Since launching his online store in January, Brad Fallon has seen his monthly revenues jump from zero to six figures. His Atlanta-based business, MyWeddingFavors.com, sells small wedding-related items like place card holders and candles and will reach $1 million in revenue even before its first full year of business.
What's the secret of his success?
"We're number two on Google and number one on Yahoo! for [the search term] 'wedding favors,'" says Chief Executive Brad Fallon, noting that the site also has good placement for many related terms.
Before launching My Wedding Favors, Fallon was a full-time search engine optimization specialist. Since the launch, Fallon has been tweaking his site and working the search engines using every bit of his expertise. Now he relies heavily on search: "We can track our revenue results right to our results on the search engine listing."
At this point, his search engine presence brings enough traffic so that even at his current conversion rate -- which he estimates at about one percent -- he's had to move to a bigger storage space three times this year.
The Search Engine Game
Before tackling the search engines, Fallon first optimized his Yahoo! Store-based site. He made sure all his title tags, meta descriptions and keywords were in shape. Particularly important, he said, was ensuring that his links supported his search efforts.
"Our links are text links that Google and Yahoo! can spider, and they have the keywords in the actual text links," he says.
Then he built a web of links from other sites to his own. He created something called a Reciprocal Link Exchange program, through which he's constantly trading links with other sites. The resulting increased "link popularity" greatly boosts his search engine ranking.
To help with this, his site includes a link directory that links to hundreds of other home pages. And he'll link with virtually anyone. "The guy who's number one on Google, who's one of my main competitors, I trade links with," he says. "Every day we have people who e-mail us to trade links."
Paid Search
But free search is not enough, he points out. Fallon invests heavily in paid search listings, spending $10,000 to 15,000 per month on Overture and Google keywords. He divides his expenditures equally among these two -- though he's too busy to fully track this.
He says that despite the success he's seen, many site owners remain unwilling to spend on paid search.
"They think 'oh, you have to pay for that, so therefore it's too expensive,'" Fallon says, but he points out the error of this sort of thinking. "You can track down to the individual keyword exactly what it's worth, all the way to the conversion rate -- it's crazy to not do it."
The trick, Fallon says, is to use paid search to accomplish what free search can't. It's not possible to completely predict your ranking with free search, he notes.
On the other hand, "you can totally predict what will happen with your paid search, so you can predict what words you'll come up for and how much you're going to spend, then find out your return," he says. "What's better than that? That's the Holy Grail of modern marketing."
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| MyWeddingFavors.com owes much of its tremendous success to its CEO's search keyword savvy. |
| Vital Statistics |
| Name: |
My Wedding Favors |
| Founded: | Jan. 2004 |
| Sales/revenues: | $969,099 |
| Content management/storefront system: | Yahoo! Store |
| Database backend: | Yahoo! Store |
| Visitor analytics system: | Yahoo! Store |
| Affiliate technology provider: | Yahoo! Stores (Commission Junction in the near future) |
| Hosting provider: | Yahoo! Store |
| Payment solutions: | Advanced Credit Solutions |
| Number of employees: | 5 |
| Number of tech staff: | 0 |
| Key strategies: | • Manage internal links for search success
• Utilize paid listings and track results |
James Maguire is a contributor to eCommerce-Guide.com. His column appears every Friday.
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