Marketing problems - Lack of Internet Sales/Hits

[BellaSotre]

A little preface,
We have a retail store that has been running for 16 years and very successful.
We run an ebay store and website that does anywhere between 3-5 sales per day.
We wholesale our products throughout the United States and Japan.
We dropship for 5 different companies.

Here is our problem, I don't believe we're getting enough exposure after searching the prices were actually drop shipping for. We sell item X for $59, other companies sell our item for $129-149 and sell at a good rate. When searching that item on google.com, we're not found until the 4th page.

I believe this is caused by our url listing an item # instead of the item itself? (correct me if I'm wrong).

We're looking to expand the company and I think we could really expand quickly if we just had a better marketing plan. We don't advertise on any website whatsoever and I'm just looking for any ideas or advice at all. I would really appreciate anything.

Thanks a lot

[inchina]

Hi,

Suggest you include an e-marketing program into your marketing plan (strategy, actions + budgets)

You could start by studying your competitors' websites (those selling at a much higher rates) and benchmark against them. Questions like: Why are they ranked higher at Google? Where are they linked to? Where do they promote themselves?

Also, you may want to start having more backlinks to your website as this will increase the pagerank of your website in Google.

Study the contents of your website. Do you have all the relevant keywords?

Have you been submiting your URL to search engines or to major directories?

[BellaSotre]

Hi,

Suggest you include an e-marketing program into your marketing plan (strategy, actions + budgets)

You could start by studying your competitors' websites (those selling at a much higher rates) and benchmark against them. Questions like: Why are they ranked higher at Google? Where are they linked to? Where do they promote themselves?

Also, you may want to start having more backlinks to your website as this will increase the pagerank of your website in Google.

Study the contents of your website. Do you have all the relevant keywords?

Have you been submiting your URL to search engines or to major directories?

I'm not familiar with pagerank at all. I believe our main reason we are not higher on google searches is the fact that all of our links to popular searches are #'s not the item itself. I just want to make sure, having the name in the actual URL is really important when it comes to searches right?

And could you define backlinks?

[rogercbryan]

Bella- I would recommend looking for some professional help on this. There are books you can buy that will teach you the basics on web marketing, but in the long run you’ll be more successful using a professional. Try talking to a few different SEO companies and putting a post on Craigslist. You should be able to come up with some sort of a game plan.

[inchina]

Bella -
Roger's right, suggest you do some research on SEO and maybe talk to professionals.

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.

SEO rules are basically
50% content relevancy (keywords...)
50% accessibility (link popularity, so on..)

Yes, your URL should not be #s. It should always be keywords relevant to the product or the particular page as URLs are also searchable. But having #s on the URL may be one of the many reasons your products are not listed as high as your competitors....

[veikoh]

Have you considered the affiliate program?
Have you submitted your items to price comparision sites?
The google lsits the URL which has been linked to your site from other sites with particular keywords. So, if other sites are linking to mycompany dot com google listed your main page as landing page. If other sites are linking to mycompany dot com/item22.htm (this is not SEO url as the filename should be relevant to your product keywords), the landing page will be in your product page.