the advertiser remind potential buyers of where they left off. For instance, you go to a certain store and go as far as adding a pair of Nike cross-trainers to your shopping cart. Then the phone rings and you click out of the site. By the end of the day you’re logged into your Facebook account and you see ads for cross-trainers appearing on that left panel. This is remarketing at work.

For Google in particular, this works well in the content network and is based on cookies. Google calls it “a simple way to connect with users, based on their past interactions with your website.” It is available in AdWords, under the Audiences tab. Combined with search advertising, it can be a powerful tool to target the right kind of audience for your online store, at a time when they are really ready to buy.

It doesn’t just serve as a reminder of an abandoned cart. It does so much more than that actually. You can use it to sell packages, special promotions or discount offers to an audience who may have a better potential to convert due to past interest. This is part of Google’s interest-based advertising campaigns.

Create a Loyal Customer Base with Good Service

In retail, people keep coming back to a store that they like, not just because they offer amazing products but also because of the kind of customer service provided to them. This is how you create a loyal customer base, by impressing them with your response time, your service quality and your overall ability to support their needs.

With so many suppliers of the same brand of products, your real defining factor as an online store are your prices and how you serve your customer. The world of online purchasing is lightning fast, a potential customer can be out of your website in just one click.

If you think you already provide good customer service, stop and think some more. Here are some tips to improve what you already have:

• Faster response rate  - If you’re running a traditional land-based store, a 24 to 48 hour response time was good enough. Online, things are different. Strive to respond to a customer concern within the same day, particularly within the first 4 to 8 hours of email receipt.
• Flexible returns policy – This is where most merchants fail the supreme customer service test. Any product return would almost certainly cost a merchant. But if you want to be really customer-centric, go beyond the usual policy and aim for a no-questions-asked returns policy.
• Reward loyalty – While it may be difficult to have a rewards program in place if you’re a relatively small company, keeping track of who frequently buys from you should not be a big problem. Once you have that handful of loyal customers, tread them exceptionally well. Maybe even go the distance by offering special discounts.
• Get out of your comfort zone – You won’t succeed online by trying to imitate what others are already doing. Push the boundaries of customer service and you’ll soon be reaping the rewards via customer goodwill – they tell their friends of the great service you’ve provided, who will then tell their friends, who will tell their friends …and it goes on and on.

Customer service can make a big difference even for a small company. You may feel like your company’s size is limiting at time, but it’s really a matter of understanding the value of what you do for them. Offering amazing customer service means good reviews and return customers.

Happy selling!

 

Measuring Social Media

If you’re active in the social media space like we’ve advised in past blog posts, take a minute to congratulate yourself. Not all businesses take the time to explore social networking channels for their sales and marketing efforts. If you’ve done it, you must have seen the drastic effect it had on your overall traffic. But is this enough gains for your business to be spending so much time on sites like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook?

Today, we’ll discuss what you can measure with social media. It’s not really in the number of posts you make but rather how engaged your audience is with your brand. It may seem vague at the moment, but engagement can be measured with the right set of metrics.

Let’s start with the very basic metrics that you can easily have access to. First, are your direct (and more obvious) metrics:  Facebook Fans, Twitter Followers – here, we’re looking at impressions to your social medial efforts; and referral traffic from social media websites, this reflects the actual clickthroughs to your online store. Then, you also have your indirect effects such as your SEO rankings and increasing business reviews and high customer satisfaction scores.

Now we go down to the level of engagement and measuring it. What you need to look at is the level of interaction with your chosen media – leaving likes or comments in your Facebook posts or your blogs or tagging you with your company hash tag means you’ve started generating interest.

The most difficult thing to measure in social media, and perhaps the most important one as well, is social sentiment. These are ways to classify what people are saying about your brand –whether it is positive, neutral or negative. A lot of apps are offering a way to do this today using natural language processing, although as a note of caution, this is not 100 percent foolproof. It would be better to use an application that lets you manually update the classifications.

 

Improving Website Conversions

One of the biggest mistakes an online merchant can make is to focus solely on initiatives to attract potential buyers. You may be paying enough attention to your SEO and paid campaigns to bring in hundreds of visitors to your online store, but if they don’t convert properly, it would have all been in vain.

First things first, you need to set the conversion goal for your online store as well as for your major pages. For the store, it’s usually for the visitor to complete a sale and become a buyer. For your index page, the goal could be to move from the index page into a category page. From a category page, it should be to move into a product page. And from the product page, your goal should be to have your visitor drop the item into the shopping cart. The shopping cart itself should have a separate conversion funnel, tracing the performance of individual pages within the cart.

Here are some general tips to help you start making changes that make sense for your conversion funnel:

• Assess if your layout and navigation are easy to understand
• Create content that is compelling and talks about what your store really is all about
• Add enticing images to your index page, ones that are more likely to sell
• Offer an incentive – whether it be packaged shipping, discounted prices for first time buyers or even a surprise gift, these are magnets for sales.
• Ask only for the bare essentials in your shopping cart forms. The more fields you have there, the higher the friction, the less likely the customer will finish the process.
• Offer contact information prominently as this communicates that you are a reliable source of products and that the customer can get in touch with you in case the transaction is not as smooth as expected.
• Build trust with seals from third parties such as VeriSign, TRUSTe or the Better Business Bureau.

Improving your conversions really is all about testing what works for your market. While these minor changes can help, focus on making the changes that matter to your specific targeted customer segment.

Happy selling!

 

 

 

Gathering Feedback for Your Brand

With the rise of social media and review sites, finding feedback for your brand has become much easier. Companies are no longer limited to the traditional means of gathering market insight, namely research and surveys.

Let’s deal with the obvious first: review sites. These actually come in different forms. Whereas before, consumers only have the Better Business Bureau or Ripoff Reports as their main channels for any problems they have with merchants, the social sharing of issues has exploded over the last few years. Comparison shopping sites like Price Grabber and Amazon as well as auction sites like eBay already have built-in feedback mechanisms. So, if you take part in any of these sales channels, it would should be easy for you to find out how you’re doing in terms of product quality and service.

Then there came the review communities, sites like Yelp and Google HotPot have allowed people to freely comment on any business they’ve had an experience with. TripAdvisor works the same way for travel.  They’ve draw the attention of the public with the San Francisco-based Yelp getting an estimated 30 million unique visitors a month.

Finally, brand owners now have the opportunity to interact directly with their target audience via social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Whether it’s through hash tags or by posting directly on the wall of a business’ Page, it has become easy for anyone to tell a business how they feel and to have this displayed in public for everyone to see.

People will and have talked about brands more actively over the last few months, so the least a company can do is to monitor it. But to truly take advantage of the changing tides, reacting to it and participating in the discussions should start as early as possible. Do note that how you react to these feedback will affect how consumers perceive your brand, it is as much about online reputation management as anything else.

St. Patrick’s Day Expected to Bring in the Greens

While its origins are Irish, St. Patrick’s Day has become a major worldwide event with thousands of people across the globe celebrating this day of Ireland’s patron saint. A recent survey from BIGresearch has found that US retailers may be in for a big increase in sales for holiday-related spending.

According to the 2011 St. Patrick’s Day Consumer Intents and Actions Survey, anticipation for the holiday is at its highest this year compared to the past 8 years. In the US, nearly 102 million people will wear green for the holiday. A total of 52.4 percent of Americans will join in the celebrations, an increase over last year’s 45.2 percent.

“Eager to shake off the winter blues, consumers will look to St. Patrick’s Day as their first spring related celebration, meaning great things for the economy, retailers and restaurants,” said National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay.

Total spending for St. Patrick’s celebrations is expected to reach $4.12 billion. Aside from the obvious green apparel, retailers can also take advantage of the increased searches for St.Patrick’s Day decorations and holiday food.

eBay Selling: The Importance of Communications

If you want to take selling on eBay seriously, then you need to understand the importance of communicating with your potential buyers. Aside from building a good reputation, the only other way to gain credibility in eBay is through personal, sincere communication with your buyers.

It starts with the way you create your listings. Be honest about your product details. Pictures paint a thousand words, so take advantage of your ability to add photos. If you have photos that you took  yourself, this would actually be much better than stock photos you can get from a manufacturer. While those coming from your supplier would definitely be cleaner and nicer to look at, it may not necessarily communicate what the actual product looks like.

Having good product descriptions is a given when it comes to creating listings in eBay. One thing that most merchants fail at is being responsive to inquiries. You may be receiving a lot of questions from people about your listing, but do try to answer each one. Remember, they are your potential buyers and those questions they ask may help them in their buying decision. Furthermore,  you can also use those questions as basis of what more you need to add to your product descriptions.

Last but not the least, your customers expect to be updated all throughout the transaction. Send a confirmation email when they win the bidding war or have sent you the Buy It Now confirmation. Send another email thanking them for payment received. And let them know once the product is on its way; don’t forget the transaction number for the courier.

Happy eBay selling!

Designing Your Online Store Homepage

The most important page of any site is the homepage. This is the first thing your customers see and you only have about three seconds to grab their attention and keep them from leaving. As such, a lot of thought should really go into the way you design your homepage.

While most templates you’ll find online today look great and are professionally rendered, it is important to check for elements that, 1) attract attention and 2) convince your visitors to go to the next step. Let’s deal with the first issue.

Your design should, first and foremost, reflect what your brand wants to communicate. If you’re a store that sells high-ticket items like jewelry, it should be evident in your logo, your graphics, your copy and even down to your color choices. Think luxurious and elegant, colors like burgundy and silver, black and royal blue or purple and white are great choices that really jump out at the potential customer.

Next, work with a good designer to choose the product images that best talk about your store. Go with items that move fast and are in demand. Put the popular products front and center. The last element that could capture attention in your home page are sales, promotions or special discounts. Everyone, no matter how expensive the item they are buying, is always on the lookout for a way to save. This is where you can get creative with the way you showcase that special something that only your online store can offer.

Second, we need to get in elements that don’t just convince your potential buyers to stay in your site but to move towards the next step in the buying process (ie to buy whatever item you have on the homepage or to look for their specific needs within your categories). For this, you need to give your visitors access to the next step. It can be in the form of a search box where they can type in the product they are searching for or a good listing of your categories.

It is also important to build trust at this stage. You can easily achieve this by having your phone number prominently displayed on your homepage. This acts as reassurance for your customers that in case anything goes wrong, they can easily get in touch with you. A link to your About Us page where you detail your commitment to customer service is also a good idea to have.

The most important thing to consider when designing your home page is to think like a customer. This will help you figure out what they need aside from those we’ve identified.

Happy selling!

 

Creating an Engaging Facebook Page

Facebook has become more than just a social network for business, it is also a marketing tool. But not all business that set up their own Facebook Pages succeed in that objective. The best use of Facebook as a marketing tool is to engage your potential buyers with the brand.

Here are some tips for your Facebook Page and Wall to get people to interact with you:

1. Set up the page with complete information. Make sure you include your contact details, including your web site.
2. Create a custom landing page. Recently, Facebook has changed from using FBML (Facebook Mark Up Language) to iFrames. There’s a learning curve for implementation, but it’s still pretty useful.
3. Post a variety of content . Include posts about your products, news about your company, exclusive promotions. Add also links to your blogs or other sites of interest to the target buyer, videos and photos.
4. Answer comments or wall posts by your audience (people who hit that “Like” button) .  That’s another relatively new feature of Facebook. Your Page members can post in your wall and not just as comments but also links and everything else in between. You can also now reply as one of your managed accounts, not just your personal account.
5. Ask questions to get feedback from your fans. It should be a two-way discussion, so encourage your Page members to comment or to answer questions that you post in your Page’s wall.
6. Use the Notes to share articles that are found exclusively on your Facebook Page.
7. Use Facebook Insights to gain a better understanding of what your Fans are looking for within your Page and if there are changes in trend with the way they search and more within your Page.

Happy selling!

Blogging for eCommerce

If you own an online store that just doesn’t seem to be getting the quality traffic you need, try blogging for a change. And not just blogging to tell people why they should buy your product, but writing about things that matter to your consumers. Consistency is the key to building and running a successful blog, but most merchants find that they run out of topics when they try to write every day.

As a tip, focus on your industry instead of what you are selling. If your store is focusing on shoes, write about the different kinds of shoes. Whether you sell them or not won’t really matter to your audience. They would visit your blog to read articles that they would find useful. For  instance, write about rubber shoes, how to clean them, where to keep them, how to remove the smell after an activity and other topics that any rubber shoe-user would appreciate.

It may surprise you that some people still don’t know the things you consider most basic of a product. Just think about it this way, you’re the expert at what you are selling. This is your opportunity to share your knowledge. Tell them how to use the product better – not all user manuals are effective at doing this, so strive to keep it natural and use layman’s terms.

Also consider taking a look at the product from a different perspective. Is there a feature that isn’t explored yet. One of the best articles I’ve ever written is one on removing ink stains from a shirt. It was for a company that sells ballpoint pens. There, I was able to discuss the different types of inks used in pens and how to remove it from articles of clothing. It was a huge success and the article went viral overnight. It’s that simple. I wasn’t talking about the product directly but a component of it.

Another awesome way to draw traffic to your specific products is to create lists like “Top 10 X for 2010”. Here, you can feature and link to products directly without looking like you’re using your blog to advertise the product.

Happy selling!

Crafting Your Welcome Email

Online retail, and the web in general, has evolved substantially over the last few months. Some say the ever-changing landscape of social networking has rendered older communication protocols like email useless. While these social sites have indeed made a difference in a retailer’s ability to engage their audience, email is still very much alive.

More than the varied means of communications, today’s consumers are also more savvy when it comes to controlling their email subscriptions and are more spam-aware. CAN-SPAM act has helped curve much of the garbage that goes into inboxes and double opt-in has made the situation even better.  

One of the most useful electronic direct marketing messages to send out is the welcome email. Whether you’ve received  a new subscriber request for your newsletter, they signed up to get news and updates or they registered in your website, you should have a system to automatically send them a welcome email. This is the first step in building a good relationship with your clients. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to engage your subscribers early in the game. After all, welcome emails have the highest open rates of any kind of email marketing sent by companies.

In your welcome email remind them that they signed up for your service and who you are. Don’t forget to thank them for their service. The message in your welcome email should be just that: to welcome them into your service. In a relationship, this is your getting-to-know-you phase. It’s a big no-no to make it a promotional campaign at the same time.

You can try a welcome series to introduce them to many facets of your business at the right pace without overloading them with information or overwhelming them with too much emails. Your first email should be sent right after they sign up and should hint at the number of emails they will be receiving as part of the series.

Reinforce your brand through your headers and your from / reply to address. Use clear, short subject lines that speak to what the email is all about. Keep your content short and sweet and always leave them with ways to get in touch with you.

Do remember that not everything can be said in an email. If you have helpful resources like video tutorials, FAQs or help articles, point your subscribers in that direction.  

Creating a Coming Soon Page

Not quite ready to let the world see your new online store?  The best interim to have before you launch your actual site is to have a coming soon page. This is a good way to introduce your product, create buzz about it and find out just how interested your audience will be in your offering.

There are no set rules to what the coming soon page should have. We’ve come a long way from ten or so years ago where the only thing you’ll see is a “Page Under Construction” sign with either a cone or a some semblance of a street sign for on-going work.

Today, companies have become more creative with their coming soon pages. Some attracting more attention than others simply by shrouding what they plan to offer in much mystery. Both copy and design plays a good role in this aspect. Have a crazy character on standby that says a lot about your product without a single word. Or get a preview video to play.

People who visit the page for the first time should have a clue as to what they will be coming back for. This is especially important if you are asking them to sign up. If you want to increase the number of emails you can capture, you should give them more incentives for doing so. For instance, it can be their ticket to your private beta launch or you’ll be raffling off some products during your launch or it entitles them to a discount.

It’s difficult to keep the mystery while keeping your audience engaged. One way to do this is via a count down. You can also use social media to get them to visit your site often, like through weekly or even daily tweets.

Just remember, your Coming Soon page should indicate that you will indeed arrive soon. Don’t let it sit there too long, people just aren’t that patient for a product they’ve never even seen before.

Group Buying Sites 101

When Groupon turned down Google’s $6 billion offer, group buying sites became all the rage.  At first, they barely made a dent in the retail industry, but now the sites that take advantage of the power of many are everywhere. They’ve turned around what the world of coupons and discounts and are now taking a big chuck of marketing budgets in every industry.

But how exactly does a group buying site work?  Off the bat, group buying sites can increase revenue and introduce a fairly unknown brand to customers. But remember, not all group buying sites are alike and it isn’t for everyone.

Group buying sites will bring in volume, but it also means marking down products just enough to make it appealing but not pushing you to a loss. It generates buzz for your business. Most group buying sites deal with merchants for a pre-determined amount of customers to buy the deal, if it is not reached, no one gets the deal. With that, those who are interested in your offer spread the news to friends and family, encouraging word-of-mouth discussion about your products.

If you’re a new merchant, with barely any profit margin there, tread carefully. It would be difficult to gain buyer volume at the onset only to end up diluting your own brand value and marking yourself as a merchant offering only low-cost products/services.

It is also essential that you understand the pricing structure of these group buying sites. Most of them require a percentage of all your sales – generally around 50%. On top of that, they also have a minimum discount percentage. This would depend on the industry and the type of product being sold, but the popular group buying sites won’t hesitate to tell you that offering a service of a product at 50% off and above would definitely sell better than other deals. Now take that into consideration versus your cost of acquisition or manufacture for the items you want to sell via group buying sites.

Clearly, group buying sites are not for profit-making but is more for marketing. They have massively popular sites and do a lot of the creative work for your deals to ensure it sells well. However, you should really do the math before you even consider selling via group buying sites and weigh the benefits against the disadvantages.

Happy selling!

Auditing Your Online Store

Your online store is still basically a website and requires necessary upkeep. As such, we urge you to conduct periodic audits to check on its quality. This would ensure that you continue to rank well for your target keywords and that site usability is not degraded. In turn, achieving these two things would mean more visitors, better conversions and better sales.

These are some things that you need to look for or do for our website:

• Research on your keywords again. Keyword research is not a one-time deal. In fact, if you look at Google Trends, you’ll see that the way people search and what they search for constantly change. To stay on top of the search game, it would be best to schedule keyword research at least every six months and to update what is mapped in your current pages.
• Check on the sites linking to your own website. If someone is attempting to damage your reputation online or to get you to rank lower, they can easily do black hat SEO by linking your online store to bad neighborhood sites such as porn or link farms. Make sure that you don’t have any of these in your back links. If you do, contact the site administrator and ask to be removed.
• Check for broken links and non-working pages. While we did advice you before of customizing your error handlers such that your 404 can also lead to a sale, it would be best not to have those errors in the first place.
• Create new content for your site. Whether it’s updating your product descriptions or adding more blog entries, these will be seen as fresh and unique content that will help your ranking still.
• Diagnose your site using webmaster tools – Yahoo has Site Explorer and both Google and Bing have their own branded webmaster tools. Make sure you enable this (it’s pretty easy to do, just follow the instructions on the sites) as they will help you discover some problems that maybe affecting your status in these particular search engines.