Seo/marketing For Ebay Store, Best ways to drive traffic to your eBay store?? Options

[jason_sot]

A friend of mine works for a small company that sells on eBay. They have been noticing a recent decline in visitors/sales and were looking for a few ways to increase this.

They currently have 4 domains... one of which is pointing to the eBay store. I know its a bit difficult to actually optimize your eBay store but i was wondering if anyone had any good ideas on how to optimize it, drive more traffic, or just any general marketing advice for a company in this position.

Thanks

~J~

[Respree]

You may have already seen this, but if not, this may be of help.

Another idea to drive traffic would be to get the inventory database and upload it into Froogle.

[tam]

I guess it depends on the type of thing they're selling. They could try setting up a site with information/reviews more details and link through to purchase at the ebay shop. I guess a site/off ebay pages might be easier to optimise than the ebay page it self. I think you can use ebays tools to pull the ebay listing off to incorporate into the site too.

Tam

[EGOL]

I used to have an ebay store that was a gold tier powerseller. I walked away from it when my website for the same merchandise got good SERPs. Working on the website was a more efficient use of my time and had lower labor and fees to maintain. Plus website buyers are easier to deal with than a lot of the people who buy on ebay.

Some ebay advice....

First... learn basic SEO... that will help you within the ebay search and help you rank your store in Google and other search engines.

Then.... learn the Ebay Search engine inside and out. Experiment and study. Do keyword research and then word your listing descriptions and titles so that they will show in the search. There is enormous traffic on the ebay site, take advantage of that. Lots of people don't know how to write their listings for max visibility.

For optimization.... if you have an ebay store there are a few pages that you can optimize. You control the second half of the title tag and the onpage elements. Learn SEO and do KW research and take full advantage of that.

Put lots of items in your store in categories that are only a couple clicks down in the store category menu. Enough items so that your store shows on the first page of the listings for your category. This will get high PR links into your store. List lots of items in many categories. This will get hot juice pumping into your store and into to your "about me" page. All of those pages can rank in the SERPs.

You have some control over the onpage content of your about me page. Also subscribe to the upgrade store and that will enable you to have a lot more category pages within your store and these will show in the search engines - if you are clever and take advantage of the second 1/2 of the title tag which you can determine yourself.

You can also use offpage SEO. Links from your website to your ebay store can pass linkjuice and anchor text and help significantly with your rankings. There are a few PR6 and PR7 ebay stores and they rule the search engines in their categories because of the ebay site authority.

To learn how to do these things will take a lot of your time. Spend two or three days exploring how the store works, the ebay interior linkage, about me page and the flow of link juice through ebay's main category pages.

Ebay has enormous reach in the SERPs and through adwords. Experiment these things and position yourself to take advantage of them. It will take time but it is time well spent.

[SEOigloo]

Hi There Jason,
Just a quick tip...it depends on the niche, but I've noticed eBay guides ranking well in the SERPs where the competition isn't too stiff. Your client might like to consider writing some eBay guides.
Best of luck!
Miriam