Continuing our a mini-series of posts about making your consignment, resale, or thrift shop’s web site do what you want it to do:

to get shoppers into your actual, physical, bricks-&-mortar, REAL store.

So far this week, we’ve been talking about what a visitor will see when s/he gets to your site, and how you can turn that idle interest into an actual shopping trip to your location.

But first, they have to FIND your site.

Which means your site has to appeal to the “spiders” which “crawl” the web… automated programs which rank your site for its fulfillment of whatever people type into a search engine’s “find” box.

This is a VAST topic, and whole industries have been created to help you rank higher in search results. But here’s a few that would be most effective for you, your shop, and your specific goal: to get folks OFF the web and into a mode of transport that will bring them to you. I have linked each phrase with the most straight-forward description/ information on the phrase; you can Google for more if you need more clarification.

Easy fix #1: Put keywords in your page titles.

Easy fix #2: Provide alt text for each and every graphic on each and every page.While these are vital to those who vir\ew web pages with graphics turned off, and to those who use a reader on the web to overcome vision limitations, alt text also helps spiders decide if your web site might be the answer to a searcher’s query. For example in the graphic below, the alt text is Fast Cash Fridays, which means that when we google  “Your Stuff + fast cash friday” we get to where we want to be!

Search engines cannot read graphics, only text. I’ve circled the ONLY text on this attractive page that spiders could use to determine if they’ll serve your page up as a search result.

Easy fix #3: Realize that spiders cannot read words in a graphic, so repeat the information in text. Using the same page s an example, only the circled words are readable text to a spider, along with the provided alt text for each image. If there’s something in your graphic “poster” that you think people will search for, be sure to repeat that information in words, as text or part of your alt text. Alt text can’t do the entire job… today, if I google “fast cash friday” only 4 consignment shops come up in the first page of Google results… and none of the four is this shop. I wonder: if the information in the graphic was repeated in the text, would that help? How search engines actually rank sites is a closely-guarded and constantly-changing secret… but I’m willing to say that it couldn’t hurt…

Easy (and terrific marketing ploy) fix #4:  Have links available to your viewers. It’s kind, it’s good marketing, it shows you care about them… and boy, does it make your search engine ranking SOAR. What kind of links? I’d recommend all of the following, in suitable places on your site:

• Other local businesses. If you want folks to visit you, give them another reason to.
• Consignment, resale, thrift peers in your market area. Customers don’t only shop your store. So give them a hand preserving their budget… more cash left to shop with you!
• Helpful links: recycling, reusing, reinventing sites you think they’ll like. Linking to sites which are related to your business, such as all the customer articles on HowToConsign.com, will put money in your pocket.
• Of course, all your social media spots (these links should be on every one of your pages)
• And here’s a kooky, perhaps, suggestion, but one which gets you WOM in your market area, good will from far-flung resale peers, and an A in my book, for realizing that yes, you too can help our entire industry thrive: Link to shops like yours, with similar names, all over the country and continent. This is one of the most valuable types of links you can possibly have on your site. All you need to do is somewhere on your home page, have a little text like “Looking for MyShop in Texarkana? They’re here. Tell ’em Howdy from MyShop in OurTown.”

Semi-easy fix #5: Have a blog. You knew I’d get around to that sometime this week, didn’t you? Read more about why. Having a regularly-updated and relevant blog will do more for your search engine ranking than you can possibly imagine. If you can Facebook, you can blog.

Tomorrow, the wrap up: A complete Rank Sheet to use on your own, to see how your web site functions with the goal of

getting shoppers into your actual, physical, bricks-&-mortar, REAL store.