Hey all! I have a local retail business that I am considering expanding via e-commerce. I have some advantages that allow me to purchase and sell the product we carry online. I have a relationship with a design firm that will help me build a modern and optimized site. I have basic SEO and Adwords skills as I have been marketing the site for our business. I am no expert but have done ok. I know very little about SEO as it relates to e-commerce. With that being said I have begun the competitive research that goes along with any new business venture. I have done Google searches to locate major competitors. I have then used Google Ad Planner to do traffic and demographic research (plus it helped me find one more major competitor). I will now move into keyword research on these competitors to find they keywords that they are using and being successful with (recommendations for a tool to do this research are welcome)! The competition consists are a few major competitors and a number of smaller, less developed sites. The major competitors are getting significant traffic (Ad Planner says 18k to 48k uniques and I assume that means per month). My questions are: What other research should I do to fully understand my competition from a e-commerce perspective? What things should I be looking for to determine if this is an attractive market and one I should enter? Is there a way to determine how the major sites are able to drive that much traffic? After keyword selection for the new site and optimization, where should I start with organic SEO considering the new Google algorithm? Thank thou for any input!
It seems you already have everything to get started. Now it's time to start testing the waters. I'd suggest that you try free traffic first. You may also want to offer your customers something new and unique that your competitors do not offer.
Any source of free targeted traffic would do: - SE traffic from domains and websites relevant to your keywords; - Facebook pages (works well if done properly); - Twitter accounts (yes, it still works, although Twitter seems to be over-abused - I'm still able to get direct sales from Twitter traffic); - link directories; - classified sites; - relevant blogs etc. ... just to name a few. Don't use paid traffic until you fully utilize all the free sources of traffic.
Install the StumbleUpon Toolbar for Firefox (or if they have it for another browser of your choice) and then every single time you post a new page on your site, Click the "Like" button on the StumbleUpon Toolbar and it will ask you to fill in a short bit of info about the site and then submit it. Once you do this, it will not only get a backlink from StumbleUpon (a well known/respected site), you will also see that your page you just "Stumbled" (by clicking on like and submitting to StumbleUpon.com) is instantly (within minutes and throughout the whole day) getting unique visitors. Sometimes in by the hundreds! I've submitted posts on my blog to using this same method to StumbleUpon (You will need to go to StumbleUpon.com and register for an account which only takes a minute) and literally within minutes my site got over 150 visitors and it continued that way all day as a added a few more posts and "Stumbled" them as well. This form of getting traffic doesn't always convert well; although I have personal experience that I can tell you "YOU WILL GET SOME CONVERSIONS USING THIS METHOD". FAST! Hope this helps! Best of luck in all you do and I wish you success in your future endeavors! -James
Are there any other services like Stumbleupon that I can use to create more back links/drive traffic in that manner?