Hi everyone,

We have a new website up for pond supplies at http://www.rockymountainpond.com.

I was wondering if anyone could take a look at it and see if something is missing?  We are having sluggish sales, and it seems like we are not getting many visitors.  Could anyone make some recommendations on changes we may want to make, or what we can do?

I would appreciate any help.

Koilagoon, I see nothing wrong with the site visually, but when searching for "pond supplies" in Google, after 10 pages of many sites just like yours, yours is not there. You must work on submitting your site to search engines, and having html content pages that have ALL your keywords on them and linking to as many sites like yours and vice versa as possible. Until that happens along with several other search engine optimization tips you will not get the traffic you desire. You really have a nice site with ok prices it is just going to take some more work to get the page rankings up. There are several threads here in the forums about this as well as much info on the web. Good luck, I wish you the best !


Hope this was helpful !

RandyT

I've never had an e-commerce site so take this for what it's worth but the site seems small. Either like it's very new or for whatever reason just not playing with the big boys whoever they are in the pond supply business.

I think you need a more business looking site. The forest tones don't say business to me. I'd try to make the site look bigger. Use a 100% width layout and put a lot more products, information, and reasons for a customer to buy from you on the front page.

The search engine thing is a whole other story ...

Have you considered signing up for AdWords and its related service at the other search engines? Of course it's not free like the organic listings but it will get your company name out there. I recently ordered from a company I discovered via AdWords and I liked the products so much that I even blogged about it, giving it free advertising.

While doing that, you should follow the advice above to improve the ranking of your site in the organic listing.

Very nice site design.  I'm curious which eCommerce solution you are using.  Really, I'd like to know! 

Also, who designed it too?

I'm having many hits, but zero sales.  I've done a lot of SEO, but graphically it's not very good.  Amazon is going well though for me.

Here's some tips for SEO and getting visitors to your site visitors:

Visit http://www.seochat.com for some great tools and suggestions.

You may want to use search engine friendly URL's.  Instead of the following:

http://www.rockymountainpond.com/index.php?act=viewCat&catId=26

...it would be search engine friendly as (example) http://www.rockymountainpond.com/air-pumps.html? 

Many search engines do not like to follow dynamic pages such as PHP or ASP, so that can be a factor.  Also numeric page id's aren't friendly.  Instead, if you can, you would want it to have the name of the product and/or category of products.  You may not have much control over this without rewriting the code or using someone else's addon or whatever.

It can help quite a bit to exchange links with similar types of sites, ie gardening sites, landscaping sites, manufacturers of your stuff, etc.

Referencing your URL in forums in sites (see above) can help in SEO, but also people may see your page referenced and visit.  I have about half of my visitors coming from one site alone, better than Yahoo or Google via the ads that I've spent a fair amount of money on.

You could consider going with an Affiliate Program and pay people a small commision for sales that come from their site.  Also the affiliate links to your site so search engines may count that for you toward ranking too.

I'd highly suggest advertising via Google, but most importantly, use their Analytics which will tell all sorts of great stats.  It is fantastic!

Via your server, create a CRON job to run regularly to submit your sitemap to Google.  Here's the link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview?hl=en

Create a robots.txt to control which search engine spiders crawl your site and which pages they crawl.  This helps a lot because there are many pages (and graphics, sounds, etc) that you would not want them to crawl.

Advertise on online gardening or Fung Shui sites and in local online newspapers, ie Chicago Sun Times, in the gardening section or whatever.  People may think that your advertising there you'd be more reputable.  Also, go to conventions and such. 

Activity is good!
It may not be a bad idea to add a Forum to answer questions.  This is good for SEO because it shows activity, which is very important.  It's also good because your prospective customers like to be able to communicate with people from there.  It shows you know what you're talking about and that you're not some fly-by-night small operation that will fold in a couple months.  Make sure you are active on your forum and, if needed, you may need to have conversations with yourself until real people start communicating there.  This could singley be the best thing you could do for SEO is to have a very active forum.

Blogging can be helpful too.   It shows activity and can help people get to know you.  It just may not be considered by some to be very "professional".

I hope this was helpful. 

Shea

As others have said, you have a great looking site. Your problem is not enough traffic. Of course, that's the real problem with most sites, so don't feel bad.

The first thing you'll want to do is get a good handle on your traffic statistics, because you'll need some indication as to what is working and what is not (as they say, you can't improve what you can't measure). You could use the free Webalizer or Analytics that comes in cPanel. But, I would suggest trying to register for Google Analytics. It's free and the data analysis is better.

I don't want to repeat what others have said as ways to get traffic, but one tip I'd give...when it comes to organic search engine traffic, the most important factor in my experience, is getting some high-ranked sites to link to yours. While you do need the right keywords, having high-quality links count more.

Would you consider your site local or global? In my humble opinion, when I see your site, I think local. I don't think I'd order pond supplies online. I'd go to my local home improvement center. So, maybe you could get some well-targeted traffic by advertising locally.

Just another aside.... I see your site has only been in existence since May 15 of this year. It takes a while to build traffic, so don't give up. It's a long road to good traffic. Now, how'd I know how long your site's been around? Check out your Alexa stats. Bookmark this. Check regularly.

Hey everyone, thanks for all of the advice.

Just some more info:

We use google analystics and google adwords.  I think the major problem with adwords is that even using their system of optimization, we cannot even get it to use $100/month (even though we want to).  The site is new.

For the one who asked:

We use CubeCart for the backend of the site.
My friend and I designed the site for the company (it took us about 2 weeks total time)..


Thanks guys.