Do your products deserve more attention
Author: Tim NashRunning e-commerce sites can be a great source of revenue but have you ever been in the situation where only a couple of products are being sold at the expense of others after all you can only feature so many products on your home page.
Mini Sites
Mini or niche sites are a favoured tactic of the SEO community for years, they allow you to target specific terms without having to adjust an entire site instead you create smaller sites dedicated to one product or niche that then link back to the main page to make the sale. These sites work because they are bringing the searcher exactly what they want, no hassle or fuss.
Determining suitable products
Mini sites are all about balance finding products that people are searching for and are easy to compete in the SERPs the key therefore to our mini sites is research.
Keyword research is laborious and tiresome anyone who has done any serious niche blog development will tell you how many possible combination of subjects their are out there you would be amazed the number of extreme ironing websites there are. However we are at a significant advantage in that instead of the near infinite topics niche bloggers have we only have a finite number that of our product catalogue.
Using word tracker and Google trends
We will use a simpler version of a technique I use for finding niche sites but for the purposes we are using it for it will work perfectly. Instead of me explaining it I’m going to use a video from the Thirty Day Challenge which if you haven’t already discovered is a great little site.
Just a few points
- In the video they use a base line “male yeast infection” the reason is simply they know the approximate traffic for high ranking page for that term
- Wordtracker is US based so some keywords it will have problems with
- You can save yourself some time by using the Firefox or IE 7 search plugin for Wordtracker
So now go through all your products looking at both Wordtracker and Google trends and then for each one do a Google search jotting down the number of competing sites (as part of this you may want to also check your own sites current rank for individual products) You are looking for products with high number of searchers but small number of sites ranking for the term.
Hopefully you have been able to find 3 to 4 products so now its time to create your mini sites.
Developing mini sites
There are loads of resources out there for developing Mini sites and niche site’s some of the best are Quick Whois Mini site guide, and Net business blog Niche Case study. However before jumping in and setting up your site there are a few things to remember and watch out for.
- Domain names - The nice thing about a mini site is you can buy a nice highly targeted domain name however when thinking of domain names remember that you cannot use other companies brand names so for example even though you might be selling Heinz Backed beans you can’t use Heinz name therefore you will need to look for a name like backedbeans.com
- Make your sales direct - while we haven’t discussed your main site at all in this article you need to make sure that you can go from the mini site direct to the checkout in a single click, you don’t after all want to lose that customer
- Unique content - don’t just copy and paste your product description rewrite and expand it, also use pictures where appropriate.
Mini sites are a lot of hard work, however if you are running a large e-commerce store having 10 or 15 high ranking satellite mini sites will bring in a continuous stream of sales, allowing our to focus on the high traffic high number of retailer products on your main site front page.
Johnty
from SEO Forensics2007-08-13 18:40:45
About the domain naming, does it matter if you are naming after a specific model or other number, I mean lets say your selling Acer Travelmates could you have travelmate620.com for example or would that breach the guidelines?
Also what would you reccomend for the mini sites 1 page static salespages or multiple pages maybe even a blog?
Tim Nash
2007-08-14 00:28:22
hey Johnty sorry about the wait your comment got held up
I really need to put my I’m not a lawyer hat on before answering any questions, and my understanding of trademark law is simply if its a trademark you can’t use it in a domain name, so in your above example if travelmate is a trademark of Acer then technically you couldn’t use it.
One page sales pages never rank well normally so your looking for at least 2 to 3 page site, though of course if you got lots to say then a blog is a great way to get unique content. But remember these sites are promoting just 1 product the temptation is to slip in a few extra.
Design for MySpace
2007-08-16 15:05:10
Tim,
Do not understand some of your points or i think they are too generic in nature. Like the content should be simple and un-copied well that’s pretty easy indeed.
And then how can wordtracker and analytics help immensly (with full respect to what they can do)
Sometimes i see people making microsites without understanding its need or even whether they’re required or not.
Nick
2007-08-19 14:01:48
I think it is much better to use a more general term in your domain. Even if “travelmate” is not a trademark, or Acer gave you a permission to use it, it is hard to compete the vendor on SERPs.
Instead you should try to rank for terms like “laptops” or “laptop reviews”. This way your mini site can work more like a landing page, and sell 2-3 different products on the same category(2-3 different notebooks in our case).
Tim Nash
2007-08-19 14:50:54
The problem with that is you lose the chief benefit which is the highly targeted domain name, remember these sites are being developed to rank for only 1 product.
Tim Nash
2007-08-23 17:05:25
@design for myspace - Akismet decided you were spam
I guess it must have been your choice of name.
To answer your question we are using wordtracker and google trends for a specific purpose in this case to find which of the products we sell has the highest number of users searching for them on major search engines. we then cross reference this with the number of sites appearing in the search results for this product. We are looking for a balance between visitors searching and competition, its unlikely that the product most searched for will have no other sites with information about it.
The key to the microsites here is to promote (in search engines) a paticular product from our range though I have used eccomerce as an example it can work on almost any niche that has several subjects.