AP 0152: Should I Use Internal or External Links to My Etsy Shop?

AskPat 152 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What is up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 152 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, happy to be here to help you by answering your online business, blogging, entrepreneurship, podcasting, startup, all those types of questions, five days a week.

And today we have another great question, from Kim. But before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is 99designs.com. You know, one of the most important aspects of your website is what it looks like and how people see it. You know it's a very visual thing. And so you need good visual stuff on your site. And it can be hard to find the right people. Sometimes the right people are a little expensive or they can be hard to come by or hard to work with sometimes. But if you want a great place to start, I recommend checking out 99designs.com/pat. You can get a design you love within seven days, professional high-quality results. And check it out. I've used it myself before. So, again, 99designs.com/pat.

Now let's go ahead and check out today's question from Kim.

Kim Franklin: Hey Pat, Kim Franklin from San Diego. I have a blog called TrashyCrafter.com. And essentially I take old, damaged library books and roll them into beads and sell jewelry.

I have an Etsy shop as well as a blog and what I'm trying to do now is focus on SEO so I can get more traffic to both my blog and my Etsy shop. The thing I'm really, really struggling with lately is, I'm trying to figure out what's better. Is it better to do internal links to the products that I post within my pages on my site or is it better to do external links to my Etsy shop? I want to try to get the most amount of traffic for the SEO tactics that I use. I just don't know if internal or external links are better, especially with all the Google updates and algorithms. I don't want to get hit and I want to get as much traffic. Thanks so much. Thanks for all you do. All right, bye.

Pat Flynn: Kim, thank you so much for the awesome question. I know there's a lot of people who use Etsy out there who could possibly benefit from listening to this. But I also want to thank you because I remember meeting you at Social Media Marketing World and offering . . . You know you actually gave me a couple of these bracelets to give to my wife. And I gotta be honest, I love them. I absolutely love them. I see my wife wearing them every once in a while. I've stolen them from her a couple of times and put them on myself. They're great. I would love to do a custom order with you at some point for one of my favorite books, which is How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I see that you actually do custom orders here on your site, TrashyCrafter.com as well, which is really cool. So, anyway, we can figure that out later. But, first of all, awesome idea here, I think this is great. These are very memorable, obviously telling a story with that thing on your bracelet. It's awesome. It's really cool.

So let's talk about your question specifically in terms of internal linking or linking to your Etsy shop and how all that works in terms of SEO and Google and algorithms and all that stuff. Well, I want to sorta do something here and I hope you don't mind. I'm going to act like a shopper on your site. So, if you're keeping track of these, I'm going to apologize in advance but it's for the benefit of your own good in terms of understanding how a person, brand new to your site, your blog, your website at TrashyCrafter.com, how they experience your site.

So, I'm on your home page now, Kim, and I see all these amazing bracelets, very colorful, amazing pictures. You know you got the little . . . the effect there, kinda blurring around the edges to soften it up a little bit. Looks great. They look fantastic. And these I believe are, sort of in here from your Etsy shop, so you probably have a script in here, which then enables people to . . . you know, so you don't have to update these automatically, sort of just pulls from your site.

So I'm going to click on the first one, which is a Goldilocks and Three Bears recycled-paper bead bracelet from your home page. And just keep track of these clicks here. This is one click. And that takes me to a blog post that says Goldilocks and the Three Bears recycled-paper bead bracelet. Okay, awesome, even more pictures, cover of the book, which is awesome and a nice little wrapping of what it might look like once they buy it. Like, I want to buy this. This is awesome. So, I'm going to click ‘Buy Now' again. That's the first time I see the Buy Now button is there. So that's two clicks already. And then I'm taken to your Etsy page and I see that you have, like 452 people have shown that this is their favorite shop, there's five stars twenty-one times, you have 187 items for sale. Like this is . . . we're on Etsy now. But I don't see anything in my cart yet. In order to add this to my cart I have to click ‘Add to Cart' again. Which is a third click; which is pretty insane, you know, it's pretty insane.

So, in terms of customer experience, or potential customer experience, you're asking a lot of somebody who's interested in one of these to actually make a purchase. I have to click three times before I even get to the point at which I am able to then put in my credit card information and actually get it. So that is quite a bit. So in an ideal world, it would be like this: I see it on your site, and you know it's good to have them on your site of course. You are building authority on your brand. You're hopefully getting rankings in Google, or will eventually getting rankings in Google for your site. Which is good, you know. That's your site. You want to keep control of it. That's why I believe having stuff on your own site and a third-party site like this is good as well. A lot of Amazon sellers do that as well. They have their own store on their own site and the store on Amazon as well, as their main selling engine.

But you're really close here, Kim, and here's what I think would happen in an ideal world. People come to your home page. And right now when they come to your home page, it's great. You see your story, talks about who you are and what you do, you know, the mother-daughter duo. That's fantastic. I love that they are on the right hand side. But then on the left hand side, I see all these great images, but I'm not exactly sure what they are. If I'm totally brand new to your site and I find you perhaps on Google, I'm not sure what these are exactly. If you just tell me right above all of these images that these are made from books, that would be awesome. It's not very clear until I start reading a little bit. So some description to share what it is that I'm looking at would really, really help on the home page.

And I'm okay with the idea of clicking on that image on the home page and then going to the particular blog post that has it in there. I think that one click is okay because it's sort of a quick little yes, yes I'm interested. Although on the home page you could also include—and make it more interesting by including—those book covers which you show on the blog post. But if you show those book covers on the home page too, you could add a little bit more variety because currently it is hard to discern one set of bead bracelets from another. So these book titles would . . . these book covers would help and it would go along with that quick description of what it is I'm looking at that I talked about earlier.

But when I land on this particular blog post, for example, when I click ‘Buy Now,' like in an ideal world I would want to click there and have it already in my cart when I get to Etsy, so that I can just either continue shopping or checkout right then and there. And I don't know if Etsy has a way for you to do that, but that's what—that, I believe, would be the best thing in the world. Beause you cut out that additional, “Yes I already said I wanted this so why do I have to click it again,” if you know what I mean. You're showing the same images on this Etsy page. You've already done the hard work of giving them what they are going to get. And having them say, Yes I want to buy it. And now you are giving them an opportunity to reconsider, and you don't want to do that.

So I don't know if there is a way to automatically add to a cart from your page, but if there is, that's what I would do. But, I do like the idea of getting to Etsy at some point. And maybe, and again, I'm just thinking out loud here, we're working this out, I think it would actually be cool if from the home page you actually link directly to your Etsy.

So, the image on the front like we just talked about, the image of the bracelet, maybe alongside that a little thumbnail of the cover, something that is recognizable, you know a lot of people—when I say Green Eggs and Ham, you can almost imagine that orange book, right? I think it's orange. Hopefully it is. But you can sort of imagine that; it brings back nostalgia. And I click on that and then that link from the home page goes directly to your Etsy page. So we're skipping the blog post. But I think the blog post is great when you come out with new stuff. That way the people who are subscribed, they'll get those blog posts and they'll see what's new. And, you know, because Etsy is serving—you're essentially doing two, twice the same thing, both in your blog post but on Etsy. But when you come out with new stuff, that will be a great opportunity for you to create a piece of content on your site for people who are following all the new stuff and latest developments. Because when people get to your Etsy page, they might not necessarily know what is the newest, latest, and greatest. So that would be a good thing to do. But also it would allow Google to easily rank for those specific items as well. Having blog posts for each of those individual, specific items … you could rank for each of those books, for example. So each of those books followed by the word ‘bead bracelet' or just ‘bracelet.' Super cool. And when people get to those blog posts, that will link to your Etsy page as well.

I just think the miscommunication here with your site right now is from the home page to the blog post and then the blog post back to Etsy. And then having to have to click ‘Add to Cart' again. So, that's what I think should happen and that way there is sort of a natural conversation going on between your site and your Etsy page or your store. Again, Google ranks for user experience and so, this is providing better user experience for your audience as well. When they see an image and they are interested in it, then they can go to your home page and hopefully that will open a new page. That's what I would recommend. So from the home page you click on a particular item and it opens a new tab or a new page. You don't want it to open on the same page because you want your store to continue to be open, even if people click and close that Etsy store they can still be on your site. They don't just leave and then they forget about you. So that's what I would do.

So, hopefully that makes sense. And then on your Etsy site, hopefully once you get customers, or even on the Etsy site itself you can link somewhere on your site, a landing page perhaps, where people can subscribe to get new items sent to their inbox and also, potential discounts on those items as well. So if you were to incentivize them to sign up to a list, you can actually collect a list of people who would then be interested in all the new stuff. So your blog post would still be relevant. I'm not telling you to get rid of them, I'm just telling you that you don't have to link to them from the home page when people already have expressed interest. And the cool thing about this is, you know, Etsy is the way it is because it works. You know they have people there who optimize it just like they do on Amazon to get the highest clickbait rate, right? Like their buttons are green because they know that that works the best. They know exactly where to put the stars in terms of ratings. They know exactly where to put the images and how everything works. And so, you can take advantage of that by skipping over your blog post for the people who have already expressed interest on the home page.

Whew, a lot of stuff there and I hope that made sense. And, Kim, or anybody else there who has an Etsy page, if you want to talk more about this, and maybe provide some suggestions, use #AskPat152. Again, this is Episode 152. This is something we're going to do a little bit more on AskPat, is if you want to continue the discussion off of my answer for the person who asked this question, you can talk about it on Twitter using the hashtag, which is really cool. #AskPat152 Perhaps you have an Etsy store and you are doing really well and you want to help Kim out, or maybe you need some help as well and you want to join the discussion. Again, #AskPat152

Kim, thank you so much for your question today. I hope that I can see you again soon here in San Diego. You're awesome, I appreciate you and everybody out there who is asking questions. If you have a question you'd like potentially to be featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page. I also want to thank today's sponsor which is 99designs.com, an awesome site I've used in the past to help with some really simple design stuff. Actually, some not so simple as well. Just, I needed stuff done, I needed it done quickly, and I needed it to be exactly what I wanted. And what's cool is you can work with several different designers to get the design that you want. So make sure, make sure you head to 99designs.com/pat and you'll actually get a $99 Power Pack of services for free today. So, again, that's 99designs.com/pat.

Thank you again. As always I'm going to end with a quote and today's quote is from Chris Thunder. Chris Thunder says “Every search has a story. Find it.” I love that. You gotta remember that there's actual human beings on the other end of the searches. There's actual human beings on the other side of your email list. So everyone has a story, every search has a story, every subscribe has a story: Find out what that story is. It's going to help you better provide solutions for your audience. Cool. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate you and I'll see in the next episode of AskPat.