Many new online retailers make the mistake of thinking that an e-commerce store is just a brick-and-mortar store placed on a website. Oh, so wrong.

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.

A common misconception about pay-per-click (PPC)  advertising is that the goal is to get the maximum number of people to click on your ad. In other words, the higher the click-thru-rate (CTR) the better.

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.

Does that sound familiar? Do you celebrate your company name’s top ranking and think that you’re all set? Your website is optimized? You wouldn’t be alone. Too many businesses think coming up #1 in Google for their company name is the ballgame.

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?

The world of domains is one area where older is better. The longer your domain has been around, the more value it has in the eyes of the search engines.

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.