tips for e-commerce: focus on SEO or focus on Social?

[marcocolombo]

Hello everyone,

I want to know about an e-commerce, it is preferable to focus on Seo tout court or focus their attention on social?

[netmeg]

Focus on users.

[DXL]

SEO isn't especially reliable, considering how much Google has changed over the last two years. Although it's harder to quantify the results of social network promotion (Twitter, Facebook), I think the longtime results will be better.

But "social media promotion" means absolutely nothing if you don't know how to engage your target audience, and establish a relationship with them.

[incrediBILL]

Focus on making your site the best, your support the best, shipping costs easy to find, your policies for returns the best, and the social will take care of itself as people rave about the site.

As an example, I found Zappo's from word of mouth. Nnot advertising, not SEO, and not their social, but REAL social with people clamoring about it.

You're either delivering the best prices and shopping experience possible, or your not, and all the rest is moot.

Also, if you have good ecommerce software most of the SEO takes care of itself. Just create unique product titles and descriptions, don't use the prepackaged stuff, and include generic product terms.

For instance, while people that know what a "Nike XYZ" is will search for it specifically, but if it doesn't include words like "Running Shoe" or "Hiking Shoe" then you're wasting your time as product IDs only work after they've found it and are shopping for price.

[Planet13]

Hi there, marcocolombo:

Welcome to webmaster world.

I can only say that it is a very, very good idea to pay CLOSE ATTENTION to anything written in these forums by netmeg, incrediBILL, Robert Charlton, martinibuster, and goodroi.

~~~~~

As for my own personal opinion on which is better, google analytics will let you know once you have it set up properly.

[incrediBILL]

As for my own personal opinion on which is better, google analytics will let you know once you have it set up properly.

That used to be the case.

I used to tell people they were wasting time and money with ranking reports until the jackholes at Google stopped sending the referrer data so we no longer get the keywords from the query string.

Analytics are just OK, they tell you it's GOOD but not why and you can only guess using data from Google's WMT and Ranking reports.

Google has really screwed the pooch when it comes to analysis and it really pisses me off.

Then again, what doesn't?

P.S. Thanks for the kind shout out ;)

[piatkow]

Most of the things that I would have said are in the posts above.

The main thing for any ecommerce novice is to remember that its the business that is important not the on-line bit. You pay the bills from sales not from page views.

[tangor]

One way you can find out which is best is to include a simple drop down form "How did you find us?" on the CHECK OUT page. Offer three choices (not required, but in the mix!):

Internet Search
Family or Friends
Social Media (Facebook, etc)

Run your metrics on those results then extrapolate from there.

As others above have said, make your site the best it can be, give good service/product, and go from there.

[marcocolombo]

<snip>

At the moment I'm using very GPLUS and TUMBLR (which I've read is very useful for e-commerce-rich images)

On LB can you tell me if the guest posting still has a sense?

[edited by: goodroi at 4:14 pm (utc) on Sep 11, 2014]
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