The better way to sell online

Increase traffic with hidden landing pages

"Keep it simple” is an important policy you should use when building and maintaining an online store. But, as your online business grows — you will have pages you want to retire, or clean out of the navigation, or delete completely.

“Keep it simple” is an important policy you should use when building and maintaining an online store. But, as your online business grows - you will have pages you want to retire, or clean out of the navigation, or delete completely.

However, quite often you have ongoing traffic which hits those pages from search engines. You simply want to keep that traffic coming in on those pages — right? Obviously removing or deleting those pages is not an option since you would have to set-up a redirect on your host so people land on new pages. You would also have to wait until new pages get ranked and build further traffic over time on each new page.

That’s where the “Extras” folder inside the ShopFactory editor comes in. The Extras is a hidden set of pages, sub-pages and products you can use to keep those old pages live on your website.

With the Extras folder you can simply drag and drop pages from the live navigation on your site to a folder or sub-page in the Extras folder to keep that traffic coming in. This removes the old pages from your navigation (index 1 and 2) but still allows visitors to view them if coming in on the search engine. The content is also still searchable on your ShopFactory search results.

The great thing about the Extras folder is — you can use it for other things too.

If you use ShopFactory as a content management center for newsletters, basic blogs or article content - you can simply build a folder for each of these venues. You can also build a “Links” page within your live navigation to provide a menu or topic link page to the different content in the hidden pages to control what is accessible by your visitors.

Discontinued Products can also be buried into the Extras folder so you can still capitalize on traffic and potential sales. If you have vendors who discontinue product yearly — simply create a subpage or sets of subpages for the manufacturer in the Extras folder, and drag discontinued products into those pages. Don’t forget to “disable” the buying/cart functions and remove the price (if desired) so those products can’t be purchased. It’s also a good idea to “link” to new products, or replacement products at the top of those pages to let visitors know where to easily find and buy a matching item, which may have replaced the discontinued item.

The other great thing about the Extras folder is it allows you to create alternate landing pages for your products and site. You can create multiple versions of pages or products for different S.E.O. keyword purposes.

Let’s say you have a product which has to be titled and keyworded for one phrase. But, you know half of your customers search for that product under a different name or keyword phrase. Simply build your main “visible” product for your top navigation, and create a hidden alternate for the second keyword rich phrase for the product. Don’t forget to change the content on the secondary product page design hidden in the Extras folder — so the second page doesn’t get dropped from the search engines.

The great thing about building separate pages like this is when the search engine algorithm changes (as they often do); you can still get traffic from other pages that may not have been ranked well before the algorithm change. If you do it right, when the search engines change — your traffic can flip flop between the two versions of the pages and you should not see a drop in the overall traffic on your site!

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