HOST Spruce Up Your Shop Challenge: Announcement Page

Welcome to Week 3 of the Spruce Up Your Shop Challenge!

Task 1 - share your Google Analytics for the past week below. Has your traffic changed any? Up? Down? Let us know.
Task 2 (Optional): Update your Google Analytics with this nice feature! http://www.etsy.com/storque/etsy-news/tech-update-etsy-web-analytics-enhancements-3350/


This week we are going to work on your shop's Announcement Page and organization


Some of the biggest mistakes made on Shop Announcement pages are:
- making them too long.
- including information that should be on the policies or profile pages.
- using negative language.
- not using blocking to make the page easier to read
- and spelling errors. Nothing sends me running faster than spelling errors on a shop!
- not using keywords to your advantage

Take for instance MY current Annoucnement page, shown here:

Problems? Tons!

It's too wordy. There are no photos of items showing. I have to scroll down on each and every page to see them - what a pain! Especially for my customers. There is nothing here to Hook their attention and draw them in.
Repetition. Shipping is on my Policy pages. A lot of the other things here are on the Policy or Profile pages. Time to get rid of them. So... here it is once those are removed.

A litttle better. Not so much text, and you can see product images. But the text needs to be spiffed up a bit.

Here are a few blog posts by others on the topic. Check them out for tips and tricks to make your Announcement page the best it can be - and if you have questions, feel free to ask.

http://handmade-business.blogspot.com/2009/10/etsy-seo-cheat-sheet.html
http://www.etsy.com/storque/how-to/seller-how-to-optimizing-your-etsy-shop-for-search-engines-3835/

My page after:

Recap on what I changed:

1. Page Title. It should never read "welcome to my shop", and mine hasn't in some time. It uses some of the key words I have for the items I sell.

2. Shop Announcement is short and sweet - although it might be able to be culled even more. I give readers a bit of infomation to get them interested, then talk about our monthly contest - and where to find the rest and then I give NEWbies to Etsy a link to get some help on how to use Etsy (I added this because I noticed I get a good deal of outside etsy traffic - so I cannot guarantee those people have ever shopped on Etsy before.

3. Customers can see the row of Featured items without scrolling.

Feel free to give me suggestions on my shop. And to share your shop's front page make over.

Next week will be about Categories and product listings. Hope to see you there!