Successful eCommerce store, need advice/next steps? [Help]

Hi guys,

Haven't posted in years, but I'm looking for some serious feedback on my main business, it's a large ecommerce site that's got HUGE potential. Currently doing about £30k/month in sales and we haven't even got our foot in the groud properly (the dream is to scale this to 500k+ per month).

One can dream right?

We're well established, VAT registered, all above board to the point we're even registered with the FCA and can offer our customers finance. Great social media following too.

£30k sales may or may not sound good but it's poor profit - we have a premises and hold quite a big chunk of stock. The business model needs tweaked but we've made some serious progress so things can only actually improve from now.

It's been going for nearly 3 years now and it has been nothing but hard work, sacrifice and a ton of arguments so it's not some overnight success.

Getting down to my question, I've only done onsite SEO on our website as I've always been worried to purchase SEO packages on it encase they do more harm than good.

I don't want to take any risks however the problem is I'll never take my business to the next level if I don't do something soon.

What do I do? I need to start ranking lots of pages for some real keywords to start progressing.

We don't have lots of competition, certainly not enough big companies to be worried about.

I just need to figure out a plan to start ranking 100s of inner pages.

Appreciate any feedback or insight with suggestions, p.s I don't want any PM's and won't be revealing the niche etc, just a genuine late night question where I'm looking for material or if possible guided in the right direction.

The most secure strategy to build backlinks is to outreach for similar/related websites that allow you to publish an article/post with a backlink to your site.
You may find a paid list for authority sites that accept this kind of backlinks in the forum.

Awesome congrats on the success. Be careful with the PBN and Link sellers here on BHW only a few are really good the rest I would just skip.

Instead I would go and suggest doing outreach. Look at your competitors backlinks on Ahrefs and outreach and get guestposts on those sites.

Make sure your on page SEO is on point, use page optimizer pro and make sure you have good internal linking.

Add a blog use it to link back to products and etc. Use Ahrefs to do research on content topics create those pieces.

Lol

Sometimes I wish someone from QUORA would answer these things.

Firstly, congratulations on your 30K per month sales revenue. You will not find many people here that is generating that much revenue. So take all advice here with a grain of salt. Because everyone claims to be a guru when they haven't actually built something like you have. Even take what I say with a grain of salt.

With that said, I don't recommend buying SEO services. And this is only my opinion.

But do you think someone who is an expert at SEO would be offering their services for dirt cheap prices instead of running their own business and ranking for profitable keywords?

I think most SEO guru's are full of shit.

Here is my best advice to you.

Write high quality content.

Write How to's, or 10 Reasons why, types of articles.

Write from 1000-2000 words.

Don't focus too much on keywords.

Just write great content.

You will naturally rank for long tail keywords without even trying. It will just happen.

The problem with most SEO guru's is that they rank keywords with decent content. You don't want decent content.

You want expert content. And it's better to write expert content than to write amateur content on your niche for the sake of ranking.

You will rank if you are consistent. But focus on providing value to your market instead of pumping out crappy keyword filled content.

That's my two cents.

What kind of business is this, what products/services?
Congratulations on 3 years and 30k, people dont realize the work needed, nor do they realize that a 30k business still needs a lot of growth to become profitable.

I don't want to take any risks however the problem is I'll never take my business to the next level if I don't do something soon.

Click to expand...

I think this a very important statement. You took on risk to start this, it worked. Now its time to do that again.

As far as what to do, I think people lose sight of the goal sometimes. The goal is to grow revenue, increase profit. Doing that can include more then just SEO, so dont tunnel vision. Ranking etc is great obviously though.
What else can you grow? Many businesses have a customer base, you obviously do, how can you increase average sale transaction? How can you make more money off of the existing customers, thats the easiest part. They already trust you. Look at the products/services you sell and think "if I bought this, what else do i need?" "what will they need 6 months from now?"
You mentioned you offer financing for your customers, great! That helps. What about hedging your risk by financing your marketing spend? Why pay 20k upfront when you can spend it over a year and maintain cash flow.

Have you looked at store flow? Could it be easier to pay and checkout? Is it seamless? What are your abandoned cart metrics, can you develop a plan to fix that (you can ha im just talking out loud to myself too here)
Chargbeacks or payment costs, can those costs be addressed or lowered?
Lastly for this post, you mentioned having a lot of inventory. Do you have times that are very slow sellers? If you have cash tied up in non selling items, liquidate it with a sale and drop it from your store. Take that cash and purchase your SEO package!

virtualman89 said:

Firstly, congratulations on your 30K per month sales revenue. You will not find many people here that is generating that much revenue. So take all advice here with a grain of salt. Because everyone claims to be a guru when they haven't actually built something like you have. Even take what I say with a grain of salt.

With that said, I don't recommend buying SEO services. And this is only my opinion.

But do you think someone who is an expert at SEO would be offering their services for dirt cheap prices instead of running their own business and ranking for profitable keywords?

I think most SEO guru's are full of shit.

Here is my best advice to you.

Write high quality content.

Write How to's, or 10 Reasons why, types of articles.

Write from 1000-2000 words.

Don't focus too much on keywords.

Just write great content.

You will naturally rank for long tail keywords without even trying. It will just happen.

The problem with most SEO guru's is that they rank keywords with decent content. You don't want decent content.

You want expert content. And it's better to write expert content than to write amateur content on your niche for the sake of ranking.

You will rank if you are consistent. But focus on providing value to your market instead of pumping out crappy keyword filled content.

That's my two cents.

Click to expand...

lol yes

Someone offered me a campaign where i would CONSERVATIVELY make 5-10 FUNDED SALES a week lol.
I said if you could generate that why are you not funding them yourself and making 5k week at bare minimum?
"Deals get hard to fund so I prefer to just focus on finding the deals now".....what lol?

Ok I said so ill fund the deals ill place them all and you take a commission, youll still make way more.
"I cant its just that theres no guarantee they will fund" I cant believe he said this

Revolate said:

Hi guys,

Haven't posted in years, but I'm looking for some serious feedback on my main business, it's a large ecommerce site that's got HUGE potential. Currently doing about £30k/month in sales and we haven't even got our foot in the groud properly (the dream is to scale this to 500k+ per month).

One can dream right?

We're well established, VAT registered, all above board to the point we're even registered with the FCA and can offer our customers finance. Great social media following too.

£30k sales may or may not sound good but it's poor profit - we have a premises and hold quite a big chunk of stock. The business model needs tweaked but we've made some serious progress so things can only actually improve from now.

It's been going for nearly 3 years now and it has been nothing but hard work, sacrifice and a ton of arguments so it's not some overnight success.

Getting down to my question, I've only done onsite SEO on our website as I've always been worried to purchase SEO packages on it encase they do more harm than good.

I don't want to take any risks however the problem is I'll never take my business to the next level if I don't do something soon.

What do I do? I need to start ranking lots of pages for some real keywords to start progressing.

We don't have lots of competition, certainly not enough big companies to be worried about.

I just need to figure out a plan to start ranking 100s of inner pages.

Appreciate any feedback or insight with suggestions, p.s I don't want any PM's and won't be revealing the niche etc, just a genuine late night question where I'm looking for material or if possible guided in the right direction.

Click to expand...

How you get sales ? from Ads? or SEO ?

liquidx said:

Awesome congrats on the success. Be careful with the PBN and Link sellers here on BHW only a few are really good the rest I would just skip.

Instead I would go and suggest doing outreach. Look at your competitors backlinks on Ahrefs and outreach and get guestposts on those sites.

Make sure your on page SEO is on point, use page optimizer pro and make sure you have good internal linking.

Add a blog use it to link back to products and etc. Use Ahrefs to do research on content topics create those pieces.

Click to expand...

Yeah I'll be doing this, I think the blog and interlinking/writing content is the way to go. Thanks for your input!

virtualman89 said:

Firstly, congratulations on your 30K per month sales revenue. You will not find many people here that is generating that much revenue. So take all advice here with a grain of salt. Because everyone claims to be a guru when they haven't actually built something like you have. Even take what I say with a grain of salt.

With that said, I don't recommend buying SEO services. And this is only my opinion.

But do you think someone who is an expert at SEO would be offering their services for dirt cheap prices instead of running their own business and ranking for profitable keywords?

I think most SEO guru's are full of shit.

Here is my best advice to you.

Write high quality content.

Write How to's, or 10 Reasons why, types of articles.

Write from 1000-2000 words.

Don't focus too much on keywords.

Just write great content.

You will naturally rank for long tail keywords without even trying. It will just happen.

The problem with most SEO guru's is that they rank keywords with decent content. You don't want decent content.

You want expert content. And it's better to write expert content than to write amateur content on your niche for the sake of ranking.

You will rank if you are consistent. But focus on providing value to your market instead of pumping out crappy keyword filled content.

That's my two cents.

Click to expand...

I'm with you on this, one of the reasons I haven't really bought an SEO package. I'll look into building a load of high quality content and linking to our products.

Appreciate your time to reply man.

YujinTan said:

How you get sales ? from Ads? or SEO ?

Click to expand...

SEO/Social Media - haven't touched ads yet.

Why not use Instagram automation in order to push highly targeted traffic to your ecom business site and increase the sales?

Don't just concentrate on SEO that will be more long term, build out your email list to re-market to, that's the key to massive growth.

I'd personally hire a facebook ads agency or freelancer that normally charge around £2k/month and let them run the store, as you grow and you feel you've outgrown them then hire a bigger agency with more experience.