Designing an Effective Ecommerce Site

[billbenson]

There are only two major companies in the industry. Customers standardize on one of the two. It's OSHA regulated stuff, so you can't mix and match products and comply with OSHA.

In AdWords the term has 5 times the impressions of the next term and a CTR of 40% which is by far the highest as well. Site stats show that as well. Its also confirmed a bit by customer phone call when I asked them what they searched for.

Except in rare searches, the customer search will either contain the Manufacturer name or Trademark product names. Every single AdWords ad that you see will have their company name in the ad.

The site has several major problems. The descriptions are in gibberish provided by the manufacturer. All kinds of misspellings, acronyms etc. for technical products. Mind you there are 2000 products online. The descriptions are being rewritten.

For the last year, the manufacturer has been improving their images, however only about 60% of the products have images. The manufacturer has been adding better images in the last year. They don't tell you or send you new images so I have to hunt through their site for new images or better images. I'm working on that to improve images although a lot will still be missing.

Its a very difficult product for navigation. categories and subcategories isn't really to workable because customers frequently don't really understand what they are looking for. The search function works quite well, but customers try to use the navigation without understanding the product which is quite technical.

I don't have very much supplemental pages with things like product manuals etc. Thats why I want to use wp at the root level. To make it easy to add informational pages outside the shopping cart.

Color scheme and design isn't the best, but I don't think that hurts sales in my market.

The success is through SERP placement and AdWords.

I haven't been able to work on the site much because it gives me enough traffic to generate 12 hour sales days frequently. I'm outsourcing much of the work that needs to be done to improve the site or I'll never get it redone. There is probably 200 hours or so of work to get it presentable. Rewriting the descriptions alone was 100 hours and that was just for the short description.

Oh, and a search for the manufacturers name generates 155K results. Bare in mind its a fairly small niche of a product and is unknown at the consumer level. A more generic search has much higher numbers but the ctr is lousy.

[vangogh]

There are only two major companies in the industry.

Which suggests low competition and that it won't be too hard to maintain your rank or get it back after a few changes.

Thats why I want to use wp at the root level.

You can install WP anywhere and still have pages show up with any directory structure you like. Most of the time I install WP in a subfolder, just to keep the root clean, yet the pages of the site still show as being in the root.

a search for the manufacturers name generates 155K results

That's not an indication of how often their name is searched for and may not even be any indication of the competition. Depends on the name. However any time I see less than a million results for a keyword I figure it's not going to be too hard to rank for.

[seolman]

....any time I see less than a million results for a keyword I figure it's not going to be too hard to rank for.

You got it. Now when I put links:www(dot)competitorsdomainname(dot)com into Google and I see a million? I cry like a baby

[vangogh]

Funny. You should make a video of yourself crying and upload it to YouTube. You'll be an internet sensation and you can collect your 15 seconds of fame. Think of all the links you'll get.

[seolman]

Good idea! Like that "leave Britney alone" video...

<starts planning video>