Imagine a man who has decided to buy an online shop. He found developers and designers, paid big money to them, bought goods and got really cool website. This man did everything right.
In a few months our hero made one or two sales, had a row with the developers, forgot about online-shop and returned to his small shop down the street. It was much easier.
This was an imaginary man, but the problem he had is very much real: ignoring website promotion can destroy this website performance. Sooner or later, every website owner comes to this idea.
And it would be much better for you to come to it as early as possible. In a perfect world, you have to think about promotion even before the beginning of your website development — I mean, at the moment when you are choosing a team that will create your online-shop for you. If you do this, you will not lose time — even more, you will be able to get many visits and make profit almost instantly after the launch of your website.
But it’s not the only reason why you have to pay attention to promotion as soon as possible. The thing is, that’s how you can stand out from the crowd of your competitors — and of course, it’s very important when it comes to online shops. People often forget about promotion of their websites, and it can be your advantage — if you don’t forget about it, you will most likely have a better website performance than your competitors have. And it makes sense that such an advantage will give you even more profits!
In this article we’ll talk about the most important areas of online shop promotion, about some details and about the process itself (how we do it). We’ll also talk about the price of the online promotion (but it’s not as simple as it seems).
All this promotion story begins with the strategy. It must be perfect — if the marketing specialists screw up, you’ll have to spend serious money (and time, of course) to fix their mistakes. In the majority of cases, only inexperienced specialists make such mistakes, because it’s quite difficult for them to take all the necessary details into account. Experienced professionals, who know in online marketing instruments (and can work with them) will definitely make everything right.
The thing is, you have to take LOTS of factors into account in order to plan the strategy. One cannot simply copy the strategy that worked for another online shop — well, it’s possible, but there’s no guarantee that it will succeed.
The sphere of activity, the time of market entry, the presence or absence of offline shops, pricing policies, promotion area — all these factors are extremely important, they must be taken into account and analyzed. It’s also necessary to conduct a comprehensive audit of your online shop.
We divide that comprehensive audit into three parts:
Of course, promotion will not be successful if you don’t choose the instruments right.
Everything depends on the sphere of your online shop, your goals and competition — but in the majority of cases, you’ll have to try all the instruments available. These instruments are search optimization, context advertising, social media marketing (SMM), e-mail marketing, etc.
However, there is no standard success strategy. You’ll have to test all these instruments in order to understand which one would work better. We usually test all of them: use one instrument, get the result, analyze it, draw conclusions — and then repeat the cycle with new variables. At first, we find the common ground with your target audience, then analyze everything possible, and them, on the basis of this analysis, we choose the marketing instruments that would suit your situation. It’s the only way to get the best result — without dozens of tests, the promotion will not succeed.
Content is king, heard about that?
The thing is, the content of your website is extremely important, because it’s one of the factors that speed up the promotion of your shop. The search engine companies always change the algorithms and do variety of new things, but content was, is and will be the main factor they evaluate. The content must be unique, interesting, original, written with certain keywords and you must always update it — only in this case you can expect something from your website.
But well, if the content is king, semantics is the queen. It’s as important as content, because it influences what content must be now shown to a search engine, and without it you have no chances.
It’s a really interesting subject but we’ll talk about it a little bit later — seems like we have enough information to write a longread about it!
In short words: if you want to promote your website, this website must meet all the criteria of search engines. The process of making the website perfect, according to their criteria, is called the internal optimization. Without it, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines will never index your website right.
Internal optimization is not one thing, it contains many problems that must be solved. You’ll have to think about the structure of your website and about its loading speed, you’ll have to take care about robots.txt and sitemap.xml, to delete the duplicate pages, to optimize meta-tags (title, description, keywords, etc). It’s a huge work, but it must be done. If you forget about internal optimization, you’ll break the whole promotion and as a result, you’ll spend even more time and money on fixing this problem.
Search engines evaluate content very, very carefully. Related images and videos, optimized, unique and readable texts — don’t forget about them if you want to get to the top of SERP.
The texts must be written for your online shop, because the texts, stolen from another website just won’t work. You’ll have to describe the goods or services carefully: in order to do this, highlight the best sides of whatever you sell, tell the reader about the advantages of this thing and don’t forget about the uniqueness. And about the keywords, of course!
But here you shouldn't overdo. If you put too much keywords in your text, everyone will be annoyed. People need interesting and readable texts, not the bunches of keywords, and search engines prefer unique and well-structured texts, not keyword stuffing. We have only one advice here: if you can’t read your text easily, rewrite it immediately.
It’s all about the banners, that appear on the search result pages of Google/Yahoo/Bing when the users look for certain keywords. This type of banners is displayed together with organic search results, and it’s a very effective instrument. Here’s why:
But this instrument comes with its own complexities, of course. Negative keywords is one of these complexities.
Negative keywords are the keywords that must be excluded from your advertising campaign in order to let you focus on important keywords only.
Imagine that you sell new smartphones. In this case, you wouldn’t like to pay for the users, who are looking for used smartphones, not for the new ones. Negative keywords are the solution: you just add the keywords like “used phones” or “used smartphones” to the list and it’s done — that’s how you will improve the conversion rate and save money on your marketing campaign! We create the long lists of negative keywords for every new online shop in order to make the ad performance perfect.
We do also create the semantic core for shops, find the keywords that suit best, optimize the advertisements and the landing page (or target page). As a result, you can get the highest CTR possible and the lowest cost per click.
As you probably already know, it’s not enough to attract the users to your website. It’s also extremely important to convert them into buyers — and there are lots of factors that could help here.
In short words: the price and payback period varies too much from client to client. It depends on dozens of factors: if you already have a well-optimized online shop and your budget is unlimited, you’ll see the result very fast. However, if your website is like a few days old and you can’t spend several thousands of dollars on promotion, you’ll have to wait for a little longer.
The only thing these two examples have in common is that both the first online shop and the second one will pay off over time.
What’s more, you will not have to spend that much money in future, when your investitions recover. You just won’t need such serious efforts to promote your website, because this work will already have been done. You’ll have to think about other things, like sales and order automation, hiring managers and choosing a good ICO for further investments, of course.
The price of promotion an online shop depends on many factors, too. We can specify the price, but in your case, it may reduce or increase — it’s all about the factors.
What exactly do you need? What kind of shop do you have? What are your short-term and long-term goals? What is your desired rate and pace of development? What is your website’s performance right now?
The thing is, we have to ask too many questions before we will be able to specify the price for you. So let’s just talk about all these questions at first — you can write or call us and we’ll make it more clear.
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