Search Engine Optimisation - Tuesday, July 29, 2008 15:16 - 2 Comments

SEO For Gift Shops

Selling your products online is an excellent way to reach a much wider audience than you can from a traditional shop. With the huge amount of search online and the ever increasing trust associated with online shopping, more and more gift shops are also releasing online stores. And SEO for gift shops is becoming more competitive.

As this continues to increase, the competition to get more visitors to your website becomes more and more fierce. On Australian search engines, Google now completely dominates with over 80% or search traffic turning to Google. This is not a new realisation, so many people have made a dedicated effort to be found in prominent positions on Google when someone searches for the type of gifts they sell.

To come to the top of Google for generic phrases such as 'gifts' or 'gift ideas' has become very difficult. It will be time consuming to do this yourself or expensive to hire a professional. To tell you the truth though, there is a much better way to get good traffic to your site from Google faster.

Every store has the gifts they specialise in. Whether it is 'kids gifts', 'AFL gifts', 'wine gifts' or whatever. By narrowing down your target market into such niche gift types you will not only greatly increase the likeliness of success from an seo campaign but also shorten that amount of time waiting to get a return on your investment.

Another benefit is that if someone is searching for say an 'AFL Gift', they are much further through their buying process and more likely to make a purchase, or at least find what they are looking for.

Of course Google Adwords is another option but it is even more risky. You could spend huge amounts of money to have a sponsored link for a term like 'Gifts' and make very few sales. It is too broad a term for any gift shop. You will surely be paying for many people to come to your website who are totally not interested in what you are selling. I am actually suprised that so many people bid for such a term.

The benefit that can be gained from a very high organic ranking on Google is huge. I have seen different online retail stores grow from home based businesses to very large companies in a short space of time. Most of them have realised their target market, done indepth 'keyphrase research' and attacked the niche keywords relevant to what they sell.

SEO for gift shops is very exciting. Once you get to the first page you almost always see an increase in visitors and sales, more with every position you climb. As with every market though the competition will continue to increase. So the longer people wait the more difficult it will get. Clever online gift store owners are already making a lot of money through quality SEO.

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