How I got my business off the ground with great SEO

Wai Hong Fong of online retailer OzScopes has used SEO techniques to double the amount of traffic to his site and increase sales. While the business started just last year, it is recording revenue of about $300,000.

But he says these techniques aren’t difficult, and suggests any SME looking to increase businesses should invest some time into researching how to use them.

You say you’ve gained a lot of traffic from your SEO campaign. What are some of the main techniques you used?

When we talk about SEO in general, we talk about on-site and off-site techniques. Generally speaking we tend to focus on long-term solutions. One of the main ones is that we are very specific with our product descriptions, and we make sure to include the relevant keywords that people would be looking for.

Most of the time customers are not looking for general telescopes, they’re looking for things like “buy Celestron telescopes” or whatever. So we make sure to include those keywords on product pages.

For us, that’s something we should invest time into, as opposed to just putting them onto the site wherever.

Did you see an immediate effect?

I think, as far as seeing an increase is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be a metric we can draw from but we can draw from a proportion of traffic coming from long-term searches. 70% of our traffic comes from long-term searches, and that happened over the year.

What other techniques did you use?

As part of off-site, we generally just create good interesting content, and that’s a good strategy. A lot of links to our site, OzGadgets tend to link, a lot come from bloggers, magazines and media outlets that have some sort of interest in the sort of content we’ve created.

In cases such as our telescopes, we’ve created guides and so on, how do you use telescopes, what is astronomy, that sort of thing. They are very important links to check out. That’s a very important technique, because it gathers knowledge for people. That’s good for other businesses to try too.

We’ve been quite lucky in that we’ve had some interesting gadgets on the page, wanting to link to us because we’ve improved our value.

After putting up good descriptions and making content, what were the next steps?

Without getting too much more specific, I think a very important focus for us is to constantly measure. SEO for us is not just a traffic driving initiative, it’s actually about driving profitability. Just because you’re ranking well doesn’t guarantee you’re doing very well in your business.

This is a very important thing to measure, being metrics and analytics. Look at what terms are driving traffic, but then actually look at how many of those terms actually convert into sales. If the term “telescopes” is gaining thousands of hits but only converting 1%, that may not be as good as a term that’s getting 200 hits but converting at 20%.

Getting traffic to a site is great, but you need visitors to do more and buy. How did you achieve this?

We really wanted to get on page one of Google, but over time we recognised that it’s really about driving an increase in sales. Increasing traffic is a part of that, and is a measure towards that.

Prior to our SEO efforts we had a website that was generating on average about 5,000 sales, and that went up to about 20,000. That’s purely from what we were doing, just playing the AdWords game. And so that went up over the course of a year.

What kind of a result can businesses expect if they do all these things?

It could be a little skewed due to our ratings with Google, but if you do these things I’d imagine to see 200-300% more traffic, and if you apply the right strategies it could generate that same amount in sales, and if not, more.