The times are hard. Economy in recession, online shoppers are saving money and seeking for more bargains. This in turn translates into bigger competition among online sellers.
But it’s been said many times and we’ll repeat it again – it’s about selling SMART that will make the difference. And one of those smart things that gives the edge to every online entrepreneur is SEO – Search Engine Optimization.
SEO. Sounds very technical, doesn’t it? How many times you’ve heard this term and thought – “Oh God, it must be so complicated! Most likely only the big companies can afford hiring SEO specialists and maintain high Search Engine rankings…”
In all fairness, nothing could be further from the truth, our dear eBay seller!
No matter how small you are on eBay, the chances for your product’s listing to appear on Search Engine search results are quite high since the eBay website is very important in any Search Engine’s eyes. Other website’s containing millions of pages - EzineArticles.com, Squidoo.com, Wikipedia.org and others always tend to perform very well in Google.com, Yahoo.com, Ask.com and other popular Search Engines.
But no doubt Google has the biggest traffic share on the Web – both in the States and across the Atlantics. So for the sake of simplicity we’ll replace mentioning Search Engines with Google from now on.
But if you’re not very familiar with this whole Internet searching mechanism, you might think – “Is appearing on Google so important for me? Surely the biggest market exposure is gained by appearing in eBay’s search results?” Well, better think twice before making such a statement! You’re only partially correct.
The repeated eBay shoppers will indeed go to eBay in the first place before starting searching the things they’d like to buy. But still a significant number of folks will start their online shopping with going to the most popular search engine – namely, Google, and start their search from there.
Sure, the numbers will vary over time and there are some indications that Google is changing the things a little bit. Nonetheless, the important fact remains – you can get plenty of visitors to your eBay Shop and listings from Google.com and other Search Engines.
So what’s this SEO is all about? For us, ordinary eBay sellers, the main thing to focus on is the keywords. Those are the search phrases used by the shoppers to look up the things they want to buy.
“Antique lamps” and “children’s shoes size 12” are examples of keywords entered in Google or eBay search windows to bring up a list of available search results. So obviously you need to figure out what are the most fitting keywords for your products and on most of occasions it’s a common sense.
However, not always you can guess what is the most sought keyword for a particular item, so there are two very useful tools that come handy to get a very good idea on what are the exact keywords used by online shoppers.
One is BayEstimator - a tool that will show you what keywords the eBay shoppers enter when looking for particular products. A tutorial on using the BayEstimator tool can be found in this blog post.
The second is the Google’s Keyword tool and it can be used very effectively to find out what are the search terms entered by Google users to look up the respective products. Using this tool is also very simple – you just need to enter a main keyword, let’s say, “Computer motherboards”, and the Keyword Tool is going to show you the search volume of this and related keywords.
As a result of using these two tools you will have found relevant keywords for describe your products in eBay listing headline and description, and here you can read a very simple action plan on how to simply and effectively use the keywords in your eBay listings.
In a nutshell you need to include the main keyword in the eBay listing’s title and throughout the description and don’t forget to write the description of around 200 or more words. That way you will give both eBay and Google high quality content to bring up in search results.
More visitors, more sales, more recession-proof income!
So much about eBay SEO this time, it really shouldn’t take you more than 30 minutes to understand and research. And don’t forget to take action and implement those few simple steps!
And of course, if you write a few useful eBay Guides and Reviews – you will increase the chances of someone finding your listings via Google even more.
Remember – every additional chunk of text and every link pointing to your eBay Shop and listings may result in a good number of additional sales!
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