In our everyday dealings with our own customers, we instruct, get asked and generally can talk all day about proper content for one’s online store. This has always been a tough thing to properly execute on the part of the shop owner.

We spend our days telling shop owners to write natural language describing their products to their customers, just as they would for example on the phone with a shopper. To this end, we get endless questions about keywords, density, traffic and more….. End result, most shop owners write spam. Why do you suppose that is?

Simple really, its quite hard not to grab a cookie while your hand is in the jar. Shop owners as a whole have a very challenging time being objective in their pursuit for great search rank. Honestly, shop owners who know little or nothing about SEO inevitably write better rankable content. Why?

Simple, shop owner’s who are not trying to learn SEO… cannot be lured to the dark side and when they write, they write for their customers. Fact is, these shop owners are on a whole more successful with their content as well. Their shoppers are more engaged, they trust the store…. and most importantly, they convert better.

We have said to many a client after finishing up an SEO My Zen Cart package, that they needed only to create great content regularly and build links going forward to be successful. You see, once duplication issues and other foundation optimization values are handled…. It’s really just that. Keep up with regular content (Google likes to know the lights are on AND someone is home) and build new inbound links.

If shop owners can manage these 2 things faithfully… Even if many foundation optimization issues exist, they can in fact be more successful.

Let’s theorize for a moment, my desk phone rings… One the other end is a shop owner getting about 100 unique visits a day and converting at say 1.2%. This shop owner hardly ever tends to his content and has probably NEVER even been all the way through his own checkout.

What would your first steps be?

Many will say… Build links, write articles, you need a press release… No you need pay per click.

None of the above is the answer, for those who were playing along. While all of those things in themselves can bring traffic and rank (more traffic), not a damn one of those things will help you make the sale.

So we have this shop, making 1 or 2 sales a day… willing to spend a wad of cash to bring in say another 100 visits so they can then do 3 or 4 sales a day! Isn’t that kinda like putting the cart before the horse?

My answer would be to do a proper usability study of the website, optimize the checkout and trust factors on site and segment their Analytics data to troubleshoot bottlenecks and troublesome areas. Cost, maybe $400… Reward, now you can take those same 100 original unique visitors a day and instead make 4 to 5 sales a day to fund your then convertible traffic campaign! So, small investment, return immediate… and 75% more sales!

Sometimes, we just have to pull our heads out of our little web bubble and use them for the greater good =-)