What will you do to compensate for the loss in traffic?

[francesca]

The recent update in Google has caused a drop of traffic for many e-commerce sites. For those affected, what steps will you do to compensate for the loss in traffic especially since the Christmas shooping rush is fast approaching.

[Hawkgirl]

Hmmmm. A few top-of-mind ideas:

1. Email previous customers with a "special - only for our loyal customers" offer to get some returning customers.

2. Try to emphasize the cross-sell/up-sell side of your site. If they're buying one large green widget, sell 'em a second one (or a red one, or the extra-large one) at 25% off. If they're buying the regular electric widget, convince them what they really want is the top-of-the-line widget.

3. Try to get some new traffic partners. If your traffic is down, so is the traffic of other sites. Do you sell books? Partner with a site that sells magazines. Do you sell socks? Partner with a site that sells shoes.

4. Make sure your site is as usable as possible. If you're getting less traffic, convert more of the traffic you're getting! Get rid of broken links, poor copy, fuzzy images, buttons that don't look like buttons, and anything else standing between you and getting more customers.

[hannamyluv]

Hmm... seeing as how I was forced from the get-go to do without google (hired by a company with a dynamic site), I'll tell you what we do.

Weekly or bi weekly emails promoting different products combined with different specials.

Quarterly contests to encourage email sign up.

Viral encouragement in emails (i.e. Forward to a friend)

Data feeds, cpc ads and banner ads

Cross Sell & Up sell at both the product level and after the sale.

Coming soon - affiliate program

Blow-ins & package inserts at compatible, non-competative companies.

Coming soon - Ride alongs in other companies' emails

Coming soon - Content information pages that will have ads for our products

I will admit, we are a catalog company so there are times that catalog drops drive our traffic, but at this time internet promted sales make up about half our sales and we have precious few useable links in google. Our homepage is about it and it only comes up for ourcatalog and company name.

[Essex_boy]

This happened to me in May, I following advice received here, I targeted other engines. Chuff all you can do about it.

[francesca]

Thanks for the suggestions. Google has been our major soure of traffic so the update in google really hurt our traffic. I'll just use this time to concentrate on other advertising channels that I've neglected before.

[paulewing]

I did not really get hit much by the update. I lost a few positions on some words, but nothing horrid. My recomendation for people would be to look at Adwords and Overture to cover you until things sort out.

Also an email newsletter helps us to pick up our repeat buyers who are our most important customers since they usually increase the purchase amounts with each order as they gain confidence in our business.

Cheers

[andy_boyd]

This happened to me as well and I lost a lot of business over the head of it. I tweaked the pages a little but kept everything white-hat, it's bad enough getting dropped for a few months but you don't want to get removed from the index altogether.

I worked on building traffic from directories and link exchanges. As well as that I started to spread my risks by developing other sites which were very focussed in terms of their offerings. Instead of having one site selling widgets in every size / colour / brand combination, I began to open sites which sold widgets by a certain company. This meant that if the one big site dropped for "blue widgets" my smaller more targetted site stayed up for the same keyphrase and brought in sales.

It's time consuming but in the long term, well worth it.