I had an enquiry through this website yesterday from a nice lady who runs www.polyannadesigns.co.uk. She wanted to know how much SEO for her site would cost and if there is anything she can do to improve traffic and sales.

I looked at her site and replied with the following:

 

Hi Joanna,
 
Its rare that I get actual real people asking my advice via my website (generally I get spam mail or indian companies trying to sell me SEO services) so I decided to have a quick look at your site from an outsiders perspective.
 
First off, the design is really nice and the products you have to sell look very attractive. On trying out the site, I did come across a few niggles which may affect your conversion rates. First off, there is a missing image in the lower right corner of the popup when you click on the image thumbnails (missing image is /images/closelabel.gif ) so having small things like this can affect consumer confidence. Secondly, when you click 'add to cart' there is no confirmation that this has happened after you have clicked on the button. What should happen is that you get redirected to the shopping bag page so you know that the website has added the item to your basket. Alternatively, a bit of text to say "item has been added to your basket". These functional changes might improve your conversion rates, but if you are not getting the traffic, then even a high conversion rate will never materialise into sales.

With a site like yours, it would be quite difficult to get high rankings in search engines due to the amount of competition in the field. It would be possible to get first place rankings but you are looking at a considerable amount of time, effort and money- and you would not see a return on your investment for a number of years, if ever.
 
What I would suggest is that you do not try to go through the getting high rankings route, but rather do one or both of these:
 
1. consider selling on ebay or amazon - they already have a massive amount of traffic to them, and the commission rates for selling are nothing compared to the cost of getting the same traffic on your own site. Having your own site running in tandem with ebay gives consumers confidence and more information about your products.
 
2. consider social networking groups - eg having a facebook page for your business, or a twitter account to keep people updated with your latest developments and news. If you can expand your followers over time, then broadcasting tweets can be a powerful medium for attracting people to the site. Another thing you might want to look at is starting a blog.
 
I don't really have the time to do a thorough SEO analysis of your site, but as I said earlier, it would be too expensive to even attempt to get to the top of google for phrases like 'custom jewellery' or 'swarovski jewellery'. Also, if you tried using google adwords, then you might find that for every £10 adwords spend, you might make £2 profit. There are a lot of competitors also using adwords which pushes the cost of using them too high to be worth considering, unless you are selling a niche product.
 
Hope this helps you with your business, and the best of luck with that!

Hopefully this blog post will add a couple more backlinks to her site to help in a very small way.