SEO for online merchant sites is easy.  Ask anybody.

Search engine optimization has, I believe, become a commodity in the minds of many small and mid-size business owners. Telephone and email spam constantly pitches retailers having Internet sites a familiar mantra: “we’ll put you on the first page”.  Logic suggests that if everybody can do this, then anybody can do this.  Engage a few of the callers in conversation and it becomes clear that much of the work will be done in countries where labor is cheap.  What the heck, thinks the site owner.  If somebody making less than $1.00 an hour can crank my site to the top, why can’t I?  And, of course, a sales pitch like that wouldn’t be credible unless in fact, examples could be shown that it did work at least some of the time.

I’ll back up a little here.  I was on the phone about a week ago with a client who owns and operates a bricks and mortar store of some size selling expensive office equipment.  They have an Internet site promoting their equipment and the supplies it consumes.  The site was in poor shape and in a span of three months we have gone through a complete rebuild. The graphics are now great and on topic. We have repaired major problems with url rewriting, and we properly focused the internal navigation structure.  Having been given a limited beginning budget and four high-priority landing pages, we carefully optimized those based upon serious keyword research.  Recession or not, their visitor traffic is up 50% and the telephone is ringing more than before our work.  My telephone call to them is a semi-monthly follow up.  So far so good, says our client - it’s time to get the remaining fifty or so landing pages bringing in more traffic and more calls.

Can you email me an SEO checklist, he asks .…

Well, yes, I say.  We are after all consultants, and it’s fine if that is how you wish to engage us.  Let me think about this, put some things together, and I’ll get back to you in a week.

I know what our client wants, and an SEO checklist isn’t it, unless by following said list and checking off the items one-by-one will result in more qualified visitor traffic AND more telephone calls AND more sales.  (A telephone call or a form submittal is the conversion for this site – few would add-to-cart a $10,000.00 item, check out, and await the arrival of their purchase).  In our client’s mind SEO is the whole enchilada: visitors, conversion, and sales.  But that’s OK I think.  We deliver the whole package for our own sites and for many clients.  Why not resolve the process into a checklist?  

Why not, indeed.  It’s been more than the promised week and I’m nowhere near done.  My list grows and grows and the minimum detail-per-item grows as well.  It may become a never-ending project.  

So stay tuned – I’ll add to this topic every now and then.  Bookmark us.  Please comment freely as my journal develops.  I really am interested.  

Bruce Clerk