Your E-store: SEO or SEM?

Everyone can have a digital shop nowadays. Sites like Volusion, Interspire,and Magento let people with something to sell -- or even people who have nothing to sell but would like to -- set up shop in minutes.

The eStore sites often make it sound as though customers will then rush to buy from you, but this isn't quite true. Many sensible eStore owners have someone like me come and optimize their pages, and that's smart. But should you focus on SEM or SEO for your eStore?

Certainly, you should always do both search engine optimization, which is about making your pages the best they can be for search engines, and search engine marketing, which is about gaining links that show search engines the value of  your site. But one approach may be higher priority than another, once you've got the basics done.

I'd like to share with you two cases. The first, a bit of whose store is in th screenshot above, is a steampunk jeweler. She has a Volusion store with good results overall, but her store wasn't coming up well for the name of her company. I optimized her site at Volusion and did some linkbuilding for her a couple of years ago.

The second case is this purveyor of cute baby clothes. They have an Interspire store, which I'm currently optimizing and for which I'm also doing a linkbuilding campaign.

Everyone with an eStore should do those two things. The question is: what comes next? These two different stores need different strategies.

The jeweler has a narrow niche: steampunk jewelry. She spends a lot of time online, has a lot of visibility, and when I met her had a lot of places she sold from, too. I've met a number of artisans who spend many hours keeping up multiple online shops and multiple mini-sites. It often is not the best use of their time. In this jeweler's case, the best strategy was to put most of her eggs in one basket and get her strongest store higher on the search results for the term "steampunk jewelry." Here best bet is classic SEO -- optimizing her pages, getting quality links, and associating her online presence strongly with the keywords.Since she has a narrow niche, she can also expect good results from targeted advertising: not adwords, but ads on popular steampunk sites.

The baby boutique, on the other hand, is in a highly competitive niche. They need to have their pages optimized, certainly, but a small company selling baby clothes can't expect to get top billing on Google any time soon. What's more, the particular population they're targeting tends to respond more to the blogs and Facebook pages they follow than to advertising. Their best bet will be to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack in some way so they can show well for more specific searches, to work on visibility in their local area, and to focus their efforts on social media.

The specific strategy that will lead to success for your eStore will depend on your product, your niche, your budget, and your skills. You can have us do a free website analysis for you if you'd like some guidance.

Advanced SEO Issue: On-site or Off-site Optimization?

First, I need to apologize for the jargon in the title. I don't write for SEO experts, after all. I write for people who want to get the most out of their company websites, whether they're up on the latest technology or not. But these are terms that make it easier to think about an important question.

When you get an SEO Strategy Report from me, it includes both suggestions for on-site optimization -- which is to say, stuff you can do at your website, or have your webmaster do, to improve your results -- and off-site optimization, which is the online marketing that can be done elsewhere on the web. The two go together like cereal and milk, and usually, it's wise to do both. The cereal and milk experience isn't the same without both elements, and you can say the same for online marketing.

But there are times when one really is more important than the other.

Take the two sites I'm working on right now.

One is a local business with little competition for search. Their current site isn't doing its job for them, and they aren't ranking as well as they should for a lot of searches. But their competitors' sites also aren't optimized for search. Once the client has a good, well-optimized site up, I'm confident that they'll surge right ahead of their competition. In fact, our proposal for them doesn't even include off-site optimization. We'll be happy to do it for them if they want it, but I think they'll get the results they want without much further effort. Google will look around for something to show their customers, see their great new site, and offer it right up with a sigh of relief at finally having something good to offer.

The other site is in a big city, in a highly competitive field. The search engines, receiving a request for their keywords, have dozens of well-optimized sites to pick from. They have to look further to determine which site to present first.

Here's where off-site optimization is most essential. The search engines will consider the number and quality of links each site has in deciding which one to serve up. Certainly, the site has to be very well optimized, or it has no chance of good rankings. But once that's done, off-site work should be the priority.

So when you're planning where to put your budget for ongoing online marketing, be sure to consider the competitive environment your website lives in online. It makes a difference.

When your new site launches...

Shan Pesaru and I just finished making a new website for a local church.



They had the common problem you find in churches and other non-commercial organizations -- a website built by a member who volunteered, and then didn't keep up with it, and lots of people getting access and making changes and no one remembering how to get back in and fix the resulting mess...

They really needed a new website.

However, since their previous website had been unusable for some years, their members aren't in the habit of using it. They want to get the membership, which naturally includes people of many different ages and levels of technical comfort, to use the new website as a primary source of information.

Succeeding at this will allow them to reduce the amount of time the church secretary spends answering the same questions, the number of group emails they send out, and the money and other resources they spend on mailings.

They also want to make sure that people looking for their church online, or for a Methodist church of any kind in their town, can find them. (Secretly, they want to be above the big Methodist church on Google, but they are pretending that's a joke when they say it. After all, they're a church.)

So they're essentially in the same place that a business would be, upon getting a new website. You want your current customers to visit your site regularly, and you want potential new customers to be able to find you.

The things they need to do are the same things you need to do when you get a new website:

• Submit your website to the major search engines. Here they are:

Yahoo!
Google
Bing
DMOZ

• Tell your current customers about your website, and give them a reason to check it out. A store might choose to have a drawing among all customers who go to their website and fill out the mailing list opt-in form, a coupon available at the website, or a sale on online purchases only. The church has a blog at their website, and is e-mailing members asking them to send in items for the blog. Chances are excellent that members will then tell one another to go look at their pictures on the blog, and once there, they'll be invited to explore and to bookmark the website.




• Take the opportunity to announce your new website. Press releases, articles in your local or industry papers, mentions in your newsletter (and while you're at it, start transitioning to an electronic newsletter), and face-to-face invitations to visit your new website are all completely appropriate.
• Twitter, add a link to Facebook, request links from your clients and vendors -- any place on the internet that you have access to is a good place to mention your new site. While "We have a website!" isn't news, "We have a new website!" is, so go ahead and share your exciting news with your online community as well as in the physical world.

Chances are, you feel a little bit like someone with a new puppy, anyway, especially if yours is as nice as this one is. Go ahead, while you feel like bragging, and brag a little bit. Check your rankings and analytics after a couple of weeks and see whether your site has naturally done what you want it to do, and at that point you can decide whether you need an online marketing plan.