Many bricks and mortar retailers have seen revenues lift this year, but fortunately they didn’t have a Google Panda to wrestle. We can’t tell you how many calls from Yahoo! Store merchants we’ve taken about plunging traffic and sales, and it’s all because of the last year’s (and possibly ongoing) Google algorithm changes. Just yesterday we spoke with a merchant who saw sales drop from $4000 a week to $400!
Some merchants feel so desperately helpless that they’re displacing blame whenever there’s the slightest possibility that anyone but Google is to blame. But the main culprits that affect search are a hyper-mutated version of they’ve always been, and require the same white hat efforts as before, only more vigilant this time:
1) Create a strategic keyword bank (the keyword can’t be “socks,” if that’s what you’re selling, but should go down four or five levels deep: swat black, knee high, waterproof socks ).
2) Develop high quality content to leverage keywords (product copy must be original, not supplier provided–this is the biggest trap of all)
3) Link build (inbound links still count, as do outbound ones–a blog is a good place to start this).
4) Check for SEO obstacles in domain, code, layout, or scripting issues.
5) Make sure store staff contributes to the site with SEO in mind (every time)
To get a good start, we recommend signing up for a SEO analysis. Here’s what comes with it (notice we didn’t copy and paste text from our product page to this blog–big SEO mistake):
