Use Shopping Sites to Boost Traffic

This guest post is part of our ongoing Small Business Experts series, and is written by the Internet Marketing Center (www.internetmarketing.com)

Did you know that customers viewing results on a shopping search engine are TWICE as likely to convert into a sale?

Shopping search engines — like Shopping.com and PriceGrabber.com — are like search engines, except they focus on helping shoppers locate the products or services they’re looking for on the Internet and compare the offerings of different online merchants.

Because they’re constantly updated, these shopping sites rise to the top of the search engine rankings, so a listing can get your product in front of a lot of buyers!

But the top 3 listings on a shopping site page get over 50% of the sales. So how do you get your listings up there?

There are a few different ways that shopping sites arrange their listings, so you have to tailor your strategy for the site you’re using.

Here are the main ways you can get your site to the top of the listings…

Pay for an enhanced listing. Some shopping engines, such as Nextag.com, allow you to pay your way to a top listing.

The ones where you pay per click usually give you the option of paying more for each click to appear higher in the results. Others will allow you to pay a flat fee for top billing or to display an advertisement for your products across their networks.

Compete on price. On some shopping sites, the products with the lowest prices appear at the top by default. Other sites allow users to sort listings by price even if that’s not the default. So in a highly competitive area, you may want to discount your product to attract shoppers (which also boosts your merchant rating, explained below).

Boost your merchant/user rating. At sites like PriceGrabber.com and Shopping.com, your merchant rating increases as you attract more customers and get glowing customer reviews. The higher your merchant rating, the higher you’ll appear in the listings. So encourage your customers to review your products and website for you… and if that doesn’t work, offer an incentive!

Optimize your product listings for relevant keywords. Shopping engines like Google Product Search and Bing Shopping display listings based on their relevance to keyword searches.

Each product listing must include keywords describing the attributes of your product (price, color, size, UPC code, and model numbers, etc). You should include keywords in the listing’s title, description tags, and image alt text. Each shopping portal has different allowances when it comes to how much information you can include, so read the fine print!

(Note: Even if you don’t have a website, you can take advantage of shopping search engines. Some, like PriceGrabber.com and Amazon.com — and of course eBay — let you list items from your offline store and put them in front of online shoppers.)

Tagged as: intent to buy, review site marketing, review sites, shopping sites, small biz marketing, small business ideas