Forum Moderators: buckworks
You're looking to start an ecommerce website. Let's just say that everything else business wise is in order and you have some experience doing this. You have identified a few opportunities for which competition is still relatively low, you have access to the merchandise at a good price. There is relatively little price cutting/undercutting/competition so you don't have to be the "lowest price" out there. And the product lines are very similar in terms of being in the same industry, but are different niches.
Now, you are looking at the search popularity of the different items (generic tem) and brand name (specific searches).
My question is, let's say you gather up all the search terms for which you feel reasonably comfortable that you can get good ranking for. And you look at both overture and wordtracker searches...
When you are building a site, what is a good number of combined searches you would like to see before you can comfortable say, this is a good idea to move forward with?
Not that search engines are everything, but in the beginning, they are crucial until you can build a brand and get press mention, etc....
I wanted to post this question here to see what you all think.
You should have a feel for the average sale value you are expecting (to within about +- 20% or so), so you should know how many sales you need to make (GST/value per sale = no. of sales reqd)
So, knowing how many sales you need, based on your experience, what %age of visitors would you expect to sell to? From this you can work out how many visitors you need. Given the combined number of searches on the terms you have identified, does it seem reasonable that you can capture the neccessary number of visitors from the total pool available?
Its difficult to be precise here, as I'm having to state the general case, rather than use figures. I would also recommend that you run the sums 3 times, best case (optomistic), middle case (what you really think) and worst case (Google hates me)
If you can live (for a while at least) with the Worst Case figures, go for it
