The Ladies Dresser is a shop selling plus size women's dresses and clothes. That description has been chosen carefully, read on to find out why.
The owner of this shop called me for a website, the shop's first. We discussed all sorts of possibilities but it came down to a simple page advertising the existence of the shop. She has many clients from outside Scarborough, so people are happy to visit Scarborough to also visit The Ladies Dresser, and regular clients who have become familiar with the design houses that suit them and what sizes they need, do phone and order clothes.
I've been getting more involved in optimising sites for the search engines, and I implemented some new stuff here, so I spent most of my time working on keywords and phrases.
For the uninitiated, it works like this. When someone searches on the Internet using Google, Yahoo!, MSN (or whatever their favourite search engine is), they type in a phrase, let's say it's "large size women's clothes Scarborough".
Google knows what words are contained in (for the sake of argument) all the websites in the world, and it finds the best match between the requested words and those contained in the world's websites, and gives the searcher a ranked list of possible matches. Amazing isn't it?
So to start with, to stand a good chance of being listed, a website must contain the words the searcher has entered. Once that's established, the ranking is mostly about where on the page those words are to be found, how often, what words are used in links to your page, and whether the inbound links are from reputable sources. You might start to see why search engine optimisation (SEO) is time consuming and expensive. For this project we kept things very simple.
Now, anyone can get a high search engine position for a phrase no-one else has used, we should be top for "plus size clothes Bar Street". That's fine, but if no-one ever types in that phrase, it's for nothing. You have to work out what phrases people are typing in to the search engines in order to boost traffic to your site. Using search engine optimisation tools, we can find out what people are searching for.
For instance, there were 5,400 searches for 'clothes', but only 3,530 searches for 'clothing'. So, if you had a site that only mentioned 'clothing' and swapped all those for 'clothes', traffic, and sales, might well rise nicely.
You have to apply some judgment. People searching for 'big women' might have other things on their mind, as might the 43,848 who searched for 'women', but we can see that 'shoes' attracted 26,573 searches versus, say, 3,677 for 'hats'. The tool I happened to be using was gathering information worldwide, so 'prom dresses' came out high at 37,315, whereas I think a prom dress is an American thing.
So, that phrase "plus size women's dresses and clothes", is a combination of the most popular and relevant terms, and since I've now used those in a link to the site, those words are again associated by Google with our website, which is even better.
We know the site will need a little bit of maintenance. We mention summer dresses, for instance, and the picture will have to change as new styles come out, but those are minor and easy changes. Text changes will probably be free of charge if they are simple. Image changes might take an hour, if that.
It might be interesting to compare this to placing an ad in the local newspaper, the Scarborough Evening News: 14,677. The rule of thumb for advertising is only one third of the people who read your paper or magazine will read your ad. So, I'm guessing, perhaps you'd manage to get one, perhaps two if the ad's already designed, comparable ads in the newspaper for the same investment, and it would be seen by 14,677/3 = 4,892 people. Let's say half of them are women (2,446), half of those are in the right age bracket (1,223), half of those are oversize (611) and half of those are able to afford and are in the market for designer clothes (305) right now. That's fine, 305 potential buyers for about £2 a time leaves plenty of room for a little profit.
The equivalent thinking from a website point of view is that the people who turn up to your site are probably looking for exactly what you sell. They are in a different frame of mind, they are actively wanting to buy something, or to discover something, right now. So, looking at previous retail sites I've done that haven't been optimised for search engines in any big way and aren't running any major publicity campaigns, without giving away confidential information, let's say they get maybe a couple of thousand hits a month from 150 unique visitors. If we equate that 150 with the 305 from the ad, we might say the website for two months is worth an equivalent ad in the local newspaper. But while a newspaper ad happens and then is gone, a website is there for years. My first major website is still running successfully, about five years after it was first published. So, in month three, you're in clover.
How do we track what sales we are going to get from this site? I might suggest we provide a printable voucher, £5 off or something. When people bring that in, we know they are from the website.
Overall this took 16.5 hours and two elapsed weeks and needed about £745 plus about £40 per year for hosting, £10 for the first two years of the domain name and about £1.50 for the background image.