Should I increase sales of an existing online store or create a new successful online store? Regardless of your goals, this article will help you organize the proper promotion of your online store from scratch to pro level!
Our team recommends focusing the majority of your time, effort, and budget on promoting your website, rather than its development and appearance. That’s why we made the cost of a ready-made online store very low, so that the owner can focus specifically on SEO promotion.
Once you have visitors and orders on your website, you can then improve conversion rates and enhance the website’s usability.
Step 1: Analysis
For the first stage of promotion, it is essential to carefully analyze the following key points:
- the website’s theme
- website visibility
- competitor websites
This stage is particularly important in starting to promote online stores correctly. Begin by analyzing the overall visibility of the website for all types of queries, starting from high-frequency to low-frequency.
If the website is still in the process of creation, choose a theme that will clearly correspond to the type of services you provide. This will determine the fate of your business since if you choose unpopular products, you will have too few visits and sales, which means the website will not pay for itself and will not generate profits. So, how can you find popular product themes?
Topic selection is one of the key conditions for a successful start in ecommerce. Without it, there is no point in moving forward or hoping for success. The domain name will depend on the choice of topic, and this will help in further promotion.
To choose a topic, use services such as Google Trends (free), Ahrefs (paid), and Google ADS. We recommend investing in the Ahrefs service, and using the Keyword Explorer tool. To analyze, choose the region in which you plan to launch your business.
It is best to search for commercial words, such as “buy” or “order.” Pay attention to metrics such as Volume, which will help you assess the overall demand for a given product per month. You can promote keywords with low KD, which means that there is low competition for the query and it has a better chance of reaching the top.
The next important step is to analyze competitor websites. Understand who your competitors are and how to beat them. Then you can calculate in advance the financial costs and resources needed to bring your online store to the top level.
You can also be inspired by interesting moments that caught your attention on a competitor’s website, to bring something similar to your online store. The main thing is not to resort to plagiarism.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP) can be formulated at this stage. By studying competitors, you can create a checklist of advantages that they offer. Then, create your own offer that is more attractive to buyers.
The offer can be used in several sales channels:
- The main page of the online store – when the customer goes to the site, they immediately see their benefit.
- Pages with promotions and discounts.
- Email newsletters.
- Social networks.
- Pop-up windows.
- Other sales channels, such as messengers.
Catalog creation is one of the most important optimization steps. It is better to correctly implement the catalog structure at the very beginning, rather than having to fix it later. When creating a complex multi-level catalog for an online store, consult with SEO specialists. This is also called the “semantic core” of the site (see step 3). Do not skip or save on this step, as the success of further promotion depends on it. The catalog should be understandable to users and search engines.
Step 2: Domain Name and Domain Zone
This step cannot be skipped, although at first it may seem that it does not matter and the promotion of an Internet site can be successful on any domain. If your site is still under construction, choose your domain name wisely.
The domain should be attention-grabbing and easy to remember. It can be the name of your brand or the type of services you provide. As for the domain zone, it should be chosen based on the orientation of your online store – international, national, regional, etc.
Why buying old domains is a mistake? In some cases, buying an old domain can help with promotion, but often existing domains have been subject to search sanctions at least once and may be blacklisted by search engines. In this case, promoting an online store will be a difficult task.
You can check the history of a domain using the web.archive.org service.
A new domain with a clean reputation is an excellent solution. But you also need to be prepared for the fact that a new domain may take some time to start appearing in search engine results. If the store is promoted (by the owner or SEO specialists), the first visits to a new domain usually appear after 5-7 months from the launch of the site. This cannot be avoided, and it is impossible to speed up even with large budgets – this is a generally accepted rule of Google and other search engines.
If the store is not promoted and is just waiting, visitors may not appear on it even after 5 years, despite the popular theme of the store. The more popular the theme, the more competitors there are, and accordingly, it is more difficult to get into the top of search engines for these requests.
Step 3: Primary Core of Search Queries
Search engine optimization (SEO) of an online store is achieved by selecting basic queries, based on which search engines will display your website to users. Without proper selection of a semantic core, your website will remain in the shadows.
To reach a large number of customers, it is useful to use SEO optimization. In simple terms, SEO promotion of an online store is a set of measures for internal and external optimization of the website to raise it to the top positions in search results, with the goal of increasing web traffic. Forming a semantic core is a crucial step in this process.
This promotion of an online store has such advantages:
- It does not require constant financial investment like contextual advertising;
- It is a simple way to reach the top because many competitors invest only in contextual advertising;
- It is a relatively fast way to increase traffic.
So what does the term “semantic core” mean? It is a complete list of search queries, all their forms and combinations, that describe the products, services, and themes of the online store.
First of all, identify basic queries (basic keys) – the main words or phrases that express the theme of the online store. These words describe the product and assortment. If you have difficulty selecting basic keys on your own, there are services for selection, use them.
Remove queries that are used the least or do not sufficiently cover the theme. Group the remaining queries. Create semantic clusters – groups of queries with similar meaning, having a multi-level structure necessary for the rational distribution of keywords across individual website pages.
Step 4: On-page optimization
On-page optimization is an integral part of SEO optimization. What tasks does it involve?
- Formulating Title, Description, H1 headers based on products, filters, geo-requests, etc.
- Formulating URL structure for website pages (URL rewriting)
- Creating SEO-texts for website pages with relevant keywords collected during the semantic core stage
- Optimizing pagination (page numbering) for website pages
- Creating XML maps for the website
- Distributing weight between pages (internal linking)
Completing each of these tasks will ensure successful promotion of your online store. This step may be difficult for an average user, but technical specialists can always be asked to do it. However, don’t worry, you don’t have to deal with all of this personally. After all, we have taken on most of the internal optimization tasks for your website – almost all of the items on this list are already generated automatically in our store, and there are modules for creating meta-tag templates and many other website enhancements. The most important thing that remains for you is to write (or order) high-quality SEO texts.
Step 5: External optimization
External optimization of the website involves creating a base of links to your pages on third-party sites and web resources. In other words, the more quality resources that link to your site, the more search engines “value” your site – increasing its ranking, improving the position of your site’s queries, and as a result – increasing the organic traffic to your site. Different types of links are required for a natural profile. For example:
Paid/free Eternal/temporary Anchor/non-anchor/mixed This optimization method is effective for increasing traffic, creating demand for products, increasing brand awareness, improving user attitude towards the brand, improving the domain’s reputation, and as a result, providing tremendous sales growth! However, it should be remembered that search engines are fighting against link farming and their “overspamming”, so in this task, you cannot overdo it (for example, buy a lot of links to your site at once), as this can lead to your site being banned and then it won’t be able to promote for years. Often after such consequences, SEO specialists recommend changing the domain name of the site.
Step 6: Alternative promotion channels – contextual advertising and targeting
In addition to the advantages of SEO promotion, promoting an online store through SEO also has its disadvantages:
- Quick and high-quality promotion sometimes requires the work of programmers on the website and making changes.
- The variability of search algorithms affects the site’s position in search queries.
- Contextual advertising always occupies the first positions in search results, so in free search traffic, the first place is actually fourth or fifth.
- With just SEO promotion, a site cannot instantly and consistently reach the top. Therefore, it is also worth promoting through contextual advertising, targeting, and social networks. Let’s take a closer look at each promotion channel.
Targeting is an advertising mechanism that allows you to select the part of the audience that is interested in the topic of your online store and meets the specified criteria (target audience). The ad will only be shown to this audience.
Targeting is definitely an effective mechanism, but it requires regular financial investment.
Social networks are an excellent way to promote online stores in today’s world. Every successful online store has its own page on social networks. Promotion on social networks in marketing language is called SMM.
The goals of promotion on social networks are:
- Selling products
- Attracting customers
- Communicating with customers
- Creating a loyal audience through contests and promotions
- Developing the brand and its recognition
Targeting is actively used on social networks. The characteristic disadvantage of SMM promotion is the constant attention of a specialist for adjustments.
Contextual advertising is paid advertising in search engines, which provides that first place in search queries. It is also called SEM – Search Engine Marketing.
Step 7: Sales with Email Marketing
Promoting an online store through email marketing has many misconceptions, here are some of them:
- It’s spam that customers ignore.
- You need a large customer base, otherwise, it’s useless.
- Emails should only be sent to notify about discounts.
- Emails should be very frequent or extremely rare.
These myths arise from a lack of understanding of email marketing mechanisms. If used correctly, this type of promotion can play a crucial role in increasing sales.
You need to know a few terms that clarify the mechanism of this channel for attracting an audience.
Email marketing automation – the use of established algorithms that allow the automatic import of data on subscriber customers, contact segmentation, automatic message composition, and distribution.
Trigger messages – individual emails that are triggered by certain conditions, such as subscribing to a newsletter, long customer inactivity, etc.
Web-push – short messages that users receive in their browser or on their smartphone. They consist of about 50 characters and images. They are intended for reminders, notifications about user actions, and offers.
To start using the email promotion mechanism correctly, first organize the collection of the contact base. This can be done with subscription requests on your website, where the user must leave their email address or other data.
For all forms, you need to set up double opt-in confirmation to avoid your emails going to the spam folder.
Advantages of this promotion channel:
- It will generate income in the early stages of starting the store.
- It will help create a customer contact base.
- It is an inexpensive marketing channel.
- Trigger emails support brand recognition and customer loyalty, which will reduce spam complaint rates when you launch large campaigns.
Step 8: Price aggregators and marketplaces
To understand how to promote an online store, it is necessary to understand a few more terms that are also important ways to promote it.
Price aggregators and marketplaces allow users to find many offers from different stores, which makes it easier for the user to choose. But how much does this make the work of online store owners easier?
For an online store, this is a way to quickly access a huge number of customers who are already ready to buy the product. On such platforms, payment is made for a click-through to the website. The cost of joining is usually not high, which means that you pay for a ready-made customer.
The downside is that the customer is likely to choose the product of the online store that offers a more favorable price and purchase conditions.
Also, in the marketplace, it is important to work on the rating and reviews. Positive indicators will increase the chance of buying in your online store even if the price is average among competitors.
Step 9: Confident development
Contextual advertising is a fairly extensive tool, and some mechanisms of this marketing channel can only be applied when the online store has reached a level of confident development.
Confident development (growth) of an online store is self-sufficiency taking into account the part of the finances that are spent on advertising.
When you have already received a positive result from previously used contextual advertising and additional funds for advertising have appeared, in this case, it is necessary to think about the subsequent development of this channel.
Start by expanding advertising in search engines, using more frequent queries. This will increase the amount of traffic. After achieving its stability, you can move on to using remarketing.
Remarketing is an advertising tool that allows you to show your ad on other sites to users who have previously visited your site. This will allow you to:
- return visitors who did not make a purchase;
- encourage users who have already made a purchase to repeat it;
- notify customers about new promotions and special offers;
- increase the number of positive reviews.
At this level of growth, promoting an online store can also include advertising in the media sphere, such as videos or with the help of media personalities (bloggers).
Step 10: Consolidating growth and maintaining positions
At this stage, you should have used all available marketing channels with their tools. Then your further task will mainly consist of maintenance and updating. You will also need to:
- analyze the site and marketing channels;
- test new ways to attract an audience;
- search for ideas for content development;
- search for new growth areas.
Website promotion is a labor-intensive process that requires a lot of attention, constant activity, and financial expenses, but the result is definitely worth it.