Questioning Google's relevancy and value for ecommerce sites

[jacon4]

well, this is really a google day today in here. as i have nothing to offer on the cookie, privacy issues i'll just vent a little on the ecomm issues. i have given up on google ( as i suspect other biz owners have), as this PR thingy simply does not work for commercial sites. its a one size fits all kind of approach. in my view you simply cant rank web stores with a robot, links, type approach, its way to mechanical and results in alot junk sites that are not really relevant. for instance, in my field google lists 2.5 million sites, are there really that many web stores that sell them? i think not and if one looks at googles 1st page of results for the search term, its littered with non relevant sites.as for google being the most "important search engine", this to is a myth at least for ecomm sites. the only category that google leads in is, time of search, this has nothing to do with selling product. when i rank high in google and get hits, they normally are poor quality hits resulting in few sales, i suspect because on googles page 1 results, 3 of the sites listed are " freebie sites" a couple more are for collectors, one is in russian ( lol ) and almost none are for what our customers are looking for. my 2 cents

[edited by: Marcia at 12:58 am (utc) on Sep. 3, 2002]
[edit reason] edited to remove references to specific product [/edit]

[Filipe]

Jacon4, it can be done, I've known people to do it, and I've done it myself. Google leads overall, you just have to know what you're doing. If you have good products and people associate you with those (links, pref. text links) then you will get high valuable rankings.

[Marcia]

jacon4, there are many people who literally make their living from ecommerce sites, with most of their traffic coming from Google. We've had many testimonies here from people who's business improved drastically after making modifications for improvement and optimizing their sites to get better rankings. You can find some in our Webmaster World Community Center [webmasterworld.com]. It's easy to get discouraged, but it can be done.

The results at Google are for pages, not sites. Some sites have many pages, and in addition to those selling products there are some that are informational, have links to or make mention of any particular product. People are also sometimes looking for those.

The broader the search phrase is, the more varied the types of results; it's more lucrative to narrow phrases down. The more specific the searches are, the easier it is for consumers to find what they're looking for. And the more specifically targeted a web page is created, the more chance there is of getting targeted traffic that will convert.

[jacon4]

well, everybody is entitled to their opinion but as soon as someone starts telling me how great something is, its a red flag for me. we are primarily wholesale distributors who sell to retail locations, the website is simply a device to sell a single item. since most of our customers are foreign nationals we set our site up for them, not some puter geek. as for many people making a living selling products on google, i say great, even a blind squirrel is going to find an acorn now and then.as for me, i have had high rankings in google, i just found the quality of hits to be poor, sales wise.

[Chef_Brian]

Hey Jacon4,

Possibly think about creating a site that fits within the "theme" of your business site but create a site that offers something of value to the same people you want on your business site. Give them something to talk about (or email about) for free. Create content that will drive your business site, then link from your new "content site" to your business site. This will transfer some of that pagerank that is so important to rankings on google.

I spent 14 months working on my "content site" that now is a pagerank6 and on the move. Now I am focused on creating business sites and linking to them from my content site as stated above. So far so good, as my earnings are increasing month after month from the four or five programs I am promoting.

Hope this helps,

Chef Brian

[Marcia]

It can also be largely a matter of selecting the right keyword phrases.

>primarily wholesale distributors who sell to retail locations

Let's take a neutral example none of us is involved with:

picture frames - 1,140,000 pages returned at Google
wholesale picture frames - 51,800 pages returned

Over a million is fairly competitive, and can include retail customers, those looking for information on different types, and those looking to buy them retail either finished, or unfinished to paint or stain, as well as wholesale. It would be very difficult for someone looking for wholesale picture frames to find what they're looking for; it's not a good search term for them to use.

On the other hand, 51,800 is NOT competitive, and while it won't bring as much traffic, not only is if far easier to achieve top rankings for with the most basic of optimization skills, it will bring targeted traffic that's much more likely to become paying customers.

Sometimes all it takes is a little study and strategizing to turn everything around.

[chiyo]

While I am sympathetic to the views of Marcia here, I as seeing the trend of Google to favour information type and niche targeted pages.

Marcias point about pages rather than sites is good too by the way. It is something we need to be reminded of.

However, I see the trend of google continuing. Mainly because they way they rank sites - PR, targeted phrases etc, we are backing on Google in the future being the search engine for content sites, not e-commerce and commercial sites. For our commercial sites, we are gradually moving away from depending on Google and using other methods such as links/ads from other sites, Adwords, Overture, Niched Product directory type sites, off-line promotion, and other search engines via paying as far as our budget goes (very little!)

I do see the trend as being that if you have a site that is focused on selling off the site, forget google. In future, we will have to pay for on line promotion of these sites, which is only sensible and accepted in all other areas of media.

The free ride on Google for commercial sites is coming to an end, and I think that's a good thing. We are quite happy to pay for promotion of our commercial sites, but can't, from a business point of view, pay for our free content sites that dont make revenue.

PLUS:

No search engine, IMHO, can be good at getting both objective valuable free content AND ways to spend your money in one go! Thats one reason why search engines that combine the two by intermingling untrasparently commercial and free listings are losing out to google and other engines. Google CAN do it by using Adwords, but it is in effect two different unrelated databases.

[jacon4]

chiyo, very good point, i think you are correct that google is an information type site and that point i think is proved by the fact that the only category google leads in is " time of search" . according to what i have read, people spend an average of 40 mins per search on google. i dont know exactly what they are doing all that time but one things for sure, they are not shopping for product.

[danny]

I use Google a lot, but when I'm looking to buy something I switch to other tools. I bought a digital camera recently, for example, but there I used Google to find some camera review sites, used those to research which model I wanted, and then used price comparison and vendor review sites to find a shop to order it from.

And when I'm buying books, I don't type titles into Google and expect to get purchasing information back (I expect to get stuff like my own and other people's reviews, plus author and publisher pages about the book)- I use sites like ABEbooks or Bookfinder or Amazon for that.