Web Store – 19 Steps To E Marketing
Updated: Jun 20, 2018
We continue the series of articles devoted to the opportunities for the promotion of your web store.
In previous articles we talked about the parameters of internal SEO-optimisation projects. Today, let's turn to external promotion as an effective way to bring the project to the top of the SERP and attract customers to your web store.
This guide consists of 19 steps that you need to take in 3 months: starting from the definition of a niche for the business and ending with managing the reputation of your brand. Accurately following this 3-month plan, you will avoid the typical mistakes that are most often made in the process of promotion, and will steadily but surely reach your goals.
Preparatory work
1. Definition of goals
Before you begin the process of SEO-promotion of any project, it is necessary to determine the purpose of promotion. Ask yourself the question - what do you want to achieve?
What results do you expect? How do you intend to check the achieved effect of promotion in the search engines?
SEO goals can be:
• achieving high positions in search engines for a number of key queries;
• Bypassing competitors in the commercial sector;
• promotion of the brand, increasing recognition;
• the growth of visitors to the web store, and, as a result, raising the level of sales;
• search for potential customers; increase conversion rate and earnings on advertising;
• Any other tasks that depend on the particular case.
The chosen goal will determine the progress plan and the way the results are analysed. But let's imagine that your goal coincides with the goal of the majority who turn to SEO - to rank the site / web store higher in search results to get a stream of customers on topical requests.
What should be done for the success of your e marketing?
2. Decide on the niche and market share
Do you already know what you want to offer to your potential customers? If not, carefully analyse the market and make sure that your starting budget will allow you to break through in a highly competitive environment. In the case of a limited and small budget at the start, it is not necessary to plan mass trading of expensive products.
The stage of analysis of potential competitors is very important, as it will allow to see the most promising niche. You should determine the following:
• products that are in high demand;
• share of competitors in the market;
• marketing strategies, which are used by competitors for promotion.
To get this information yourself, you should use specialized services to analyse different niches:
• Google AdWords: Keyword Planner is a free service for analysing statistics for selected keywords and estimating traffic.
• Wordstream Keyword Tool - similarly helps to analyse and select keywords, but a paid service (The free service displays only limited data)
• Google Trends - another free service, through which you can track the dynamics of changes in the popularity of products.
3. Developing the correct structure of the web store catalogue
Cataloguing of products in the web store is the process of sorting the data about the products according to certain criteria. Information in the catalogue takes a system view, convenient for a quick search of any commodity items. A logical and correct catalogue will help not only the buyer, but also the administrator to make changes.
Creating an effective selling directory is necessary for:
• presentation of products in a form convenient for consumers.
• growth in sales.
• flexible management of products by the administrator.
• automated processing of information about product positions.
• statistical analysis of sales.
• accounting of products turnover and analysis of the sale of products.
• improving the indexing of the store by search engines.
The first month of promotion
You need to know that the first month of promotion is usually the busiest and lots of groundwork needs to be done. But the quality work done during this period will definitely give good results. So, what actions are taken directly at the beginning of an SEO promotion?
4. We connect analytics, services for checking positions
To begin, we connect Google Analytics , Google Search Console . So you get the opportunity to track the progress and dynamics of your project.
It is important to connect the services for the analysis of positions on search words and search traffic. At a later date I will prepare a separate article on the use of analytics for the web store for maximum effect.
Attention: proceed to the next steps only after the previous septs have been taken care of. Also, make sure that your project / web store meets all of the recommendations for web store audit . Without these parameters, the following work may take much longer or not at all to produce the desired result.
5. Compilation of Keywords
After connecting analytics tools, you need to take care of attracting potential customers to the pages of your web store or project. One of the most popular ways, as you have already guessed, is the promotion in search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. And it begins from the compilation of the semantic kernel.
Your keywords is a collection of search words and phrases that most accurately characterize the type of activity, the offered products or services of the site.
There are several services for searching words for a web store. A popular and free one is Google Adwords : with its help you can easily determine the frequency of words in
the desired regions.
At the selection stage it is necessary to have patience, as the maximum number of queries from all potential sources (competitors, tools of search engines, bases of keywords,
price-list, generation of phrases from starting phrases) is collected. After that, all the selected words and phrases must be checked manually and queries that are not
relevant to your business be removed. I also recommend checking the frequency of these phrases in order to discard the dummy queries. And remember that the more extensive the
query, the better, because there are more opportunities to attract targeted traffic. We are talking long tail keywords here.
Obviously, an independent selection of search queries will take considerable effort and time. Especially if a person is doing this process for the first time. Therefore, I recommend using special services or ordering as a service. There is a plethora of companies and tools online that can do this task for you for a fee.
6. Analysis of competitors in TOP-10
So, what have we done? Identified a niche, created a site, picked up keywords. It's time now to look into the garden of your neighbour - to study the competitors. What should
interest you when doing that?
• The prices for the products presented in the web store of your competitors;
• strategy of business promotion which they apply;
• the density of keywords on the pages of the sites of competitors, as well as the length of the text and its thematic nature.
Note that the analysis of one competitor takes from 3 to 5 hours, if it is done by a specialist. For a beginner, it will take significantly longer, and he may also fail to
take into account all the important business parameters. Based on this, I recommend using specialized services for conducting competent, full and effective analysis.
7. Comprehensive audit of the promoted web store
Paradoxical as it sounds, but after close acquaintance with competitors sites it is necessary to get to know your own site more closely - to conduct a detailed audit. This is particularly true of those web stores that were created without taking into account recommendations for SEO optimization. Website audit requires a lot of time and attention, so it must necessarily be conducted by a person with relevant skills in SEO.
Thorough audit of the site is designed to determine all its advantages and disadvantages from the technical side. In addition, it will show how the search engines are currently seeing and rating the site - whether there is indexing, the presence of filters, the presence of external links to your site, etc. But since we are actually at the initial stage of promotion, you will not see any particularly impressive results. Up to this point, a lot of preparatory work has been done, which will serve as a good foundation for further progress.
8. Content strategy to promote your web store
Without quality relevant content, your web store will not win the audience. Today, useful and unique content is becoming increasingly important for the marketing of e commerce projects and attracting users. So what do users want to see?
The strategy for content creation should embrace two important aspects:
• content plan for basic optimization of all pages of the site;
• Regular publication in the news section and/or blog of your site.
When preparing the content plan, remember the need to use the selected keywords: the keywords should appear in the proper frequency in articles, headlines and meta tags. As a
rule of thumb the keyword density should be 1-3%. So in an article of 1000 words the keyword should be mentioned 10-30 times.
Content strategy is the engine of your business. It is developed once and for a long time, therefore it is critically important to give it maximum attention. On outsourcing, the development of a content strategy costs from $1000, (depending on the size of the project and the content produced).
9. Writing and adding optimized content
Next, we start creating materials according to the content plan. In a limited budget, you can divide the process of writing articles over several months - first for the main sections (home, catalogue page, product cards, about us), then for secondary (shopping cart, ordering page, delivery and payment, contacts).
The texts optimised for keywords can be ordered from the many content writing services found on the Internet, where the cost of texts ranges from 1-10 cents per word -
Fiverr is one such service. But it should be remembered that the quality of such texts is not always satisfactory – not all freelancers are capable of producing high quality
content optimised for search engines and your niche. There is a risk to receive the ordered text not on time, or not to receive it at all (which, alas, happens). You can also
start writing articles personally, or you can entrust it to specialised companies.
10. Purchase of links
Times when it was possible to improve the position in the SERP, just by buying a lot of links on various sites is long gone. Today, this can even seriously harm the reputation of your site. By purchasing links of poor quality you risk getting a ban from the search engines. Having (an even) small number of high-quality links can lead to a lot of users on the site.
Consider how this works:
• Links to the site on other popular sites attracts a new audience;
• links increase the trust of your site in the eye of search engines;
• links can raise the conversion rate.
Take into account that a proper link building strategy is one of the most difficult stages of promotion of a web store, on which the speed of achievement of results and the growth of the web store depends. The search engines prohibit directly influencing the search output by the method of inorganic link growth (in fact, the artificial link building violates the rules of search engines). It is better to outsource the link-building strategy itself to specialised companies in order to avoid a possible ban on the part of search engines.
If you have managed to master the plan of the first month of progress and learnt the vital new knowledge - it's time to breathe a sigh of relief, because the most difficult
thing is behind. Now you need to start the plan for the next month, carefully and painstakingly performing all the points.
Results of the first month of promotion:
• The keywords for the web store were collected;
• all queries for SQL are correctly located on the pages;
• a plan has been drawn up for subsequent articles;
• found the first errors, carried out the necessary edits;
• all pages are optimised and correctly linked (re-linking is organised);
• the first links were secured.
The second month of web store promotion
11. Writing and publishing articles to a blog or news section of a web store
All users (even those who do not make purchases) need to be offered interesting articles that cover the main topics of the site. The types of material published should be popular with your visitors and it should be sought out from visitors themselves what material they would like to read and find beneficial. Here are a few types of such
articles:
• information texts - a survey material for products;
• shares and contests, in which the prize will be the product you offer;
• announcement of a future event, information about discounts, sales or promotions.
Experience shows that the more unique (text) content you post on the site, the more potential customers will be attracted, and this in turn leads to more sales.
12. Working with social networks, building an audience
Another place where you can find your potential customers is the social networks that are so popular today. To work with this segment, you should arm yourself with a good and strong strategy. Adhering to the developed plan, you can significantly increase the audience of your resource. Here is what you need for this:
• Develop a clear strategy for promotion, and also decide what material will be published;
• Conduct research of all possible sources from which users will be attracted. Choose the most effective ones;
• Strive for an active schedule of posts;
• determine the optimal number of advertisements and posts;
• posts should be interesting and banners well designed and attractive
.
13. Viral content - the engine of modern stores
You have added a blog section to your web store, and are already successfully promoting in social networks? Great, it's time to master the viral content. This concept includes various banners, videos, texts, as well as infographics. Its main task is to cling. I am sure that you have met such content, you want to immediately share with all friends in social networks.
14. Development and adjustment of contextual advertising and advertising in social networks
Without contextual advertising, there will not be a single well-known resource. One of its main trump cards - it's easy to work with. The principle of action is also as clear as possible - we see how many times people have clicked on the ad that appears on the partner sites of search engines, and pay for it.
The result from the promotion through contextual advertising is visible almost immediately, which makes this method ideal for young sites.
Let's consider the mechanism of work with contextual advertising. To do this, we turn to the services offered by Google. Here we need to perform several actions:
• Develop a quality strategy for the advertising campaign (RC);
• Identify keywords that match the proposal;
• Create a new RC;
• Create the right ads for the RO;
• Determine the rates and constantly monitor the budget;
• Work out landing pages;
• Analyse the result of the work: pay attention to the efficiency of the RK, determine which requests worked best.
Without working with social networks, you cannot make the most effective promotion of any project, because they collect a huge number of potential customers. The work in this area can bring quite significant and long-term results, the best among which is the increase in brand recognition, trust in it, and the replenishment of the client base.
Among the methods of promotion in social networks, it is worth noting targeted advertising, with which you can quite accurately get into the target audience. Do not forget about the direct work in social networks - create a page or group and develop it. This allows you to constantly work with already found potential customers and keep existing ones. To do this, you must follow several rules of work:
• Create and post interesting posts;
• From time to time publish novelties;
• Conduct contests and surveys for interactive communication.
15. E-mail-marketing
Mailing is just an ideal way to notify a customer about the appearance of a new product, company news, promotion or discount.
When the content strategy is good and the blog consistently shows new and interesting articles, it's time to start increasing the number of subscribers. Email marketing, in turn, will help to keep subscribers and turn a potential customer into a regular customer with the help of well-selected material in each letter.
Results of the second month of promotion:
• Optimisation of the site, all bugs fixed;
• Reap the first fruits of launching an advertising campaign;
• Established and grew communities in social networks;
• The subscriber base is also increasing;
• The visitor number and pageviews are growing;
• Launched and configured analytics in search services and, based on the results, identified the most effective channels;
• Site traffic is growing, and with it sales.
The third month of web store promotion
Two months into the work on the promotion of the web store and the first tangible results are already appearing. But it's too early to relax, there are more new tasks ahead, aimed at further development and consolidation of the previously obtained result.
Work on the third month of promotion will in many ways repeat the actions in the second, but there will also be new ones.
16. Correction of internal and external optimisation
Based on the results obtained earlier, you should do an audit of the web store, which will clarify several important aspects:
• Which pages need additional work or tweaking (edit the text, change the video or pictures);
• How well the link between pages is organised;
• The need to create a new or change the existing strategy for promoting the project.
Such a set of tasks for a web store can be ordered through outsourcing from external organizations, which have specialists at the right level. The cost of such work can range
from $500 upwards. The price depends on the project and the requirements of the client.
17. Managing the reputation of the store on the Internet, increasing the popularity of the brand
Everyone knows that the products offered by popular brands are bought much more actively than unknown novelties. Recognition is exactly what you need to strive for successful trading. For this, it is necessary to organise work with users in social networks. In your groups, you need to explain how your offer differs from all others and why they should pay attention.
The result of this work should be customer feedback. Do not resort to ordering reviews from the copywriter. Their effectiveness cannot be compared with reviews of these customers. Real feedback will help you monitor the quality of your work and make the right changes in time. Do not forget to provide timely and quality feedback.
If possible, please customers with various gifts and promotions. This encouragement will significantly increase loyalty to the web store.
18. Expansion of the keyword repertoire and web store
At this stage, you need to re-engage in the keyword set of the site, that is, consider and increase the list of queries that will lead the user to the site. Of course, these queries should be used when writing all the content.
To expand the keyword set, use statistics from the analystics and web traffic software. It will show the queries of your users, under which you should prepare new material. Such actions will increase the incoming traffic of the web store and bring new customers.
19. Increase sales of the web store with the help of price-aggregators
Price aggregators are sites which host pricelists of various web stores. All the information provided is processed and presented to the user in a convenient and understandable form - on the search result page of the desired product, several offers with the price and name of the company that sells this product are displayed. These resources today are pretty well known and familiar to almost every person. Among them:
Placement of your offer on such sites provides increased sales. You also need to take care that customers are completely satisfied and moved to the category of regular customers. This will improve your rating and put your business at the TOP of the best stores, which will significantly increase the inflow of new customers.
Results of the third month of promotion:
• The number of new customers and returning customers continue to grow;
• Improved position in the SERP;
• The quantity of high-quality content on the site is increasing;
• the ROI is growing;
• the effectiveness of the channels is monitored and the necessary adjustments are made;
• managed to increase the range of your profitable keywords.
It's time to congratulate yourself - you have successfully mastered a three-month plan for promoting a web store! But this does not mean that it's time to relax and let it all go by itself. There remains no less different interesting and new work on your project.
The described plan for the development of a web store is a step-by-step instruction that will suit almost any project, regardless of the niche or size. It is based entirely
on my many years of practice in the development of projects. I have distilled all my experiences in this area in one article to share my knowledge with you. If you strictly
adhere to the plan and follow all the instructions exactly - you will certainly get the desired result.