Continual Improvement Continued - Key to Ecommerce Success

I talk to ecommerce merchants daily as I help them build their stores, market their sites online and find ways to make more money from their e-business. During these conversations over the years I have learned many things that separates out my most successful ecommerce clients from the ones that languish. One of the key things all of the most successful e-merchants have in common is continual improvement.

I find myself stressing the importance of continually updating and improving your website to customers more and more. One area that most benefits from this approach is search engine positioning. Search engines use a whole suite of algorithms and methods to calculate the relative rankings of a page. Some of these methods include number of links to a page/site, content on the page and how new the content is, which is also known is "freshness."

Continual Improvement directly affects 2 out of 3 of these ranking methods. By constantly updating your content and tracking the change in ranking and sales, you not only improve the quality of the page from a customer's perspective while also optimizing your keyword density, but each time the search engine rolls around, you're providing it with fresh content.

Okay, I know it's a lot of work, we're talking about updating every page on your site, and when you finish starting over again. You're wondering if it's really worth it. It is, and here's why. Sites that are updated continuously are indexed deeper and more often than more static sites.

Think about that for a second. By updating your site continuously, your new products that you offer those hot ones that are new on the market are found quicker by the search engines. This article, which I'm writing on August 30th will show up when doing a Yahoo! Search before the end of the day. Why? Because I also am sending the search engine an RSS feed that has all of my new content in it. Yahoo! Sees that I have a new everything ecommerce content and rapidly incorporates it into it's vast databases. Which is really one of the points of this article, you see I've been ranking really high for the term ecommerce by itself on Yahoo!, but I've been busy and haven't been updating the site as often as I should.

The result: going from #8 to #21. Being towards the bottom of page 1 vs the top of page 3 results in a drop in search engine traffic to 1/20th of what it was before.

Here is a little bit of homework.
Look at your site, go through the products and look at the descriptions. Read over them. Do they answer every question you can think of? How much does it weight, is it compatible with what I own, what does it feel like, when will it ship, is it in stock, when will it arrive, how can I return it, how long will it last, will it void the warranty, etc.... If your descriptions don't answer every one of your potential customer's questions, start adding content and answering those questions. The result will be higher search engine rankings and greater conversion rates.

If you want to learn more, or are ready to take the plunge and make your business more successfully, contact me, and we can work together to make sure you're capturing every sale you can from the upcoming holiday push.