How would you increase traffic and sales to an online decor shop?

It sounds like you're thinking more about how to distribute your product than thinking about the strategy of what would make people buy it.

Several thoughts...

First, forget about getting listed in dmoz. Long story, but it's sort of a joke with those who know about it. Minor point.

It's hard to say if you're over-optimizing your site. You may be. If you want to go for ranking, then having non-standard content for product descriptions will help a lot. If you're using standard descriptions that other ecommerce sites are using, then that will hurt you.

See what's selling most and promote that more on your site. You should be using some kind of tracking scripts similar to G Analytics.

Also keep in mind that selling very common, low priced items means you're competing with more businesses. If you're selling stuff that is easy to find locally, then that will not help you. If you're competing with large, established offline stores, you can't compete effectively with them.

You can try optimizing some pages for local search in German cities. Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt.

Also, are you sure the goods you're selling will appeal to Germans from maybe a cultural sense? Have you looked at what's selling in German urban areas and checked out the styles, colors, etc?

Another point is the brands may not be recognizable to Germans. So they may not have an interest because it seems foreign or they just don't trust it. You never know. Try to find popular name brands in Germany for what you sell and get an idea about that.

Did you do any market research?

It may help to know what the qualities and characteristics certain retail items have that appeal to Germans. This goes back to the bit about cultural influences on preferences.

Also, have you done any research on your keywords for their seasonal volume?

I would stop concentrating so much on SEO and start concentrating your efforts more so on social media. SEO is so unpredictable and a very shaky way to build your company. It can be pulled out from underneath you at any time.

Get your fanpage working better. Maybe change the name of it to something more appealing. Something where you could post a "of the week" type product from your collection and make it fun and interactive. This is what will help build up your social media presence and drive more people over to your site. You can then also use Facebook ads to get infront of the friends of the people who like your page and things can grow quite quickly from there.

I would like to add some of my ideas, but this might not be very helpful really. Since you have try in using social medias to promote your product then why not keep it on moving (upgrade to the next level). Make your strengths be more of a strengths. I mean focus on your strengths to attract more people to buy your product, think of something that others haven't done yet. And try searching other techniques on marketing, there are a lot of them and are very helpful. ^_^

I will increase traffic to any site by guest posting because guest posting not only brings traffic but also brings quality traffic to a site.

Thank you so much for your responses.

@misterme: We do have a strong focus on how to get people to buy our products. We do photoshoots featuring our products in interiors/arrangements for our homepage, we feature our products on Instagram in a creative, visually appealing way, we send newsletters to subscribers from time to time with new photoshoots and decorating tips, etc. On our blog we even did a recipe and DIY featuring our products. The problem is that no one sees any of this since our traffic is too low and we are not known.

@KenThompson: It could be that we are over-optimising our site but we have the same amount of SEO text and keyword density as our main competitors who are ranked on the first page on Google. Our product descriptions are non-standard which is how we are being ranked high for our products. However since the majority of our products are too unique for lack of a better term, the search volume for them is really low. The majority of our products are not what you would typically find in the offline shops here in terms of design as the big retailers here have more mass marketed products. We do believe our products would appeal to Germans. Similar products are featured in the most popular decor magazines here, some bloggers have voluntarily written about our shop and we had a lot of bloggers contact us wanting our products.

We sell our products without a a product brand. As for the well-known brands, we contacted suppliers of some well-known brands in Europe and never heard back from them.

Promoting our most popular items on our site is a great idea. Optimising some pages for local search also sounds good but a local monthly search volume of 5,400 is too low. We were ranked on the first page of Google for a German keyword like "room decor" which has a similar search volume but we just had 30 clicks from that in the last month.

We have not done research on our keywords for their seasonal volume. We have just tried to rank well for three main keywords: the first has the highest search volume and high competition and if we were ranked on the first page we would not have sales or traffic problems anymore. The second has a high search volume and low competition but is less relevant. The third has a low search volume and high competition but is the most relevant for our business. We really believe it comes down to ranking well for these keywords or nothing.

@Jesse L: Our target market is women aged between 20 to 35 who are interested in fashion and travel, take care of themselves, are trendsetters, well-educated and have average to above average incomes. They are also technology and social-media savvy and care greatly about how they are perceived by others, especially by their peers.

With the PPC campaigns we ran, we tested different ads. We tried some broader keywords like "online decor shop", more specific keywords like "buy stylish decor online" and specific product keywords like "white deer antlers". Most of our products are so unique that they would be listed on the first page of Google organically and Adwords suggested that the search volume was too low for a lot of product keywords.

@WillR and Usmile: Those are great points. We are concentrating a lot on social media but our fanbase is not growing much and there isn't much viral activity or engagement going on. Also when we posted more frequently on Facebook we had more unlikes. "of the week" type product sounds great and then "friends of friends" ads when we have a bigger fanbase. We will give those a try! Cheers!

@nitesch: Thanks! We will keep that in mind.

You can drive laser targeted traffic to your website by hanging out on mommy forums often or those message boards focused on home improvement. They are your targeted audience, so if you establish yourself as an industry expert and people see you eventually as an authority on the subject, generating traffic and leads would be easy for you.

Maybe employ an SEO expert (found on forums like these as well as outsourcing sites for cheap) and work with them on ranking your website high in google for high volume keywords!