It’s been a while since we shared some success stories from online businesses.  A quick trip to Internet Retailer yielded several examples of how other companies are boosting their online success.

Why should you care?

Because we believe that one of the best ways to learn the tricks of the trade is to assimilate the knowledge and experience of others into your own.  While individual circumstances and situations differ, the techniques they use can work for just about anyone.

Less Clicking = More Spending

Cabela’s was able to boost their online earnings by reducing the number of clicks customers had to make in order to spend money.  By using a different approach to search engine optimization, Cabela’s made their landing pages direct-buy capable.  Instead of clicking through to another page to spend money, customers could shop directly from the pages being index by the search engines.

The Moral:  Make it as easy as possible for your customers to convert.  If they’re spending money on your site, you want them to spend that money as quickly as possible.  If it’s hard to shop from your site… they’ll go elsewhere.

Sometimes the Best Traffic is Free Traffic

Officefurniture.com used to focus on pay-per-click and comparison shopping engines to generate the majority of their traffic.  But a change of tactic, which put more emphasis on search optimization and natural search rankings, resulted in a 35% increase in sales from free, organic search traffic.  The company was concerned about the rising costs of its PPC campaign and decided to explore the strange new world of natural results.  And it paid off.

The Moral:  You don’t have to spend a ton of money to increase traffic… and thus, conversions/sales.  You do, however, have to spend some time critically thinking about your site’s search engine performance.  Why not take a look at Matt’s search criteria series and see what you can do to boost those free natural results.