Jim Cockrum, of Silient Sales Machines recently posted a video in his blog showing how the eBay Featured Plus Item option can get you massive exposure in Google. In the examples, he shows it’s easily possible to get a top ten position for a niche keyword within a week - one which would normally cost hundreds of dollars to maintain with an adwords campaign with the same keyword.

Unfortunately, by the time google may have crawled and indexed your listing it may have ended, so if your considering using this technique to rely on extra traffic for your eBay auctions it’s pretty much essential to either maintain an ebay store or have a large number of listings active so users can jump to your other items - Ideally, both.

Also, by using niche keywords although you may be gaining traffic from google, it’s worth remembering traffic from ebay may be down as the majority of users rely on eBays keyword based search facility - For example they type in specific keywords instead of browsing categories & are more likely to search for “Engagement Rings” as oppose to “Asscher Cut Diamond Engagement.”

Overall, Jims suggestion is a good one. Especially if your looking to build a full time business both on and away though eBay, however it should be used with caution considering the recent eBay price rises for using Featured Plus in some categories.

However, to take it one more step forward if you already run an existing eBay store it’s even easier to gain exposure from google this way. How? Simple rename one of your store categories to your chosen keywords.

I’ve done this for the last three years and have maintained a top five position for the specific keyword in google. More importantly, as it’s a store category and not a featured plus listing it doesn’t cost me a penny more. Let me know your experiences.