Stop obsessing over search engine rankings

As the owner of an e-commerce store, my top advice to other owners is to stop obsessing over search engine rankings. Instead, focus on building your brand.

In the real world, we buy stuff from people that we like. The “better” car salesman is probably more likable. The same principle applies online: Real people purchase from your site; Googlebot does not.

Despite being a small store, you can still build a brand that customers will remember and identify with. However, being obsessed with search engine rankings means that you’re too focused on new customers. As you’ve undoubtedly heard, repeat customers are the lifeline of a small business. So, stop obsessing over the small tweaks to the search engine algorithms and put your attention toward building your brand.

This investment will have massive benefits. It will create word-of-mouth marketing. It will build loyalty. It will help expand your business far beyond the number of new people searching for your keywords.

The biggest “problem” with search engine optimization is that you’re limited by the number of people who search for the keywords in which you’re interested. All of the most popular and most profitable keywords are already hotly contested. You’re going to have a hard time competing in that space. But, if you pick the “long tail” of keywords, there may be less competition, but there are fewer customers.

Therefore, you must become the keyword.

You must create a personality for your website. It needs a “voice.” It needs, for lack of a better word, a soul. You can’t just copy your manufacturer’s product description and photo, “optimize” your pages for Google, and watch the money pile up.

Real people want to purchase from someone they like. True, they may like a cheaper price. But that’s short-sighted. You’re a small business. You can’t compete on price alone. Low margins must be supported by high volume. Small businesses don’t have high volume. You must compete on service, selection, and entertainment value. You must become memorable.

If you add personality and spark to your website copy, visitors will begin to trust that there’s a real person and a real company behind the storefront. And if you can make someone laugh, oh boy, you may have a customer for life! You must walk a fine line between the clever and the absurd, but that’s what separates you from the robotic machine that is Amazon and Walmart.com.

Most of you have probably already optimized your site to the point where you’re getting 95% of the organic and paid traffic that can be expected. Now, you must optimize your site so that people remember you, tell their friends, and keep coming back.

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Here are some ideas to get you started.

Put yourself out there. You can become the brand.

• Video record yourself talking about every product.
• Put yourself on every page and create an aura of expertise around yourself. Talk about industry or product category.
• Give your opinion. Make it fun. Make it interesting. Make it engaging.

Double down on your service efforts.

• Offer customization.
• Offer free consultations.
• Promise to answer customer emails within 30 minutes during regular business hours.
• Provide customers with the owner’s email address so they can resolve their issue promptly.
• Put forums on your website where customers can talk about issues related to your industry. Be active in the forum.

Infuse your website copy with the “human touch.”

• Stop sounding like the manufacturer. Remove the marketing hype and fluff.

• If there are “problems” with a product, POINT THEM OUT! The amount of trust that you will create by highlighting an issue with a product will earn you customers for life. It’s difficult to “slam” a product that you’re selling, but if it has an issue or two, highlight them. Many customers will buy anyway, but those who don’t will trust your opinion on every other item you sell.

Will this strategy work? Here are some stats from my website:

• Over the past three years, our traffic has tripled without increasing our pay-per-click spend.

• In 2008, our top referrer was Google, which represented 31% of our traffic. Today, our top source is people typing our domain name directly; Google accounts for just 20% of our traffic.

• In 2008, our domain name represented 1.4% of the keyword searches used to find our website. Today, our domain name represents 23% of all keyword searches used to find our site.

Remember, no change in the search engine algorithm can affect the traffic for people coming to your site directly.