Building trust and driving sales?

We've been struggling to increase conversions since inception - our site (ely sieme.com) had a soft launch slightly over a year ago, and a hard launch with advertising, etc. a few months back.

I'd like to get any suggestions from you guys about what avenues we can explore. Right now we are:
- Advertising on Adwords
- Advertising on other networks (graphical)
- Blogging
- Posting on related blogs (fashion, etc.)
- Listed in directories
- Coupons and sales, listing on coupon and discount sites
- Cross-listing to auction sites (Currently implementing)

We're seeing roughly 100 unique visitors a day, but would like to build upon both that and sales volume. Any recommendations?

 

to start with
- i would change the big picture in the homepage. should get a pic that has something to do with jewelery
- add toll free number if in the US
- target more long tail keywords
- install seo urls

 

Sorry to see you're not having any returns on your probably significant investment. You are definitely doing things right on the marketing front, and I'm shocked you only have 100 uniques per day, which means you are not doing nearly enough on the SEO front. I'm getting about 60 uniques per day all organic SEO from one of my sites, and it's only been online for about a month now.

As Iproperty mentioned, you definitely need SEO friendly URLs. What does that mean? Instead of this url:

http://elysieme.com/item_list.php?top_cat_id=4

It should be http://elysieme.com/jewelry-earrings-silver.html

Most eCommerce platforms (Magento being my suggestion) integrate this automatically, ie:

https://mysalontools.com/flat-irons-hair-straighteners/babyliss-hair-straightener/babylisspro-nano-titanium-hair-iron-1-plate.html

That is a link from one of my Magento stores. It takes the category name, then sub-category then the name of the product to produce the URL, and you can see how much more descriptive it is and how many times it uses various keywords.

Also, it doesn't look like you're targeting any keywords.

Use this tool to see what keywords to target:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Use this tool to see which keywords you should be targeting any how many clicks you can expect:

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Let me know if you have any other questions, happy to help!

 

trust seals work well...check out

scanverify.com
hackersafe.com

 

I appreciate the responses I've gotten so far, guys. See my comments below with respect to those items:

Picture in Homepage: Absolutely. We've just sent a couple pieces to the studio for photographing the next season's promotional photographs, so this will be switched to something with some product placement soon.

SEO URLs: Is there any way to do this easily? We're not able to change the platform that the site runs on at the moment (it was a custom piece done by a development firm we hired), and it'll be pretty difficult for me to get approval to hire a new technical resource. That being said, I do agree that this is one of the most essential items on your lists.

Targeting Keywords: We've used the estimator tool to generate target keywords, and we're currently bidding on about 600 words/phrases on Adwords, some of which are long tails (which haven't received much traffic). The main problem is around our quality score, and the high cost of clicks. Would Google penalize us if we created custom landing pages that linked to the rest of our site, but nothing else on the site linked to the landing page?

If this wasn't what you meant, I apologize - not sure exactly what we're missing on this front.

Trust Seals: Absolutely, this is something that was recommended to us offline, and we're definitely going to look into this. I assume the McAfee one is preferred? The ScanVerify site, though inexpensive, looks a bit shifty. On a side note - all payments are handled off-site (PayPal), so I'm not sure exactly what they'll be certifying on.

 

I have McAfee on my site, blurple.net, It did not increase sales significantly and i think i went ahead and got this too early, but i am keeping it as an investment, I have had it for 3 months so far. Im not sure if the white McAfee secure logo will look good on your site, but it would definately stand out. However i would suggest that you do not waste $1000 on a McAfee Trust Seal yet, and if you really want to i can give you the phone number to the agent i talked to, very nice and was able to work out a deal and explain everything in detail.

But like i said, there is something else missing here, you should probably try to get more sales before you get secured to make sure that it isn't your product or something about your site or advertising which is causing low sales.

Have you targeted the people who are interested in this jewlery? found forums for discussons on the jewlery and maybe groups on facebook where people discuss the jewlery and are able to review your jewlery? I would definately talk to people and make sure you are targeting the right people before you get secured.

But if you think you are ready, i say go ahead and get McAfee, I would buy McAfee over any other of the sites out there and i get detailed reports on any problems and detailed info on how to fix them. I also get listed in their directory.

Hope it helped

edit: i just read the last part of your post, McAfee makes sure your site is secure and that there are not open ports and vulnerabilities on the site and that there are no ways a hacker could get client details from your site or hack an admin panel, or mess with the paypal transactions and information.

 

I dont trust those trust seals. It seems like your paying just to show an icon.
try the BBB and your SSL provider's seals

 

you need to be a business for over a year to get with BBB and also a location with good customer relations. The main thing is to be registered business for a year though.

edit: and the represenative i talked to told me to "save my money" for when the time to get the BBB seal comes.

 

Hi!
Many are investing in EV SSL certs to build trust. Also..if you google it..there are some hosts that have auto-installers for magento now. It's a very, very good program.

Bryon

 

Red120, i remember there was discussion on some other forum of your site and its members gave you some advice. Since that nothing has changes on the site actually. May i know why? Do you think all the advice given was useless? Did you follow any?

To my opinion you need to work on the following aspects:

1. SEO - it was mentioned already.
2. The way how your products look like - you ABSOLUTELY need to make high-quality images for products. Also if I were a customer I would like to see how jewelry looks like on woman. So photos of models would be an advantage also...

Just my 2 cents

 

Hopefully with the help provided on this you will see some conversions good luck!

 

X-Cart - Actually, we've made numerous changes already as mentioned. I don't understand your antagonistic tone. Around the technical changes, it's a bit more difficult, and we're moving to get those resources on board.

For my original post, I was going more in a direction for avenues of promotion, but it's always good to get more suggestions for the website format. If people are giving us advice, I'm certainly not going to turn that away. That being said, there are always varying cost levels of implementing different solutions - some require a great deal of resources (changing the address structure, reworking the cart), some less so. We do note down and discuss all suggestions, and those that can't be put into play immediately are kept on record for implementation when we do get a dedicated technical resource.

For McAfee - as mentioned, this looks quite expensive. Was a bit concerned from WebExpert's post that it didn't seem to help much, so we'll probably hold off on this for now.

Has anyone used the ScanVerify site that was mentioned, and has noticed conversions changing materially? The site doesn't look very clean or official - I'm worried about what the customer's impression will be after click-thru to verify.

 

You need SEO urls.

The black background on white text makes it very hard to read your site at first. By the time people's eye have adjusted, they have probably clicked off your site. Take a look at your bounce rate to confirm.

The images are pretty - but odd and irrelevant. Most people are image driven. If I were just looking at the images on the main page of your site I would be massively confused as to what you were selling. You need more images of your product on your main page to draw people in.

 

Yep, the images should be updated soon. Still waiting to hear back from the studio.

Our bounce rate is 45% - can anybody provide as to the industry standard, or a ballpark figure?

 

One of our most successful online sites (sells over 2M a year), has a bounce rate of 22.02%, average time on site 7:08.

 

Red120, i am sorry, i never meant to be rude or pushy, just wanted to know whether any advice provided previously has helped you or not. I really hope your store will be successful and you will have large customer base.

As for bounce rate, then there are opinions that bounce rate lower than 50 % is kind of normal, higher - not good one. 45 % is not bad to my mind.

 

Have you tried joining an affiliate program? like shareasale or linkconnector?

 

Seo url's is relly good idea,
also you can try to export you products to the Google Base / Google Product Search (base.google.com/base/)

I tested your store a little bit, for some reason some items in the 'shop by color', 'shop by price' and 'shop by material' filters are not working. E.g. 'Silver' or '<100$', may be it is better to remove these filters?

 

The google base idea is a solid one. We get lots of traffic from that.

 

You might find this article interesting on how to avoid top 10 blunders in eCommerce and improve conversions:

http://www.commercewiki.com/ecommerce/top-10-blunders-in-ecommerce-design/