Biblio Witnesses a Decrease in Traffic
Biblio sent out a press release yesterday stating that traffic to its site is steadily decreasing, but sales conversations have increased (press release body below). While this signals a more effective marketing strategy, in the short term, it is not a trend that will lead to positive outcomes for the site long term. What makes this even more troublesome is the fact that the online bookselling market is booming. More and more visitors are look to the industry’s sites (on the whole).
For any website fighting for space in a crowded marketplace, like online bookselling, traffic is almost just as important as sales. Traffic that does not yield sales, still helps the site increase its brand awareness and may yield sales from the same user who returns with a direct look-up of the site. In order to achieve significant growth and an increase in market share you must increase traffic - bottom line fact.
ASHEVILLE, NC — November 20h, 2006 — Biblio.com, one of the world’s largest suppliers of used, rare, and out-of-print books, has seen a steady decrease in traffic over the last few months, due to some algorithmic changes at some of the search engines. Interesting though, the bottom line conversions have increased. What does all of this mean?
“We have made huge advancements in the way our site is structured to maximize the number of pages that are indexed in the major search engines. Yahoo is indexing 200% more pages than last year, MSN, 100%, and Google is actually down, but conversions are way up,” says Kevin Donaldson, Chief Marketing Officer for Biblio.com. “Honestly you just can’t complain about less superfluous traffic from Google and more closed sales. We are doing something right.”
Biblio.com is a small company located in Asheville North Carolina that was the brainchild of the current President/CEO, Brendan Sherar. Begun in 2003 as Biblio.com, the site has attracted thousands of independent booksellers from all over the world. Biblio, Inc., the parent company of Biblio.com, takes the idea of independence seriously.
“We want the sellers on our site to be able to run their businesses without a great deal of interference from us. We are marketing vehicle for them much like an advertisement in a newspaper or trade magazine,” says Donaldson. “Being able to get individual books and pages listed in Google is just another way we make a path from the buyer to the seller. We have more than 43,000 of our web site pages indexed in Google with some reference to our independent sellers, and we work every day to get more.”
