Common Sense eCommerce

I was under the impression that Google did not index eBay auction listings. I’m not sure where I got that idea (think it might have been one of those old school SEO books) but was I wrong! I listed something on Sunday 1/28 and on Tuesday 1/30 (approximately 48 hours later), I typed in the product name as it was in the listing title and… there it was! On the first page of Google. It was in the #9 position of the organics.

It really isn’t surprising considering that eBay is an important site and Google does lots of indexing on important sites. It also explains some things. Like why we have had a Store Credits showing up on our eBay account. eBay issues Store Credits when someone comes from outside eBay and buys something for your eBay store. I have absolutely no external promotions going into my eBay store (there are some going the other way - heh).

But it was one of those “aha!” moments for me and I started to wonder how I can possibly leverage that. Is that a case for coughing up the extra 40 cents for 10 day auctions? Hmm. It did get me thinking about writing my listing titles not only for eBay users but also for Google users.

Google has a free keyword tool (link here) that you can use to see what terms and related terms it recommends for a given keyword. It’s used for Adwords ad research, but it might be useful for other purposes too.

Obviously the keyword has to be a fairly niche keyword. I don’t think you could do this with Ipod Nano or something like that. I tried this experiment with all my listings and most of them actually came up fairly high on Google - many on the first page.

So, it’s back to the drawing board on title writing!

Tags: eBay Selling, eBay Auctions, eBay Auctions in Google, eBay Listings Indexed

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