Website Introduction & Review Please

[chappers]

Hello

My website has been live for a few months now. Made a few sales already. I have a large number of products - market research reports, which provide data about the size and growth of a particular industry.

www.marketresearchint.com (Market Research International)

It's a reseller website for business reports, and has a high throughput of products. Typical lifecycle for a product is about one year, after which it gets out of date. Therefore this makes the job of promotion, marketing and SEO pretty difficult.

I'm using the news section to drive traffic. I'm also paying for a press release website to take my content with backlinks. This website is ranked by Google and appears in Google News.

My product descriptions are the same as the Publisher (or Manufacturer). Therefore I am duplicating content that the publisher has, as well as several other resellers I compete with.

Reviews and feedback appreciated..!!!

Thanks

Chappers

[bornfree]

Hello Chappers
I think the website looks good and professional. Nice clean feel and blue always looks good for B2B type sites. You might like to think of having an 'About us' section? This could include some info on company background, etc. and would add some legitimacy and reassurance to customers spending quite large amounts on your reports. You could include some of the info from your 'FAQs' section in it, e.g. 'Why buy a report from us', etc.
We're about to go live with our BP site and sell textbooks. One thing we are including is a 'Browse inside' feature, using a Dutch company called Publitas (we've just got a free account and it works well). You can see an example here: http://bp83.betapark.co.uk/travel-to...d-edition.html. Something similar for your reports might add value?
Just out of interest, did you use a screencast-type program to do your video? We're looking at doing something similar.
Hope suggestions help and best of luck!

[Harpo]

Hi Chappers

Looks good. My only points would be:

1) Your META descriptions on products could use a bit of polish - many of them are truncated mid word. Its definitely worth spending some time on this.
2) Lots of duplicate images. Obviously an image of a report is a hard thing to do (!), but currently your product images don't really add much value. A unique image per report might be too difficult to achieve, but you could get more variety in there - Eg composite images of vendor, market, year etc.
3) Multi language. Are the reports all in English? If so, the Google translate feature may be overkill - it messes up your lovely formatting when you change to (say) Chinese.

[chappers]

Guys

Thanks for the reply and the suggestions.

The About Us page is something I'd been planning to do. Thanks. I don't host the reports so I can't use the search inside feature. I can do this but adds work and I have little time as it is! The video I did using my Apple Mac. It has an inbuilt screen recording program - its very cool and is free with the Apple Mac. I moved to the Mac about 6 months ago and will never go back.

The meta descriptions are built by me. I don't do them manually and do them in bulk using Excel functions. I've been trying to find a function that enables me to cut off sentences by the second or third full stop - but cannot find it. At the moment I'm using either a LEFT function or a MID function in Excel, stopping at a certain number of characters from the start.

The images is a good shout. I use Photoshop to process images in bulk but I need to find a way to randomise the images... when uploading say 100 titles at a time.

Re the translations - I may get rid of it. The reports are all in English as you say, but wanted to offer it anyway. I hadnt checked the formatting on the translations so this is likely to get the boot.