How Can People Search Your Site If They Don’t Know What To Search?

By Wayne Liu
Posted Friday, September 17, 2004

We all know it is difficult to promote commercial products, especially those commodity items. People selling commodity items are generally submitting their sites to search engines, such as Google and getting links from other sites to increase page ranks. But you will lose some potential customers who don’t know what or how to search.

When we look at how people are using Internet, there are basically two types of people who use Internet for shopping. The first type is they know what they want and try to find out where they can buy on the Internet. The second type is they want to buy something but don’t know what to buy. Who are they? The best example is the people who shop for gift giving.

In general, when you buy something for yourself, you know what to buy, but don’t know price and place. So you go to Google to search shopping sites. For the people who shop for gift, they may not know what to buy to fit their friends’ styles, not to mention what they can search using search engine. Perhaps, the only word they can search is gift. Therefore, a gift giving sites can guide them to shop better gifts for their friends.

Don’t forget those people who visit the gift giving sites are willing to spend money. They are not just looking for product or background information. They are not doing web research. They have intention to buy something. This is what you want.

Moreover, gift giving site can sell a little bit more expensive, or call upscale items. People may buy cheap things for themselves, but they won’t buy cheap things for their friends. Otherwise, you won’t see people borrow money from banks or credit cards for gift giving.

As I said before, some visitors may not even know what is the correct keyword they should use to search. If you sell something that is unique or the product type is new, then how can you expect people can search your site using correct keyword?

For example, assuming you are selling “Car Reversing Aid”, a new and unique product. You would probably use Pay-Per-Click advertisment with keyword “Car Reversing Aid” to promote your product. Then take a look at how many searches for “Car Reversing Aid”. There is only 83 searches in a month. It is true that the cost of keyword “Car Reversing Aid” should be very cheap, but it is meaningless because nobody, or only a few people have “Car Reversing Aid” in their mind.

Gift Giving sites eliminate this problem by showing products in open areas that are easy for visitors to see. Categorize the gift ideas into different hobbies, events and type of people (Example: (http://www.StyleAndMatch.com/snm2/giftlink.html)), which help gift shoppers to find out what they want.

Yes, there are a lot of gift giving idea sites on the Internet. But most of them are ecommerce sites that focus on selling their own products. There are couple sites really providing different kinds of gift giving ideas but those sites are relatively immature. There are a lot of areas that can be improved.

There are two types of sites that provide gift giving ideas based on people and events. The first type of gift giving site is they show product details and images on their web sites. Usually, these product images and details are submitted by vendors for Pay-Per-Click Advertisement. This approach may limit the number of products or product categories showing on the site.

The other type of gift giving site is they don’t show products details for gift ideas, but show lots of different ideas for specific events or type of people. However, they don’t tell or guide people where to buy. Even I can find some of them have links to other sites, but those are standard banners that point to other sites’ home pages. That is not convenient to customers.

Therefore, gift giving sites are not perfect today. There are a lot of areas that can be improved. You should use some creative marketing ideas on promoting gift giving site. Not only that, gift giving site is also extremely good for selling advertisement, as long as you have enough traffic to your site.

About the Auhor
Wayne Liu is the founder of (http://www.StyleAndMatch.com) , a Gift Giving ideas site that provides thousands of gift ideas for different kinds of events and different kinds of people. He can be reached at mailto:wayneliu@styleandmatch.com .