SEO HELP i am looking at ways to get my online shop noticed away from Facebook.

[rosieholly]

Hi i have managed to gain 2500 engaging followers on Facebook but i am having problems getting my webshop off the ground outside of social media. I dont have premises so have no local area to advertise and am on google but only if you search the business name. I sort of understand metatags and have these in place. Any suggestions to get noticed and gain customers away from social media welcomed

 

[fisicx]

Engaging doing what? Are all these 2500 potential customers? Do you sell on Facebook or just your website? What are you doing on your FB page to tell people about the website?

 

[rosieholly]

Engaging doing what? Are all these 2500 potential customers? Do you sell on Facebook or just your website? What are you doing on your FB page to tell people about the website?

Thanks for replying. I have a facebook page which i use to post daily blogs conversation starters etc where people reply and comment. I have had 2 unfollows total and the followers are growing in healthy numbers. I dont sell on facebook but i promote my website from my page. I also give people the option to subscribe to a monthly enewsletter which has a decent audiance. But i dont want a facebook business. I would like to grow outside of facebook. I hope i have answered your question

 

[fisicx]

I dont sell on facebook but i promote my website from my page.

Great. How many of your 2500 followers have visited your website? And how many have completed a purchase?

 

[rosieholly]

Great. How many of your 2500 followers have visited your website? And how many have completed a purchase?

Thanks again for your reply i started a sale per month this has grown to 1 per week hence my problem. I am not sure where these sales come from unless i run a facebook promo code to capture it. I have has positive reviews left on Facebook so some have come from there.

 

[fisicx]

Your site analytics will tell you the source of your visitors.

It's very unlikely you will get many sales from your facebook followers. This puts their monetary value at close to zero. People who follow on facebook tend not to be people to buy things from external websites. If you sell on Facebook you can do well but you need many many more followers to make it worthwhile. My wife follows a facebook page for a type of china and maybe buys one piece per month. They have nearly 1million followers. Facebook adverts can be very lucrative but getting these to work well needs some skill and it needs to be something people want to buy. My Little Pony will generally do better than baked beans.

Which brings us back to your website. What are you selling? Who are you targeting? What is your marketing strategy?

 

[mattk]

Do you have Google Analytics (or similar) on your site? This should allow you to track where your customers are coming from.

If it shows that Facebook is a successful platform, have you considered branching out to Instagram and Twitter?

If you are struggling to appear on the organic search results, have you considered listings on Google Shopping?

 

[tony84]

You may need to spend some money to notice a difference which I know is hard in the early days but speculate to accumulate as they say...

@Lee Oakley does the SEO on our site and the hits on our site have doubled in the 12 months or so since he started. It took about 3-4 months to notice an improvement but since then it has gone up more or less every month since, as have the enquiries we receive.

He started by fixing some basic issues we had on the site and then found gaps in the market we could go after. You sound like you are prepared to do some of the work yourself which is great but I think if you are relying solely on facebook/twitter you are probably going to always struggle.

You could try amazon/ebay and put in some business cards in hope to direct those people to you in the longer term but you probably need to be looking at the bigger picture, which is scary when the smaller picture is not even paying the bills. As the saying goes, keep doing what you always do and you will keep getting what you always get - or whatever it is.

 

[rosieholly]

Your site analytics will tell you the source of your visitors.

It's very unlikely you will get many sales from your facebook followers. This puts their monetary value at close to zero. People who follow on facebook tend not to be people to buy things from external websites. If you sell on Facebook you can do well but you need many many more followers to make it worthwhile. My wife follows a facebook page for a type of china and maybe buys one piece per month. They have nearly 1million followers. Facebook adverts can be very lucrative but getting these to work well needs some skill and it needs to be something people want to buy. My Little Pony will generally do better than baked beans.

Which brings us back to your website. What are you selling? Who are you targeting? What is your marketing strategy?

Hi again i sell metaphysical goods my target customer is new age wiccan pagan people into crystals tarot etc these are the metatags i have used

 

[rosieholly]

Do you have Google Analytics (or similar) on your site? This should allow you to track where your customers are coming from.

If it shows that Facebook is a successful platform, have you considered branching out to Instagram and Twitter?

If you are struggling to appear on the organic search results, have you considered listings on Google Shopping?

Yes facebook is working i have linked this to Instagram. I have some traffic from google but not enough to generate healthy sales. Catch 22 is to pay for google ads once revenue is coming in but need the revenue first

 

[rosieholly]

You may need to spend some money to notice a difference which I know is hard in the early days but speculate to accumulate as they say...

@Lee Oakley does the SEO on our site and the hits on our site have doubled in the 12 months or so since he started. It took about 3-4 months to notice an improvement but since then it has gone up more or less every month since, as have the enquiries we receive.

He started by fixing some basic issues we had on the site and then found gaps in the market we could go after. You sound like you are prepared to do some of the work yourself which is great but I think if you are relying solely on facebook/twitter you are probably going to always struggle.

You could try amazon/ebay and put in some business cards in hope to direct those people to you in the longer term but you probably need to be looking at the bigger picture, which is scary when the smaller picture is not even paying the bills. As the saying goes, keep doing what you always do and you will keep getting what you always get - or whatever it is.

Thought about using a SEO expert. I use ebay and heavily use my logo here to get it seen again and again. I also point each ad to my website from ebay

 

[fisicx]

Hi again i sell metaphysical goods my target customer is new age wiccan pagan people into crystals tarot etc these are the metatags i have used

So lets go back to your 2500 followers. If you are getting 1 sale per week then it means most of those followers are of no value at all. If you closed down your FB page and focused on ebay and your website with some paid adverts you could easily increase the number of sales. Your analytics are the key to everything. They will tell you the source, what your visitors did and if the brought anything. What sort of bounce rate do you have? If it's above 20% it means you need to fix the site.

eBay buyers will not be visiting your website. They use eBay because they prefer this to other ways of buying. So promoting your logo/website on ebay isn't really helping. What does help is adding a 10% discount voucher to every order if they buy from your website.

 

[Mr D]

Hi again i sell metaphysical goods my target customer is new age wiccan pagan people into crystals tarot etc these are the metatags i have used

So where, besides facebook, can your customers be found? Can you advertise there?
Do you use any paid ad campaigns?
Marketing a website can take time and money - lots of customers may be found on the third party sites such as amazon, ebay, etsy etc but of course will have fees charged to sellers and they will be customers of those sites, not customers of your site.
Depends if you want sales or customers.

 

[tony84]

I dont necessarily agree that if they shop on ebay, they wont shop on your site.
You just need to give people a reason to come direct, that may be a discount or something. A lot will depend on how many times your customers are likely to come back.

Have you got your items on google shopping?
Do you do any marketing to existing customers? (assuming you have their permission to do so following GDPR).
Have you tried altering prices? Increase them and offer bigger discounts maybe?
Are you getting hits on your site? If so, we just need to convert more of them.
If not then you need to look at increasing them.

I used to do SEO many years ago but a lot has changed since then. I took a lot from what Lee told me and ran with it. Having some direction from him (or someone similar) can help. You could be writing posts, but if they are going to be on page 2 of google, it may as well be 92. We have discussions on the type of business we want, he then goes off and comes back with suggestions.

Sometimes I go off and do my own thing, but there is a lot more organisation and we are more targeted now, so the results are better.

 

[rosieholly]

I dont necessarily agree that if they shop on ebay, they wont shop on your site.
You just need to give people a reason to come direct, that may be a discount or something. A lot will depend on how many times your customers are likely to come back.

Have you got your items on google shopping?
Do you do any marketing to existing customers? (assuming you have their permission to do so following GDPR).
Have you tried altering prices? Increase them and offer bigger discounts maybe?
Are you getting hits on your site? If so, we just need to convert more of them.
If not then you need to look at increasing them.

I used to do SEO many years ago but a lot has changed since then. I took a lot from what Lee told me and ran with it. Having some direction from him (or someone similar) can help. You could be writing posts, but if they are going to be on page 2 of google, it may as well be 92. We have discussions on the type of business we want, he then goes off and comes back with suggestions.

Sometimes I go off and do my own thing, but there is a lot more organisation and we are more targeted now, so the results are better.

I have had repeat customers and i have a subscribe to my enewsletter page which has a good subscriber list. I send out a monthly newsletter consisting of information and new items in stock. I promote a discount code within this letter and it does generate sales. I use mailchimp and can see i have had 2 unsubscribes and 60% open click rate.

 

[rosieholly]

So where, besides facebook, can your customers be found? Can you advertise there?
Do you use any paid ad campaigns?
Marketing a website can take time and money - lots of customers may be found on the third party sites such as amazon, ebay, etsy etc but of course will have fees charged to sellers and they will be customers of those sites, not customers of your site.
Depends if you want sales or customers.

I use paid ad on facebook linked to instagram and this has brought me customers but minimal. I have thought of using google ads etc but thought i might have an issue with my meta tags. For instance i sell tarot cards so i use this meta tag but unless i type enchantingwillow into google i wont hit top 1000 page i bet. Im doing something wrong or just missing something big. This is my hobby job but i plan for it to generate a liveable income

 

[fisicx]

I have thought of using google ads etc but thought i might have an issue with my meta tags. For instance i sell tarot cards so i use this meta tag...

Ranking doesn't have anything to do with meta tags. Nor do google ads.

Your problem is wix. If you want a successful website don't use wix. Google doesn't like wix and people landing on your site from facebook or instagram won't like it either.

Wix is the spawn of the devil. And not in a wiccan way.

 

[rosieholly]

Ranking doesn't have anything to do with meta tags. Nor do google ads.

Your problem is wix. If you want a successful website don't use wix. Google doesn't like wix and people landing on your site from facebook or instagram won't like it either.

Wix is the spawn of the devil. And not in a wiccan way.

Oh blimey really?? Any suggestions ?

 

[fisicx]

Plenty of alternatives. Shopify is popular but has a monthly cost. Wordpress with Woocommerce is free - you just need to pay for hosting.

 

[rosieholly]

Plenty of alternatives. Shopify is popular but has a monthly cost. Wordpress with Woocommerce is free - you just need to pay for hosting.

Just checked my analytics and 36% of traffic is direct 61% is from Facebook. Will i have to have the site built again or can i (excuse the naivety) pick it up and drop it to another site building package? Do any businesses work with Wix?

 

[rosieholly]

I dont necessarily agree that if they shop on ebay, they wont shop on your site.
You just need to give people a reason to come direct, that may be a discount or something. A lot will depend on how many times your customers are likely to come back.

Have you got your items on google shopping?
Do you do any marketing to existing customers? (assuming you have their permission to do so following GDPR).
Have you tried altering prices? Increase them and offer bigger discounts maybe?
Are you getting hits on your site? If so, we just need to convert more of them.
If not then you need to look at increasing them.

I used to do SEO many years ago but a lot has changed since then. I took a lot from what Lee told me and ran with it. Having some direction from him (or someone similar) can help. You could be writing posts, but if they are going to be on page 2 of google, it may as well be 92. We have discussions on the type of business we want, he then goes off and comes back with suggestions.

Sometimes I go off and do my own thing, but there is a lot more organisation and we are more targeted now, so the results are better.

Thank you for replying you have given me a lot to think about

 

[rosieholly]

Plenty of alternatives. Shopify is popular but has a monthly cost. Wordpress with Woocommerce is free - you just need to pay for hosting.

Thank you for your help

 

[fisicx]

You have 2500 engaged followers on Facebook and 61% of your visitors come from Facebook. How many is this in real numbers? With only one sale per month it suggests very few of those followers ever visit the site and even fewer buy anything. Which means the value of those followers is low.

Now look at the other 39% who come from other sources. How many of them buy anything?

It’s analysis of your analytics that tell you want to do next. It may be that you can boost eBay or Amazon, rebuild the site, do some marketing or something else.

 

[gpietersz]

I agree with fisicx, on both the low value of FB followers who do not buy and about deciding what to do after analysing the numbers.

The original question was how to get attention away from FB. One thing is to market it every where you can. You do not even have a link to your site from your profile page here.

 

[crackerjackcommerce]

I would advise you to speak to someone on here who is a specialist in web design and marketing and set some specific goals: short term, mid-term and long term.

Furthermore I suggest you educate yourself either by reading blogs or speaking to multiple people regarding SEO. The more you know yourself, the better armed you will be.

IMHO if you are specialising in something i.e. metaphysical goods then this is a good start as it is not so general.

Ultimately you need to invest time and money and I would suggest you speak to someone established who can help you with your website and marketing.

It is great you have so many followers on FB and you should run some competitions or special offers to see exactly how many of them do interact/shop on your site.

Most experts you speak to will advise you to lose WIX and go with something more appropriate.

Good luck regardless!

 

[NathanGrieve]

Reddit is a great place to get honest feedback on your company. The forum is anonymous so people dont hold back with their opinions!

 

[fisicx]

Reddit is a great place to get honest feedback on your company. The forum is anonymous so people dont hold back with their opinions!

Which means you often just get a load of trolls. In any case not sure how asking on reddit about a dog walking or plumbing business is going to help.

 

[NathanGrieve]

Which means you often just get a load of trolls. In any case not sure how asking on reddit about a dog walking or plumbing business is going to help.

You receive feedback that you wouldn't receive in other places purely because it is anonymous. May have to ignore a few troll comments too.