Every E-Tailers’ 2011 Wish List

By Larry Kavanagh

SEO
SEO still represents the biggest opportunity for most sites, particularly multichannel merchants, to increase traffic. In the past, it took months for SEO efforts to show up in terms of generating visitors. However, Google has made a number of changes that reward your SEO efforts more quickly. Plan on spending more time and money on SEO in 2011 — budget for at least a 20 percent boost in effort. The increased traffic generated from SEO will make all your cool conversion techniques that much more effective.

Email and Other
Email doesn't have the ability to dramatically increase raw traffic numbers. You can keep this source of visitors growing, however, by working on ways to increase the percentage of visitors who give you their email address. You need the number of deliverable email addresses you have to grow year over year. If your program is stagnant, look at where and how often you ask for email addresses, and what you offer in return.

Finally, the best thing to do with the "other" category is to track it and look for trends. It's where the next hot source of new traffic will come from.

The naughty merchant will likely see flat traffic next year, prompting a real struggle. But if you're nice and follow the tips above, you'll be well on your way to achieving double-digit sales growth in 2011.

Larry Kavanagh is founder and CEO of e-commerce software-as-a-service developer D.M.insite. He can be reached at lkavanagh@dminsite.com.