While many merchandising fundamentals apply, selling on the Internet has it’s own set of conventions, techniques, and methods. Ignoring these online commerce drivers results in e-commerce stores that merely exist.

If you’re an online retailer you may be painfully aware of what I mean. Yes… you sell online, but you’re store is not a significant contributor to your business. It just …. exists.

Creating a robust, merchandising ecommerce store is not an out-of-reach proposition for small businesses. It takes some time and elbow grease, but it is the difference between just having an online store and having a powerful online selling channel.

This strategy is not only not the goal, it’s the road to the poor house.

Since you are paying for every single click on your ad, you don’t want the most clicks, you want the most qualified clicks.  You only want those who are likely to buy. Any others, you’d like to actively discourage from clicking on your ad.

So, how do you discourage the unqualified riff-raff from clicking on your ads? Here’s some strategies:

1. Use negative keywords. Google Adwords lets you include a list of words that you definitely don’t want your ad showing up for. Common negative keywords include free,inexpensive, and cheap but should include any words that help you refine your targeted keywords. For instance, if you sell fine jewelry you might exclude terms such as costume, fashion, stainless steel.
2. Write “qualified” ad copy. Your copy can be written in a way that makes it clear that you don’t have what the riff-raff are looking for. Using our jewelry example, your ad might include a price point that eliminates all those looking for a cheap piece of jewelry.
3. Target your keywords narrowly. Broad keywords will bring broad traffic (translation: unqualified riff raff). If I’m a fine jewelry retailer and I target my ads to folks searching on the very broad term “jewelry” I should expect to get a lot of traffic from folks who’s budget is far below my price points.

But it’s not the ballgame. You certainly want to rank for your company name, but that’s pretty easy to achieve. And the only traffic it will bring you are people who are already familiar with your company.

The real gold is showing up on the first page of Google for terms related to the products and services you sell. These terms will bring you visitors searching for solutions who didn’t even know you existed prior to their search. And the search volume for these terms will be much higher than for your company name. Now, that’s the ballgame.

What about you? Does your company appear on the first page of Google when searching for the important search phrases for your product or service, or only for your company name?

Now, keep in mind that the search engines incorporate an enormous list of factors in their algorithms that determine search engine rankings, and domain age is just one of them. But it definitely has an effect.

What does this mean for you:

1. Buy your domains as soon as you can. Even if you won’t be ready to build the site for some time. They’ll sit their aging like fine wine and, when you’re ready to build your site, your aged domain will start with value that a brand new domain just won’t have.
2. If you have domains that you’ve bought in the past, it’s best to re-purpose them for other uses rather than let them expire. The older the domain (registration date), the more valuable it is.
3. If you have a site that’s been around a while, it has value even if you’re not seeing much traffic. With some basic web optimization, an older site can really come alive.

My experience was confirmed with a recent  article which reviewed the top 100 fastest growing companies and found that over half (58%) did not employ web optimization practices. Over half! And these are the hot, new, progressive companies. Really stunning. You can read the article here: SEO Basics Overlooked By Fastest Growing Companies

The really, really good news here is that savvy businesses can get a huge leg up on their asleep-at-the-wheel competitors by employing basic, bread and butter web optimization on their websites.

I’ve really resisted creating a website and blog for The Lariat Group for some time. Partly out of laziness and partly because I didn’t want to contribute one more site to the overpopulated “SEO consulting” website category. I’ve been a fan of Whired Rhino’s approach to SEO consultant site building.  More work. Less talk.

So, why have I given in and entered the fray? Well, I thought I might have a view that isn’t very well represented out there. I’d like to talk about web optimization and marketing from a small business perspective, because that’s my perspective.

I’m a small business owner who runs a network of sites including an ecommerce site. My Internet marketing lessons are hard learned and self-taught. I dont’ speak from theory but from experience creating, marketing and operating business websites.

Through these lessons I’ve gained a very solid  expertise in Internet marketing – SEO, PPC, Blgogging, Analytics. I thought I’d share some of what I”ve learned. I hope you find it helpful.