SEO for Antiques and Collectibles

Several weeks ago, I started doing Search Engine Optimization for Merry Elizabeth Foss, a dealer of Latin American Antiques and Collectibles. Merry lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico and gets her pieces directly from the people who create them. That is, she travels to Mexico, Peru, Guatamala and other places in South America and buys them one-by-one.

Sounds like fun, no?

I have enjoyed the process of learning about Merry’s “niche” because it is so new to me. And it is so VARIED. There are literally 1000′s of keywords related to antiques and collectibles in Latin America. Where do you begin in such a niche?

I install Google Analytics Tracking code on my clients’ websites. It’s a free service that gives great information on a website’s visitors. It will tell how many visitors a websites receives, and which pages they view. It will even tell you what keyword that searched for on google. If you do not want to add the code yourself, you can hire a web-programmer (or me) to do it for you. It only takes a couple of minutes per page.

Once you have gotten the keyword information I go to WordTracker and find related keywords. Perhaps there are new words and phrases that I can use to help bring in website traffic.

In Merry’s case, I quickly found out that one of the main words on her site “antique” is searched about a million times per month. It would would be hard to get a top rank for such a highly searched keyword. But within that keyword there are smaller targeted niches such as “Antique Collectibles” and “Antique Silver” that have great possibilities.

I also found out that people look for “antique silver” in combination with other terms such as “antique silver jewelry” and a “silver necklace” – just to name a few. These keyword have the potential to be a great niche. Many people are looking for specific information about antique silver items and Merry’s site has many unique pieces. So we begin search engine optimization with “antique silver” and then move on to the other potential traffic generators in her site.

Make sense? Interested in Antique Silver Jewelry?