Big Sweater Graphic Design

Tips on Improving Search Engine Ranking

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 12:46 pm.

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This was originally a comment on Eric Terry's blog, but it got too long for LiveJournal to allow it, so I'm posting it here.

A little background: Eric owns and operates the very awesome Linty Fresh online teeshirt shop, where he designs and sells all of his shirts. By hand. His work has gotten more attention recently, having been featured on the inimitable shirt.woot, and otherwise gaining recognition. He asked for some tips on generating more traffic from search engines without spending a ton of money, and here, more or less, is my response:

You don't have to spend a lot on advertising. Google's Adwords program is really great in that it's extremely inexpensive, compared to other advertising venues, but at the same time, highly effective. You can spend as little or as much as you want, and target your ads locally. I have one ad campaign going with a budget of $50 per month. It's led to a couple hundred clicks to my site, with three really quality leads, and if those leads turn into actual work, the ROI will be terrific (it works out to something like a 1200% return if I got one good job, if you include only the cost of the ad itself). The nice thing is, you only pay if people click your ad. So, although I have $50 budgeted to Google every 30 days, in actuality, I've only spent around $25 for the first month. Pretty cool. If you target your ads to your local area, you have a greater chance of getting hits (it limits the number of people who will see your ad, but those people have searched for "atlanta teeshirts," or whatever you want to use for keywords, and are looking to support local business).

Having a blog is great—and yours is regularly updated, even better—for SEO, but it helps to have it all under the same domain (as in, a part of your site, instead of a blogspot.com account in conjunction with a Big Cartel account). Hosted solutions like the one you're using are terrific for online stores, especially if you're just getting started, but having exact control over the look/feel of your site and the content of it will ultimately help search engine rankings. For instance, if you designed the LF site to be all fancy-like and it got attention from online web galleries—arguably something that won't happen with a Big Cartel powered site as they control the layout, if I'm not mistaken—some good, quality incoming links will result, boosting your search engine rankings (not to mention the fact that those who view web galleries are exactly the demographic that would buy your shirts). I know this from experience: no less than three galleries have featured my site, and the resulting boost in search engine traffic has lasted for awhile. I don't do a lot to the site, either, but now, around 33% of the traffic to bigsweaterdesign.com is from search engines—and it's totally organic, naturally-occurring traffic that has gradually built. I don't get work directly from web galleries, since most of the folks that visit them are also web designers, but any increase in search engine ranking is a good increase in search engine ranking.

Regardless, use your blog. Visit forums with a link back to either LF or the LF blog as your signature. Look for other blogs that serve a similar demographic to the one you're after (or even sites that are only peripherally related to teeshirt design—or unrelated completely, for that matter), and comment on the articles that interest you. Comments on blogs with a link to your site in your name will often lead to more clicks and more interest in your stuff. Adding quality, interesting commentary to a blog (or blogs) written by somebody who gets lots of traffic and has good influence will in effect lead to a relationship with the blogger, and if you're consistent, you'll get a really high quality incoming link to your site in the form of their blogroll (or, for that matter, a nice feature in a post, like Entreprenuts did with my site).

One of the biggest things you can do to help your SEO stuff is to offer something on your site (or blog) for free, and then promote that. For instance, you could write a tutorial using your next teeshirt design. People love cool shirts, naturally, but inquiring minds would love to know how you design your shirts. I know that when I read designers' blogs, the articles that describe their processes are often the most interesting to me. You could even write a tutorial on how to go about searching for a teeshirt printer, or whatever. If you did one a week, consistently (and that's the key: consistency, as Google indexes sites that update more often than sites that don't, and users stop trusting sites that stagnate), or one every two weeks, or one a month, or whatever, and people liked what they saw, you'd get incoming links and your search engine ranking would steadily climb. If you give stuff away for free that people like, they'll buy your stuff to compensate for the free stuff, and it'll lead to bigger, more profitable work.

A classic example of this: Jonathan Coulton went for a year where he released a song on his site for free once a day, and from that, he got lots of traffic (legal free music!); now, he plays sold out live shows at small venues and has even written songs for videogames (I'm thinking of the end credits song for the game Portal, which is supposedly one of the best games ever, but there could be more). So who knows; if you do enough self-promotion in the form of free knowledge (or free vectors, or whatever, just something that you don't charge for and that other people find very useful), eventually you might be commissioned by a bigger design agency to put together a cool shirt. It's sort of a machine that fuels itself, once it gets going.

Ultimately, organic Google (et al) traffic just takes time to build. It's slow going, but once you're ranked highly, it's well worth the investment of time.

Your one-on-one promotion is important, too. Business cards and free shirts can be a pretty powerful marketing tool. Nothing will ever replace human interaction: going to trade shows and selling products out of your car, as mentioned, will not only help people put a face to your business (and therefore encourage them to buy), but it will also potentially help your search engine rankings. But that's an entirely different post.

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