Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

I’ve come to realize that some of my SEO efforts have not been targeted to some of the products we’re really looking to sell.  I’ve spent some of this week looking into our selection of quality foam pillows, and have looked at rewording some of the text on those product pages.  We always want to be clear and concise in our product descriptions.

I’ve also looked at different ways to market our Large Foam Filled Bag Chair as well as our smaller sized Foam Bag Chair .  Which are products that many people sell on their sites.  Because of the competition for these particular products, It is hard to get a foothold in the search engines.

The key is to find some obscure keywords that maybe some other sites aren’t really focusing on.  And try to get listed for those terms to draw in extra traffic.  However, we all pull information from the same sources.  You just have to keep working until you can figure out which keywords give you the biggest advantage.  I’m still doing research to help optimize many of our individual product pages…this is something that I haven’t focused on in the past.  But will do now.

Some of our products have gone through a change.  One manufacturer recently changed some of our foam filled items to a durable fiber filling.  This may or may not our sales.  I’m not sure why they have changed some of the products, but they tell us that the product is better now.  I’ll take their word for it.  Because I personally like the foam filled products, I went to one of our other vendors that also provides us with foam bean bags and other furniture to see if they’d like to replace our lost products with their own foam products. 

They are interested and will be providing us with some information about this new line very soon.  You see, I’d really like to offer both to give the customer a choice.  I feel that both are quality products, foam vs. fiber, but I hate to be limited.  A foam bean bag, a foam floor pillow, a fiber pillow, a polystyrene bean bag…they’re all important to our business…but choice of product is very important.  That’s why we offer all of sizes and fabric choices that we can.  I see some of our competitors limit the fabric choices.

I’ve spent the weekend working on some of the little things that can help our site rank better for certain keywords.  I’ve changed a lot of how the links in our site help spread some authority to other pages of our site.  For instance…there are a lot of links on our Home Page at My Pillow Place.  Some of these links are not really important as far as getting indexed in the search engines.  There are more important for the visitor.  For instance, all of the links that point to an FAQ, or a privacy policy are important for a visitor.  But no one would search for “FAQ at My Pillow Place” in Google.  So, I’ve taken many of these types of links and added a “no follow” command to it.  This tells the search engine spider to ignore that link. 

This in turn, gives more credit to other links on the page.  The more links on a page, the more diluted the juice (importance) becomes. So make all of your links count. 

Listening to our visitors, we’ve had a large number of them tell us that they can’t find our fabrics pages.  On our custom floor pillows and bean bags, there are many fabrics to choose from.  We set up a page to show larger images of all of these fabrics (which have just been updated to reflect new fabrics that are available).  We thought putting a large link in blue saying “to view fabric swatches, click here!” at the top of all of these pages would be very easy to find.  But some people still had trouble finding it.  I tried many different things.  Multiple links on a page, larger text, asterisks, etc.  Still had people having trouble.

The latest thing I did on our Square Floor Pillows, Round Floor Pillows, Rectangular Floor Pillows and our Classic BeanBag  page was to add an icon showing colorful fabrics with a link underneath to show “click for fabric swatches.”  The new icon really draws the eye to it.  I just hope it doesn’t overwhelm the page.  Click any of the links above to see the new icon.  If you can’t find the fabric swatch link, by all means comment here and I will have to go back to the drawing board.

I usually like to post on this blog at the minimum twice a week.  However, because of being busy lately with these crazy storms that have passed through the midwest over the last week, its been difficult to get everything done.  I had to spend some time over this last weekend fixing some parts of My Pillow Place to reflect wholesale pricing changes.  I’ve also been adding to our list of products that will now ship for free.

In the next few weeks, I intend to employ a new SEO strategy to help get our exposure at a much higher level.  Recently, we’ve seen a slight drop in traffic levels.  Just yesterday, we went over 300 visitors.  We haven’t seen that many since the first few days of September.  I’m also going to start promoting some of our newer products which haven’t gotten much traffic, such as our Relax Lounger and Wedge Chair Lounger and Ottoman.

I would also like to get some more exposure to some of our newer lines of products such as our Ottomans and Dog Beds.  It takes time to get some good listings for your new website sections.  However, in the case of My Pillow Place, I think its taking too long.  There has to be some quicker ways that are considered white hat methods that allow one to get a foothold in the search engines.

August ended with a slight putter as we missed our numbers.  We had a 4 day period in august that we had no sales and that hasn’t happened since last year.  We’ve been dealing with a little bit of frustration as we’re seeing price increases from some of our suppliers.  You see, raw material prices have steadily been increasing.  The raw materials suppliers have passed higher prices to our vendors…they in turn pass it on to us.  So, we have a decision to make…do we take a lower profit margin and hold steady our prices?  You always try to do that because a higher price point deters people from buying. 

There are some cases where you can’t keep the price the same because you’ll literally lose money and no one is in the business to pay people to buy their products.  Every one who is in business is trying to turn a respectable profit. 

So, so far we’ve held our prices pretty steady…we’ve offered incentives such as free shipping.  We even had an 8% discount code on our site for the entire month of August.  Now, September is here.  We’ve moved into the last 3rd of the year and we anticipate the approaching holiday season.  I think august always has a slight let down because people are preparing for back to school and shopping and budgets concentrate on that. 

September has started out pretty well.  I would like for www.mypillowplace.com and www.mybeanbagplace.com to see a consistency of daily sales for an entire month.  We still seek that month with at least one sale a day for 30 days.  Could September 2008 be the month?  Stay tuned…I know this is gripping stuff, right?  We’re trying here.