Planet13 - 10:29 pm on Nov 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

@ jecasc

Have you checked your competition?

Yes, and for the ORGANIC listings, we seem to sell our products for 10% to 20% LESS than those that appear in the top serps.

But it should be noted that what we sell is more along the line of arts and crafts, and they are somewhat unique, so it is hard to make an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

Sometimes it is not about your website, but simply a competitor has improved his website or has some special offers.

I can certainly understand your point. I don't really see any special discounts or value adds that they are providing. Our prices tend to be the same or lower. They probably have better brand name recognition, but it is not a niche where there is much (if any) brand awareness,

Also, we have recently added some new photos of our products to present them a little better. We've also taken steps to make the site more user-friendly, and made the calls to action more prominent.

"Most users check two or three websites before deciding where to buy."

I definitely do that when I buy something that is something of a commodity (like a digital camera). In our case, it might be a bit difficult for customer to compare across websites due to the individuality of the products.

Having said that we compare evenly or favorably to other sites that near or above us in the organic SERPs, there are indeed lots of people selling the products via adwords at cheaper prices. It is hard for ME to really determine if they are stealing our business though, because most of those SMALL companies that advertise seem to come and go after a few weeks, and the larger companies (ebay, amazon, etch) have landing pages that aren't even for the particular category of products. it is usually just a generic search page when the lander has to type in the search phrase.