Have you ever wondered why some auctions get hundreds of visitors while yours only gets 12 ?

The secret is in the keywords used to promote the website and how they relate to the buyers search query and the difference between selling your product for next to nothing and receiving top dollar for your auction.

Let me tell you how we discovered the power of this strategy. Our firm began selling website businesses on ebay but despite offering superior designs, better base products and lower reserves, our sites were selling for a fraction of what other sites in our category was selling for. For example, our site with a superior design would sell for $75 while a similar site would sell with less features would sell for $600. Being the type of person who gets really frustrated as to why this was happening, I began investigating the other sellers who were selling for so much money compared to ours.

The first obvious difference was the traffic to their site. They were getting 900 people in a 7 day auction, while we were getting 60 in the same period. So with this in mind, I began searching for their strategy to achieve so much more traffic.

I scoured their site, and all of ebay. Had they found a secret category that could get them a lot more traffic then the ones I was using I wondered ?

About the same time, our firm was launching a new service called the SE tool box, which analyzes web pages and reports back to you what the search engines see when they visit the site. The report includes meta tags and key words.

Then it occurred to me that ebay relies heavily on their own search engine to help buyers find products. In fact I read the 80% of all buyers use the basic search tool to find their listing. So I thought, What would happen if I ran my spyder against the site that my competitor has sold for so much more than I was selling for.

The results were astonishing.

In our category, commerce websites, his listing was packed with key search words that without my spyder I never would have known existed. Words like “ website business “ word prominent in his listings, where they were nearly non existent in my listing.

I then revised a 7 day auction I was running and changed the title to contain the key words “ website business for sale “ and added that term as often as I could in the site without making to too obvious. I also reduced the use of non essential keywords the my SE Tool Box  was showing as heavily used. I resubmitted the site, and almost instantly, I went from receiving 10 visitors a day to receiving 35 visitors an hour.

The moral of the lesson is that if you apply the same strategy to your own category, you will achieve the same results.

Here are some tips on how to make this selling strategy work for you.

1. keep and eye on your competitors auctions using the watch feature in your “ My Ebay “ section.

2. When a product sells for a really good price, check the traffic on their hit counter. If they have a lot of traffic, analyze the key words being used in their site. The se tool box can do this instantly for you.

3. Apply these keywords to your next auction and watch your traffic skyrocket.

I would be happy to lend you a hand in your key word efforts.  If you have any questions, drop me a line.