Boosting sales on E-commerce site

[Justin B1212]

My existing E-commerce Wordpress website is generating only 3 percent of my annual sales. I have learned SEO and applied the principle to optimise the website. There is a lot of room for improvement, such as having more quality external links to my website and publishing more blogs to the website ( I am only publishing one blog a month at the moment) I used peopleperhour and found an Indian programmer to re-design the website, the result was ok. I am due to receive a grant of £3k-5k to promote my website and my products. This grant has to be paid to a digital marketing consultant. Is there any advice on how I should spend the money wisely? Shall I use an overseas digital marketing consultant advertised on Peopleperhour, as the UK ones seem to be very expensive? I would really appreciate it if anyone has similar experience or any good contacts to share. Many thanks.

 

[Mr D]

Do you want cheap?
Or do you want something useful?

Perhaps look at why the UK ones are so expensive.

 

[fisicx]

What are you selling to whom?

external links and blogging won’t improve things. And I doubt a digital marketeer with be of much use either (most are useless)

 

[Justin B1212]

What are you selling to whom?

external links and blogging won’t improve things. And I doubt a digital marketeer with be of much use either (most are useless)

I sell furniture and home accessories online to the general public online.

 

[John Toomey]

Hi Justin, the wonderful world of digital marketing can be minefield and you can easily burn through the budget with little or no return. That said, Google's parent company Alphabet didn't make the money they make by having a product that doesn't work so it can work.

If you're already selling off line I assume you have product that people are willing to buy. So, if the aim is to drive traffic online to make it easier to process orders and sell to people outside your footfall and you want to use a company get yourself ready so that you at least know the basics:

• Analyse your existing sales to develop a persona for the types of customers who provide you with the best life time value i.e. the ones that repeat purchase
• With a persona in hand, ensure you setup the ad copy to target the persona
• Limit the time you advertise and the location (£5k is not enough for a UK national campaign)
• You won't really know whether the budget is enough until you understand what you will have to pay per click
• Research the keywords / terms that buyers have used to find your product on Google because you know they work. Over time, Google analytics will give you some of the information you need
• Ensure that the copy you use in your PPC ads relate to the pages you link to, otherwise your bounce rate (% of people who leave your site after viewing one page) will be high and you will waste a lot of money
• If you want information about the types of keyword matching options search "search term types on Google Ads" on Google. I have seen people select the wrong one before and they end up with too much low quality traffic (expensive) or not enough traffic (return is low)

Consider off line activity to drive traffic to the site

• Driving traffic to the site by ensuring you promote your face to face buyers but do it post sale otherwise they may leave the shop and you may lose the sale
• Ensure you collect their email addresses, by asking to keep them in touch about special offers, so that you can stay in touch.

In terms of who? We have used on- and off-shore people and both can be good and bad. It really depends how much effort you want to put in to find the right company.

I hope this helps but if you need any more pointers feel free to get in contact.

 

[Kevin Joseph]

I am personally doing the SEO for a furniture manufacturing company. All the points mentioned above by John hold true.

You'd better watch out for shoddy SEOers who build bad links which will plague your site for years to come. As for Ads, regardless of whether you do it yourself or via an agency/someone else, I recommend that you be as involved as possible. There are simply too many overlaps between business & Digital marketing

 

[Emre Eldar]

Hi, besides you need o look into your e-commerce site, there is one more important factor that you need to take care of as an excellent social proof. What is that? Your product/service reviews. Review plays an important role to influence the decision of people to buy your products/services. The more positive reviews you have on your e-commerce site, the more sales you will get.

 

[Darren_Ssc]

I am due to receive a grant of £3k-5k to promote my website and my products. This grant has to be paid to a digital marketing consultant.

I am a digital marketing consultant and, you'll be pleased to know, I don't want your money.

For such a sum I would avoid a multi-talented agency where they claim to be experts on everything when, in reality, you have one person of influence and half a dozen lackeys on minimum wage or less doing the actual grunt work. They'll burn through your money in no time with little or nothing to show for it other than a bunch of failed, experimental pay per click campaigns.

Better to deal with a one man band who knows at least one area very well and can use the funding to set you on the right path. That may be a marketing consultant or seo person of which their are a few around here.

 

[fisicx]

I sell furniture and home accessories online to the general public online.

Then giving the money to a digital marketing wonk won’t achieve anything useful. You will spend all the money and get a load of guff in return.

There are loads of places I can buy furniture and homeware, for me to even know you exist means your marketing budget needs to be a lot higher that the grant. You need to be listed on all the major shopping channels, spend money on advertising and other promotions and be better at SEO that your competitors.

 

[Paul Carmen]

As @fisicx says giving the money to a consultant is unlikely to be the answer. You need a thorough marketing plan based on data from your customers, website, your market and competitors.

The only successful way to run any marketing and lead generation/sales campaigns is to do proper initial research and then come up with a plan that targets, measures and tests the processes properly. The process should focus on:

1. Researching where your customers will look for your products and what they actually search for; e.g. its online, but where do they search, Amazon, eBay, Wayfair, Google and if you want to grow your website sales what do they type in search engines, can you compete here with your budget?
2. Identify your customers for marketing and tighter targeting purposes; e.g. define their age groups, locations, demographics, affluence etc.
3. Identify the core products you want to promote; these should be profitable for you and something you can deliver and then scale further if your lead generation really takes off, you may not be able to compete on all products depending on retail price and margin
4. What do these products do for your customers and how do you communicate this succinctly; e.g. why is yours better, what's great about it, why should they buy from you?
5. What is your unique selling point (USP), basically the marketing hook to get them interested; e.g. do you do something great that the competition doesn't, is your order process simpler or faster, are you better on price, or do you offer a unique angle etc.

Once you've done this you can see how your own site and marketing performs against this criteria currently.

You may well need to do a large amount, and combination of, different work here; e.g.

• product copy changes and technical SEO tweaks to product descriptions, meta title & descriptions etc
• website conversion and behaviour tracking improvement to be able to maximise performance with A/B tests
• ongoing website changes to improve conversion rates based on the tests
• setup new PPC campaigns and a range of tests and optimisations to determine what works
• setup Google Merchant Centre feeds and decent shopping campaigns to target your customers, products & use negative keywords to be ultra cost efficient
• its unlikely you have sufficient budget to do much off site SEO work, plus you should be aiming to find out what works well via PPC before you do any of this to avoid wasting time and money

We don't really have enough info based on what you've said, but this should be about a marketing plan to deliver initial results that you can then build on with a further marketing budget.

Anything else is likely to burn the money and if you're very lucky get a return, but its far more likely just to waste it...

 

[antropy]

Shall I use an overseas digital marketing consultant advertised on Peopleperhour, as the UK ones seem to be very expensive?

Buy cheap, buy again. I really wouldn't go down the cheap route when it comes to digital marketing and it will be money down the drain... Alex

 

[fisicx]

Buy cheap, buy again. I really wouldn't go down the cheap route when it comes to digital marketing and it will be money down the drain... Alex

On the other hand, it's not actually their money so they can splurge the lot if they want:

I am due to receive a grant of £3k-5k to promote my website and my products. This grant has to be paid to a digital marketing consultant.

Unless of course there are conditions attached to the grant.

 

[Darren_Ssc]

Unless of course there are conditions attached to the grant.

I would certainly hope so? A blank cheque to spend on PPH would be like chucking money on a raging fire.

 

[antropy]

On the other hand, it's not actually their money so they can splurge the lot if they want:

Ah yes, was more on about if he HAS to spend it on a digital marketing company, may as well pay a good one and have the work done right as opposed to spending the money on a poor service and get nothing in return. Alex

 

[chrisbawden]

I have been in e-commerce for 15 years. Personal opinion, one from making many mistakes myself!

£3-5k wont do anything for SEO at all. All of these SEO companies saying, pay £500-1000 a month, won't make much difference at all, especially in a highly competitive sector.

Invest the money in Google Adwords, I use a very good agency for my Google Shopping management, in the UK, fairly cheap. So there are good agencies in the UK. We get £10 in sales for every £1 we spend now, but it has taken several years to get to this point.

There are very good freelancers on sites like PPH or Upwork, some UK based and some abroad. If you hire a freelancer, check references, talk to there clients and ensure you give them ROAS targets to work towards.

Investing £3-5k in google ads should give an immediate return in sales and revenue and you can continue after the grant has been spent. Even if you initially get £3 for every £1 spent, you have still flipped the £5k grant to £15k in sales. Not bad eh! You can improve this ROI over time, it won't happen over night.

 

[Justin B1212]

I have been in e-commerce for 15 years. Personal opinion, one from making many mistakes myself!

£3-5k wont do anything for SEO at all. All of these SEO companies saying, pay £500-1000 a month, won't make much difference at all, especially in a highly competitive sector.

Invest the money in Google Adwords, I use a very good agency for my Google Shopping management, in the UK, fairly cheap. So there are good agencies in the UK. We get £10 in sales for every £1 we spend now, but it has taken several years to get to this point.

There are very good freelancers on sites like PPH or Upwork, some UK based and some abroad. If you hire a freelancer, check references, talk to there clients and ensure you give them ROAS targets to work towards.

Investing £3-5k in google ads should give an immediate return in sales and revenue and you can continue after the grant has been spent. Even if you initially get £3 for every £1 spent, you have still flipped the £5k grant to £15k in sales. Not bad eh! You can improve this ROI over time, it won't happen over night.

. Thank you all for your expertise Chris, would you mind PM me the details of the agency you use from Google shopping management? Shall I try to take some free online google adwords lessons from Google?

 

[chrisbawden]

i have sent you by PM who we use for our shopping accounts, but i am not sure if they are taking on new clients or not. Certainly worth asking however!

Honestly, its free money, the grant. So i guess you could try to learn it yourself. Personally, i have run our myself but cannot get anywhere near the current performance of the agency i use. Its quite easy to set up things like shopping campaigns if your tech-savvy. It will go one of two ways, either great or terrible.

I have had people run our google accounts and perform terribly before, like £2 for every £1 spent, so it's success really does depend on who does it and how well they understand PPC.

Do you already have a adwords account and a google merchant centre?

 

[Justin B1212]

i have sent you by PM who we use for our shopping accounts, but i am not sure if they are taking on new clients or not. Certainly worth asking however!

Honestly, its free money, the grant. So i guess you could try to learn it yourself. Personally, i have run our myself but cannot get anywhere near the current performance of the agency i use. Its quite easy to set up things like shopping campaigns if your tech-savvy. It will go one of two ways, either great or terrible.

I have had people run our google accounts and perform terribly before, like £2 for every £1 spent, so it's success really does depend on who does it and how well they understand PPC.

Do you already have a adwords account and a google merchant centre?

Yes. I have already got an adwords account but I don’t have a google merchant center. Thank you so much for sharing the details of the agency

 

[Paul Carmen]

I have been in e-commerce for 15 years. Personal opinion, one from making many mistakes myself!

£3-5k wont do anything for SEO at all. All of these SEO companies saying, pay £500-1000 a month, won't make much difference at all, especially in a highly competitive sector.

Invest the money in Google Adwords, I use a very good agency for my Google Shopping management, in the UK, fairly cheap. So there are good agencies in the UK. We get £10 in sales for every £1 we spend now, but it has taken several years to get to this point.

Chris is spot on, you can only really develop an effective SEO strategy once you know what works, and what you can afford. There's no point in going after keywords that don't convert well, or that big competitors are spending a fortune on.

That's the whole point of the keyword, customer and competitor/market research, identifying as much of this as possible first, so your initial marketing isn't guesswork wasting your money.

Google Ads and then Shopping are a great way to start, as the budget and targeting can be tightly controlled, and you can quickly optimise for buying intent keywords in search ads, if you're tracking all online and offline conversions properly.

We usually find that the problem with most Shopping campaigns is they're not targeted well at all. The setup is done at the same time as search ads, and then there's 100% reliance on product descriptions and trusting Google to show the right Shopping Ads to the right searches!

The reality is that this will spend more money on irrelevant searches and only help Google. We've saved companies a lot of money and driven very high Shopping returns by using the keyword data that converts in search ads, and combining this with the product description keywords, to setup waterfall style Shopping campaigns that only bid high on searches that are likely to convert into a sale...

 

[fisicx]

All good advice, but it’s grant and they have to spend it on a marketing consultant not SEO or PPC.

 

[Paul Carmen]

All good advice, but it’s grant and they have to spend it on a marketing consultant not SEO or PPC.

@fisicx You'd hope that it would allow the consultant, or company, to at least do the work as part of the consultancy!

Any consultant worth their salt should recommend this sort of research and implementation strategy; that should be a day or two of work, maximum, leaving a decent chunk of the grant to spend on implementation and setup work, even if you're not allowed to spend it on the PPC advertising itself.

We don't know the details of the grant, but surely you haven't got to spend the entire £3-£5k on literally consultancy only?

I know the UK government likes to line the pockets of their mates, but that would be a total waste of money, you might as well hire Serco or Deloitte then!

 

[Justin B1212]

All good advice, but it’s grant and they have to spend it on a marketing consultant not SEO or PPC.

That is true. I wonder if it is possible to pay the Google Adwords consultant the grant money and ask them to pay Google for the PPC cost, and obviously the grant money will cover their keyword research costs etc. What kind of charge can I expect to pay the Google adwords consultant? I have a container of chairs arriving soon so I know exactly what products I need to promote.

 

[Paul Carmen]

@Justin Brandon what does the grant T&Cs or information say you can use the grant for?

Almost all PPC professionals will link to your Google Ads account via an MCC account, and all the details (e.g. owner, company, payment etc.) will be in your name, so they can't pay for it for you.

 

[Justin B1212]

@Justin Brandon what does the grant T&Cs or information say you can use the grant for?

Almost all PPC professionals will link to your Google Ads account via an MCC account, and all the details (e.g. owner, company, payment etc.) will be in your name, so they can't pay for it for you.

The grant says I can use it to pay for any new project which will enhance productivity but it has to be paid to an external supplier.

 

[fisicx]

The grant says I can use it to pay for any new project which will enhance productivity but it has to be paid to an external supplier.

Ah. Then that's an entirely different thing. Does it restrict who this external supplier has to be?

If it can be anybody then get someone from this thread to sort out your site. I can vouch for pretty much all of them.

 

[meteora]

have you tried relationship marketing before, you can turn the friends on facebook to customers, for example how do i build a list of 3000 friends on facebook and interact with them and turn them into customers

 

[Justin B1212]

Ah. Then that's an entirely different thing. Does it restrict who this external supplier has to be?

If it can be anybody then get someone from this thread to sort out your site. I can vouch for pretty much all of them.

I really appreciate everyone's advice, every one is so friendly and helpful here, it is like a business networking group and I will definitely be considering using one of the businesses here I am still in the early research stage, as the grant will be arriving in Jan. I will be decide on how to spend the money and which company to use when I get the grant in Jan, as I don't know how much the grant will be exactly.

 

[MichelleB-UK]

Might be worth an online search to see if you can find an online marketer with specialist knowledge in the furniture industry then review their case studies, results etc. PPC is good for short-term sales but it's a continuous investment and only works if the ROI is good enough. You should keep focusing on your SEO too to grow your organic traffic alongside, this will bring you free and relevant traffic.

 

[Vin Gupta]

My existing E-commerce Wordpress website is generating only 3 percent of my annual sales. I have learned SEO and applied the principle to optimise the website. There is a lot of room for improvement, such as having more quality external links to my website and publishing more blogs to the website ( I am only publishing one blog a month at the moment) I used peopleperhour and found an Indian programmer to re-design the website, the result was ok. I am due to receive a grant of £3k-5k to promote my website and my products. This grant has to be paid to a digital marketing consultant. Is there any advice on how I should spend the money wisely? Shall I use an overseas digital marketing consultant advertised on Peopleperhour, as the UK ones seem to be very expensive? I would really appreciate it if anyone has similar experience or any good contacts to share. Many thanks.

If you're willing to put the work in, then you can find great value by using someone from abroad. I had my websites made in India, and they're excellent. But you will need to do more due dilligence over the company you're using.

One piece of advise I have is to find someone that has very good English. If they don't speak good English, then they're unlikely to do a good job at promoting your website

 

[Justin B1212]

Might be worth an online search to see if you can find an online marketer with specialist knowledge in the furniture industry then review their case studies, results etc. PPC is good for short-term sales but it's a continuous investment and only works if the ROI is good enough. You should keep focusing on your SEO too to grow your organic traffic alongside, this will bring you free and relevant traffic.

Thank you for your advice. Is the weekly blogging still important for SEO?

 

[fisicx]

Thank you for your advice. Is the weekly blogging still important for SEO?

Depends on the topic. But for an ecommenrce site not usually worth the effort.

 

[Justin B1212]

Depends on the topic. But for an ecommenrce site not usually worth the effort.

Thank you for your advice. What else could I do to improve the SEO for my e-commerce site myself? I have done the on-page SEO.

 

[Darren_Ssc]

Thank you for your advice. Is the weekly blogging still important for SEO?

'Blogging for seo' is likely to be wasted effort unless you have some kind of strategy/methodolgy that works.

Look at some random furniture sites and you'll usually see that some 'blogging for seo' has been attempted and pretty much abandoned at some stage. This isn't to say it can't be of benefit but doing it in a random and unfocused way isn't going to be effective.

A blog doesn't necessarilly have to be about seo though, it can be part of a wider strategy. For instance, you can write about your business, why it was founded, your local area, charitable and community projects you're involved in, etc. This isn't going to directly impact how much furniture you sell or affect your keyword rankings but it does form part of a wider function and that is giving your business a bit of authencity.

Some business sponsor a local sports team, usually just to get a link on the website or a bit of local recognition. But they could also take more interest, writing about matches and recent news. You may find you're the only business/outlet doing this and it could result in a fair bit of local goodwill and community feedback?

Also, if you specialise in a specific type of furniture, you can become an authority in your niche by giving background information about where your products are sourced. Is there an ethical or ecological aspect to your products that can be exploited, for instance?

In general, look at the bigger picture and don't get bogged down in 'seo' or short term plays because, I can assure you, 99% of your competitors are already doing this.

 

[Justin B1212]

'Blogging for seo' is likely to be wasted effort unless you have some kind of strategy/methodolgy that works.

Look at some random furniture sites and you'll usually see that some 'blogging for seo' has been attempted and pretty much abandoned at some stage. This isn't to say it can't be of benefit but doing it in a random and unfocused way isn't going to be effective.

A blog doesn't necessarilly have to be about seo though, it can be part of a wider strategy. For instance, you can write about your business, why it was founded, your local area, charitable and community projects you're involved in, etc. This isn't going to directly impact how much furniture you sell or affect your keyword rankings but it does form part of a wider function and that is giving your business a bit of authencity.

Some business sponsor a local sports team, usually just to get a link on the website or a bit of local recognition. But they could also take more interest, writing about matches and recent news. You may find you're the only business/outlet doing this and it could result in a fair bit of local goodwill and community feedback?

Also, if you specialise in a specific type of furniture, you can become an authority in your niche by giving background information about where your products are sourced. Is there an ethical or ecological aspect to your products that can be exploited, for instance?

In general, look at the bigger picture and don't get bogged down in 'seo' or short term plays because, I can assure you, 99% of your competitors are already doing this.

Thank you for your advice. Yes, perhaps sponsoring a local sports team is the way forward, great idea!

 

[fisicx]

Blogging isn't going to sell furniture.

If you want targeted traffic from Google you need to rank your product pages. And I suspect that's not going to be easy if you are selling the same products as everyone else. But you could look at more long tail keywords. For example: "bedside table with single drawer and shelf"

 

[MichelleB-UK]

Thank you for your advice. Is the weekly blogging still important for SEO?

Doesn't have to be weekly, we do a post every 3-4 weeks depending on the time of year. I would focus on some strong knowledge pages too about the services you offer, how-to guides etc, depending on your field. One of our how-to guides is now ranked number 1 on google and brings us 500 unique visitors per month!

 

[Lina HH]

Find some good websites for a guest posting. You need to have good do-follow backlinks to your website from other high ranked sites.

 

[Justin B1212]

Find some good websites for a guest posting. You need to have good do-follow backlinks to your website from other high ranked sites.

How do I do that? Sending my guest blog to home interiors website and ask them if they would like to publish my blog?

 

[fisicx]

How do I do that? Sending my guest blog to home interiors website and ask them if they would like to publish my blog?

Ignore her advice. This isn’t going to achieve anything useful.