Ocha and Garth: Straightforward traffic building advice for very small fashion ecommerce sites

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

April 2, 2010 [1285 views]

In both my roles, in academia and commerce I come across many talented designers and business people who have launched very low cost sites - often after months of heartache and effort and then face the inevitable lack of traffic and customers.

I recently had an email from Sarmilla Roy at men’s fashion designer Ocha and Garth who has spent the last few months launching their new site.

It looks pretty good given the budget they had to spend but she now needs help drumming up custom and visitors. This article is part of that help but it may be highly applicable to other similar businesses so I thought I’d add it to my blog. Here are some simple suggestions:

Focus on in-bound links

I use Yahoo! to measure the number of in-bound links to a site. If you go to Yahoo! and enter link:ochaandgarth.co.uk into the search box and you will get an estimate of the number of links that have been found by the search engine; you may need to select Entire Site to make sure you are finding links to any part of the site.

Today there are only 2 links from outside the Ocha and Garth domain and this explains why the site is practically invisible. Remember that we are only two weeks after launch and links will take some time to build.

How many links will you need? As many as you can get and from high quality fashion bloggers and magazines. You are certainly going to need hundreds or thousands eventually.

Fix roadblocks on the site

There has been a lot of debate recently about why Apple has not included Flash in the forthcoming iPad but it’s effect on search engine traffic is a major reason we prefer not to use it in my agency. If I look at the current Ocha and Garth site I can see that the first page has been implemented exclusively in Flash without any text links whatsoever.

This means that the search engine spiders reach this page and stop. Of course Flash can be made search engine friendly but that does not appear to have happened here.

My suggestion would be to add some text links to the bottom or top of the page to connect Goole and the other spiders to the rest of the site.

Use your blog

Sarmilla Roy and her colleagues have recognised that writing interesting content can have a positive effect on a site and that putting part of this on an independent blog begins to generate the web of links that all sites need. They have therefore launched Trend Injection which will feature news and comment around similar fashion brands and sites.

Of course the problem is that Trend Injection has yet to develop a presence and a reputation itself and so they need to be very patient while keeping writing. It certainly has much richer text that their site and is likely to be indexed more quickly. A quick check using the Yahoo Site Explorer above revealed no links yet, so I submitted Trend Injection to the indexer. Anyone can do this for any site.

Ask for link favours

Any designer will have built up a network of contacts as they started their business. Many of these will have a web presence of their own. It’s time to call on those friends and ask them to link to your site.

Any traditional PR you can generate will also create links eventually.

Develop links through socal media and pointing out useful content

People can already follow Sarmilla and Ocha and Garth on Twitter and this will help eventually to spread the word. If they continue to grow their followers (and friends on facebook) and offer them appropriate content (links to Trend Injection perhaps) then these links will get disseminated and with luck added to articles and blogs.

But real patience will be required and this means months.

Consider experimenting with Google Adwords

While you have little natural search traffic it can sometimes be useful to try out search engine PPC advertising but be very careful. Don’t even try to buy keywords such as designer menswear as you will burn through any budget very quickly. Instead start by buying very niche terms that include your brand and build very slowly from there

What next?

There are lots of other smaller things that will need attention but it is important to focus on link building for starters. Here are some of the others:

1. Improve your page titles to include keywords
2. Add additional content opportunities on the site itself
3. Install Google analytics so that you can begin to study the improved visitors
4. Start to look harder at competitors and see what they are doing with content, titles and their blogs
5. See if you can get your designer to improve the URLs on your site so that they contain keywords too - this might be expensive
6. Add keyword rich meta tags to every page and make sure that the page descriptions are different

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