Question from a social media client in B2C who sells handmade goods on Etsy: “My 6 month contract with an SEO firm to ‘optimize’ my site is completed and I am frustrated that I’m not seeing improved traffic like they promised. Why? And what should be my next steps?”
Our very first step was to audit her site and verify that everything they agreed to do for the site was indeed completed. Thankfully, we found they did a good job with keyword optimization across all the product pages of her site. So it was money well spent.
Now why isn’t this increasing her website sales? Short answer, because SEO is only one piece of the sales and marketing pie. By the way, this is true for any business, not just an Etsy seller.
SEO optimization for your website is necessary and will help your product be found IF you are optimized for the correct search terms. And that means knowing your target audience and their online behavior; the keywords they are using to find products like yours on the world wide web. Make sure that when you add search terms, always test and analyze what’s happening with the adjustments you make to your site content for optimization. The data will tell you a ton about what your customers are doing online.
Her next question, what are the best next steps to increase traffic to her beautiful new and optimized website and increase sales?
We need to improve the communication streams that send people to her site. Since she doesn’t do traditional advertising (print, radio, or tv) the main channel for her brand is Social Media.
Here are the TOP 3 things we did to help improve her social media strategy to get more traffic to her site:
1. Branded all her accounts on 5 different platforms with consistent messaging and imagery. We standardized the company mission and description, then made sure the logo and profile header were customized and everything was consistent.
2. Created some templates for her social media posts that included branded copy and images with hashtags. All helping to guide potential customers in internet-land to her website vs her Etsy site.
3. Developed an editorial content calendar with her to make scheduling her mix of promotional, educational, and entertaining posts easy.
As an added bonus, we were able to spend some time together looking at how these simple updates impacted her website analytics. Now she feels confident she can make simple adjustments to her social strategy as she sees the patterns in the analytics change.
There are many other tactics we can use on social media to help us achieve specific goals like increase web traffic, and we’d love to hear some of the things you do too! Share in the comments.