With more than 20,000 products sold through its 62 web sites, The Grill Store and More has learned that effective web search is crucial to leading shoppers to what they’re looking for. Optimizing its web pages for search is helping put the retailer on course to more than double sales this year to about $5.6 million, up from $2.2 million last year, CEO Michael Hackley tells InternetRetailer.com.
The Grill Store and More sells barbecue grills and related products through its flagship web site, BBQGuys.com, but it also sells a broad range of other products for household and outdoor use through dozens of sites like Bar.com, GoCartDepot.com and PowerTooling.com.
Hackley’s goal, he says, is to offer as many product SKUs as possible in order to generate maximum traffic, now at about 12,000 unique visitors a day. By reviewing retail web site data in Internet Retailer’s Top 300 Guide, he says, he realized that an online retailer’s number of SKUs has a positive correlation with its total revenue.
But with so many web sites, Hackley adds, generating sales requires an effective search engine marketing program to make sure shoppers find his products, many of which come in a large number of different versions. Barbecue grills, for example, are categorized by charcoal, gas and electric, with scores of sub-pages, such as a Dynamic Cooking System gas grill, a 30-inch DCS gas grill, and so on.
His most effective search engine marketing tactic: making sure that each product page highlights the same language featured on a starting page of a product category on each product sub-page, as well as the detailed descriptions specific to the product version presented on that sub-page. BBQGuys.com also designs its pages so that, as visitors drill down to more specific product versions, each page has a series of links that take shoppers to multiple categories.
Depending on the keyword used in a search, a shopper searching for a 30-inch Dynamic Cooking System gas grill, for example, may first land on the BBQGuys.com home page, where there is a list of links including “grills.” On the grills page, the shopper finds a second list of links for types of grills, including gas grills, then a list of links for styles of gas grills including DCS grills, then a list of links for the different models and sizes of DCS grills. The system not only helps visitors get to the product page, but the combination of descriptions and links on sub-pages also helps BBQGuys.com score higher in Google natural search rankings, Hackley says.
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