Anything more I can do?

Hi All

My site has been up and running for around 6 months. In that time I haven't sold a single print! I have statistics that show people are visiting the site but I am not sure if I have maximised the SEO? In the last 3 weeks my stats tell me that only 10 visits to the site were referred by search engines where people used keywords (9 Google, 1 Yahoo). The other sessions where largely Google Image searches.

I even reduced the prices of the prints significantly 4 weeks ago as an experiment to see if that would have an effect but to no avail.

Here is the link to the site:

HTML: Select all

http://www.sjohnsonart.co.uk

Any ideas folks?

Thanks & Rgs

Craig

You need to make a realistic plan for your business.

What is the demand for your product? Pretty low. It's not easy to make money as a painter.

You'll probably need to attract a large number of visitors in order to make any decent income. You can only expect a small proportion of them to buy -- about 1% or less, not 10%. This also assumes that most of your traffic is coming from relevant searches or links (i.e., at least vaguely interested in buying paintings).

Let's say, for sake of discussion, that 1% of visits result in a sale of £15. In order to make an income of £30,000 p.a., you would need to make 2,000 sales, which means 200,000 visitors (about 17,000 visitors per month).

So you need to increase your traffic by a factor of about 1000 to earn a full "wage", or a factor of about 100 for a nice sideline. Anything less, and it's a hobby.

These are just assumptions, of course; but since you don't have any real data yet, we have to make assumptions. Your real business prospects could be much better or much worse than these estimates suggest.

But, based on these assumptions, you'll need more than some SEO fiddling to make the business lucrative. A little optimisation here and there will not produce such a dramatic change in your traffic. The problem is much more fundamental than, "Have I coded this site right for SEO?"

Do you know what search terms you are competing for? Have you considered an AdWords campaign? Do you have other means of marketing your work?

By the way, your paintings are great. I'd love to be able to do that.

Hi

Thanks for the reply. I know what you're saying, but I never expected to sell thousands of paintings. It's just that I haven't sold a single one yet and i'm wondering if there's any more I can do. It's purely a hobby, I don't expect to make a living out of it, but selling one every now and then would be nice as I have gone to the trouble of setting up the website, registering it with many search engines etc.

Not sure what you meant by "These are just assumptions, of course; but since you don't have any real data yet, we have to make assumptions". I have statistics for the website with all sorts of info. that I can monitor for the last 6 months.

If anyone wants to know anything stats wise I can tell you whatever you need to know about my site!

How many page views do you get per month?

What you really need to know is your conversion percentage: how many purchases per 100 page views (or visits)? What is your average income per page view? If you can estimate your average income per page view, then you can estimate the amount of traffic you would require in order to make a certain amount of money -- in other words, you can estimate the scale of the challenge, and plan accordingly.

But since you haven't sold anything, we have to guess.

Hi Craig,

If I suddenly had the urge to buy a watercolour print I'd go on to Google and search for "watercolour prints" or "watercolour paintings". In my opinion you should optimise your site for these phrases. Unfortunately your site doesn't come on page 1 for either of those and it needs to.

I'd change your homepage title to just "Watercolour prints by Stephen Johnson".

The page title for this page should be something like "Lydstep, Wales - Watercolour print by Stephen Johnson". Keep the titles concise and have the most page relevant words at the start of the titles, i.e. Lydstep, Wales is more relevant to that page than "Stephen Johnson" so it comes first.

On your print detail page, why not add a little content about what's in the picture? your reason for painting it etc? (I'm thinking content for search engines).

Go out and get as many backlinks as you can! Ask other artists to link to you, suppliers maybe, put your signature in forum postings like this if rules allow. Aim to get 5 new backlinks every week. One easy way to get backlinks is to provide something genuinely useful to users for free.....how about a beginners guide to watercolours? A simple tutorial for newbies. You'd be surprised the backlinks you'll get for something like that. Backlinks are key!

On another note, I think your images need to be bigger and sharper (maybe it's just my monitor). Usually I'd advise against large images but this sort of site is an exception - I need to enlarge the image and then think "wow, that's really nice" - there should be a "add to basket" button available at that point.

Just a few random thoughts.

James.

__________________
Digital Overload - a digital agency

Excellent advice.

Mike and all,

This page Analysis shows an overview of the page activity on the site throughout November & December 2007:

/robots.txt with 206 hits
/ with 80 hits
/HTML/essex.html with 61 hits
/html/gallery.html with 52 hits
/HTML/westcountry.html with 47 hits
/HTML/about.html with 37 hits
/index.html with 32 hits /HTML
/misc.html with 31 hits /HTML
/howto.html with 25 hits
/HTML/faq.html with 24 hits
/HTML/wales.html with 23 hits
/HTML/CO150STD2LGOPT.html with 20 hits
/HTML/contact.html with 20 hits
/HTML/WC150STD2LGOPT.html with 17 hits
/HTML/WC150STD17LGOPT.html with 15 hits
/HTML/WC150STD1LGOPT.html with 14 hits
/HTML/CO150STD1LGOPT.html with 14 hits
/HTML/WC150STD8LGOPT.html with 13 hits
/HTML/WC150STD18LGOPT.html with 12 hits
/HTML/WC150STD15LGOPT.html with 12 hits
/HTML/ES150STD2LGOPT.html with 12 hits
/HTML/ES150STD8LGOPT.html with 12 hits
/HTML/WC150STD13LGOPT.html with 11 hits
/HTML/WC150STD3LGOPT.html with 11 hits
/HTML/WC150STD5LGOPT.html with 11 hits

Okay, that's useful information.

You appear to be getting more traffic than my original estimate.

One note of caution, however: hits are not page views. For every time someone views your page, many hits will be generated. A hit occurs for every HTTP request -- every image, every script, every stylesheet, and so on.

So a single page view can easily generate 20 hits. The question is: are your "hits" actually page views, or are they just hits? The answer depends on how precisely your tracking software is using the term "hit".

Have you tried Google Analytics? I really like it.