Rising to the Top

Howdy manufacturers, Jon Hoch, Founder of Power Equipment Direct, starting a new series on our new Preferred Placement program. I actually think that this program is awesome, but first I want to let you in on a couple little secrets so you better understand why you need this program.

Here is the home page for Tillers Direct, and you would think that this page by far would be the most viewed page on Tillers Direct, that the home page is the place to go. And if you thought that, you would be completely wrong.

The reason is, if you look at the actual analytics and data, and I probably shouldn't be showing you this, but I'm going to do it anyway to prove a point; is that our most visited page is actually the quick search results page which generates 10 percent of the views.

The home page, which is the default one here, is only seen 6 percent of the time by visitors to Tillers Direct. In fact, if you look at the pie chart here, you'll notice that here's the quick search results page - here's the home page, a very sliver of what the actual page views really are.

The question is what is the 65 percent? Well those are our category pages. If you blend the 65 with this 10 percent of the quick search results, you're looking at 75 percent of the web traffic.

So what does our listings page look like? Here, let's take a look, right? Here's an example of cordless cultivators, okay? And I'm using this page as an example because there's only three products on this page to kind of simplify things.

The question is, people are on this page, where do they go next? So, do they go a third, a third, and a third? Or is the traffic actually spread out and vary depending upon the listings and the hierarchy of these pages? Well let's look at the data.

According to Google, this is where people are going to next after this page, okay? Now, it's a little bit backwards because it's got red. Red is normally bad, and green is good, but it's actually in the reverse in this case. So you'll notice that the red, 29 percent of the time, customers are looking at this specific product because it's number one and 92 percent of the people buy it. The second most clicked on product is this GreenWorks, 19 percent of the time customers will click on it. And lastly, the Black & Decker, which it doesn't have a ranking at all, 5.6 percent of the time.

The thought is that the higher you are on the page, the more likely that you're going to get clicks going to your product page, okay? But in most cases, it's not 3 products, it's 12 products, because that's what we show in our listings, you'll see 12 products. So let's take a look, and here's gas cultivators. Let's look at the data, because we have more products here.

The number one listing actually gets 7.8 percent of the clicks. The number three listing is also highly clicked, and you'll notice that this one's recommended - 3.7 percent of the clicks. And if you scroll down, you'll notice that the further you get down the page, the less you actually see things being clicked on.

Here's another product that's recommended - 5 percent of the clicks. And let's go a little further down. You'll notice that there's no clicks going on at all on these products. But watch this, this is what I want to point out. Only 13 percent of the people go to page 2. That means that 87 percent of the people stay on this page and click on something from this page. They're not going to page 2.

If you think of our listings page, okay, think of it to be just like the Google search results. So think about, when you're on Google, you want to be on page 1 on Google, right? Who doesn't, right? That's great, because who wants to go to page 2. If you do, you're one of the few that are actually doing it. In addition, you want higher listings on Google. So you know, there's ads, and we can buy ads, and other people buy ads. And then there's top listings.

But one thing I do want to point out, is that for us, for the term "gas cultivators," we don't have one listing. We don't have two listings. We actually have three listings for "gas cultivators." Do we want to be higher on this page? Absolutely we do!

Do you want to be higher on our listings page? Absolutely you want to. So in the next video, we're going to talk about our algorithm that determines the rankings for this, and we're also going to give you some tips on how to get your rankings higher. Rankings higher equals more clicks, and equals more potential for sales.

So stay tuned for our next video, and I hope you enjoyed it. Have a great day.

NEXT: Our Secret Recipe - How Our Algorithm Determines Your Ranking