The design and layout was fairly nice and simple, but the “Consumer Friendliness”, and “Site Optimization” need some fixing. As it stands now, sales will be to friends and relatives, and you will not be found in search engines.
I will assume that the site is on a low budget and one person does most of the work. My suggestions will frugal (else you wouldn’t be here), and Iincluded some marketing recommendations at the end.
Consumer Friendliness – Since your store is an unknown to potential customers, you must go the extra mile to sway them. Every attempt must be made to give as much information as possible on your company, products, and that you are reputable to buy from.
Suggestions:
1. Who are you? Tell the visitor about your company or yourself. What qualifies you to be selling gifts and collectibles. What does “Wholesale” mean to the visitor? Is this site open to everyone?
2. Make the customer feel safe about purchasing. Explain how secure the credit card transactions are, your “Privacy Policy” and how you will use their information. How you will handle shipping and returns? You have ample room on your Store Directory, Shipping, and Contact pages to include this information. Here is a link to an example consumer information page on a client’s site: http://www.jonesberryfarm.com/consumer_info.htm
3. On the home page put a link to your product page from each of the categories you have listed in the body text.
4. No Promotions? – there should always be something in promotions. Otherwise get rid of the page.
5. I clicked on about a dozen products and each one came back with “unable to process request”. A real visitor would have left after the second or third item. I have no answer for this other than to get some available products in your store. This was extremely bad!
6. Since your products are unique, I would assume that each has a story or history to it. Currently your product descriptions are weak, and could be greatly improved to entice the visitor.
7. Get rid of the AOL email address on your contact page and use an email address with your domain name. It makes you look rinky dinky! If you have no fax number, remove the line instead of showing zero’s.
8. The text links on your products page are too light against the background, making it hard to read. Change link colors to make it easier to read.
Site Optimization – The site had a zero page rank and showed no backward links in Google. It appears your are not in their database at all. Even searching for “Crawford House Collectibles” came up empty. It appears that engines are unable to index your “Dynamic Pages” that in turn prevent information from being collected on your site.
Suggestions:
1. Make the Home Page a standard HTML page using the file name index.htm or index.html. This will allow all engines to index and gather information about your site. Make sure your top keyword phrases are included on the page. You could also do this for your Store Directory and Contact pages.
2. Improve your HTML <Title>s – You score more search engine points when keywords are closer to the first position. An example would be to change the title on your Home Page from “<title>The Wholesale Source-Home Decor-Gifts-Novelties</title>” to “<title>Wholesale Decor Gifts Novelties</title>”. I would also suggest removing the hyphens.
3. Body Text – How come the keywords; gifts, novelties, and decor are not included in the body text on the Home Page?
Internet Marketing
If you are on a shoe sting budget it will be very tough to get search engine exposure with all the competitors in this field. The site optimization recommended will only get you so far, and is only intended to be the “least you could do”. Continual optimization would probably be futile and too costly since the big guy competitors are either buying search engine positions, or have the resources to plow into continual optimization.
To give your site a chance do as many free submissions to the search engines as possible (including Google), and pay $39.00 to be included into Inktomi. Currently good scores in Google means good in Yahoo. But with the recent Yahoo purchase of Inktomi it will only be a matter of time before Inktomi results will appear in Yahoo.
A strong recommendation would be to try pay-per-click (PPC) service for search engine positioning. If you believe that items in your store would sell if people came, then put up some money and give it a try. If nothing else it will show if your products will sell or not. With PPC the amount of qualified visitors you get is directly related to the dollars your spend. If you get 1000 visitors and no sales, then maybe its not the traffic. There are currently plenty of keywords and qualified traffic available in Overture and second tier services (FindWhat, Kanoodle, ePilot) that are in the .10 – .60 cent per click range.
Summary
Take the necessary steps to educate the consumer on who you are and how business will be conducted. Make a better effort in writing compelling product descriptions. Optimize the site as best as possible and then plot a marketing course. Your field is very competitive and the amount of traffic you get will have a direct correlation to the amount of time and dollars spent.
Good Luck!
Brian P. Evans
Do-Net www.do-net.com
Peer reviewers volunteer their time and effort to help other site owners with their websites. Please take time to visit this reviewer’s site and say that you think what they’re doing is valuable to the web business community. If you’d like your site reviewed, send an email to editors@https://murdok.org.
