Guest Blogger: Tom Rent – April 25, 2011
Today’s guest blog comes from Tom Rent at Comical Captions, one of the most knowledgeable and helpful guys around the community. Thanks for the tip, Tom! — Corrie
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Your Artist Profile Is More Important Than You Think
Yikes! Being lazy one day, rather than typing in my store URL to see if my new cards were up, I just did a Yahoo Search and noticed something interesting and disturbing!
Look how our search results come up! The title line is from GCU, and we can’t modify that, but the first lines of our Artist profile is what comes next. This is so critical in helping the shopper decide to click the link or not – yes, CRITICAL.
I then tried a Google Search and they present the same way but they instead use part of the second sentence! They must know people are gaming the system by depending to much on the first sentence.
Oh man! I think I need to come up with something more inviting and that covers 2 sentences, perhaps with a similar message. I do know it is good to use the store title again in that first sentence to help in ranking high in search, so having Comical Captions has to stay. Perhaps something like “Over 5000 of the funniest Greeting Cards around now at Comical Captions. My funny Greeting Cards are some of the most popular around.” … (and then I’ll get into the personal stuff). The first lines need to be very “catchy.” If they are reading them then the “Real Paper Greeting Cards” is what they are looking for, so the next 2 sentences of our Artist Profile is what they will bite on next so we have to word them just right!
Obviously what we come up with also has to look “OK” to someone reading the artist profile once in our store. We don’t want to drive them away. This could take some noodling!
Just thought I’d share that with the group. You might try to see how your Artist Profile reads in search. Please share what you find out!
GCU Community 
Hi Tom – thank you for this warning!
But it’s left me a bit puzzled. I’m wondering why anyone would search for our store by name, unless they were already familiar with us and what we have to offer? Maybe I’m missing something?
Good point! I may be biased as I tell people to just google my store name as it is easy to remember. It is also my brand, which if entered a lot will increase my rankings in search.
Everyone should try to come up with a “brand name” as a key part of getting established and driving traffic to their store.
I have now changed my first 2 lines. It will be interesting to see how long it takes to show-up changed in search.
Thanks for the comment.
Hi Tom
Thanks for explaining. I don’t think I ever actually tell people to google my store name, but just out of interest I googled it myself, once as judyscardstore and once as Judy’s Card Store. In neither case did it come up with my profile.
Mostly it came up with GCU’s ‘Real paper cards…’ but continued on with the GCU description, which is fine.
But once it came up with my most recent testimonial, which was also fine because I think that was so enthusiastic that it would tempt people to look further.
Worth checking though!
Thanks for this, had no idea – going to take a look at mine.