There is a common mistake I see online stores make, and without realizing it, they’re hurting their conversions (turning “clicks” into “sales”). The mistake?

Setting the “landing page” of every ad to go to the homepage.

At first glance, this may seem like a great idea. The visitor gets to see all that you have to offer, as well as your welcome message and everything else your home page has to offer. The problem is that in most cases, people are not searching for your home page or even all that you have to offer – they are after one thing. And that one thing relates to the word or words they typed into the search engine.

Ecommerce sites are all about selling – specifically, meeting the customer when they’re in the buying mode. If you’re going to target specific keywords and phrases, follow it through by sending the visitor to the exact product or product category that matches their search. As an online shopper, I don’t want to do a search, see your ad, click on the ad, and then have to search again as soon as I get to your site because you’ve landed me on the home page.

The more specific the search, the closer the visitor is to buying, so it pays to shorten the distance between their search and your shopping cart. If you’d like to see your conversion rates improve, the prescription is simple: Set each ad’s landing page to the one page on your site that best matches the keywords that trigger that ad. If you can improve the correlation between the searcher’s keywords, the ad you show them, and the page you take them to, you’re guaranteed to boost your pay-per-click results.

The Pros:

• Lots of inbound links to your site
• One-way links
• Increased “link popularity” for your site
• Increased traffic from visitors searching the web directories

The Cons:

• It is labor intensive… to be effective, a site should be submitted to each directory individually, by hand

There is a neat piece of software that can help cut down the time required. It is called Directory Submitter and eases much of the “pain” of manual submission in several ways:

• It has a list of over 2,000 directories built-in, and links to each one
• It allows several website titles, descriptions, and keyword sets to be entered
• It will rotate the titles, descriptions, and keywords so that the submissions are varied
• Fills in all or most required fields on each directory submission page with the click of a button

It comes in a free version with 350 directories. If you plan on submitting to more directories than that (and I would recommend it for any site), then you’ll want the full version.

Even with the software, though, it is still very time consuming. If you would like to pass this task off to me and my team, we can hand-submit your site (with your chosen titles, descriptions, and keywords) to as many directories as you wish. Right now there are about 1,000 or so free directories that we submit to, and it can be done at a rate of up to 80 directories per working day. If you recognize the value of building one-way links to your site, but would rather spend your valuable time in other ways, please see our Directory Submission Service page for details on how we can help.

If you have “more time than money” to spend building links to your site, the free version of the Directory Submitter software is an excellent way to get started.

But why would I want to do such a thing? Well, there are a few reasons:

• It was a very fast way to get the site up and running
• Search engines LOVE BLOGS
• Blogs are an excellent content-management system – and I will have more content than “products” to manage with this site
• To see how hard it would be (not too hard, as it turns out)
• Access to a lot of different WordPress themes (for free)
• Did I mention that search engines love blogs?

The connection between blog post and shopping cart will be accomplished through the implementation of ShopSite’s “Order Anywhere” functionality, but as my “product” count will be fairly low, this will prove much easier than trying to code an entire set of ShopSite-WordPress hybrid custom templates. (Although that does sound like an intriguing project to tackle sometime, eh?)

If there’s interest in how I went about it, I may write up a quick “how-to” guide. But first things first – click the “Cart” tab at the top of the page (or this shopping cart link) to see the cart integrated into the blog design. What do you think?