So you have a cool looking website, it’s sitting their looking pretty, and now you’re thinking about marketing your e-commerce shop online?
Good plan, or maybe not – thinking about marketing your business after you’ve developed your e-commerce website is simply short sited to say the least, and can be the make or break of your business. If you are at the planning stage andcreating your marketing plan, do yourself a favour and get a digital marketing agency on board before, even ‘during’ the implementation stage, but definitely not after you’ve gone live.
The following are examples of real life scenarios and some of the issues you may need to think about before deciding to plough your money into your online business.
1) I’ve completed my e-commerce site and design and now I need to get some online visitors. What do I do now?
Big tip, when you made you business plan, did you not specify your marketing requirements, goals and objectives and ecommerce specification, a must have list, and a nice to have list of functions?
So many clients do not know or have the knowledge of what they require before choosing an e-commerce platform. Tip: research this properly, find out what functions each system supports, how SEO friendly is it - read online reviews, and don’t get locked down to one system early on from persuasive advice from companies. Ask if they can send you an e-commerce specification document.
2) Here’s another scenario. A customer has a swimwear site and wants to export her products to Google merchant centre. Unfortunately, this was an after thought, but for small businesses should be easy to implement, it’s free and you can get exposure on the first page of Google. A marvel for internet marketing and effective alternative, compared to PPC or natural search.
Anyway, their ecommerce system did not support Google shopping feed – there was no software plugin or extension available. Only alternative was custom development which can be a tad expensive. Remember to research your platform thoroughly and find out what 3rd party systems and integration software extensions it supports. It will save you a song a dance later when you find your current system is not well supported, by the creators.
A general rule of thumb here is to go for an open source e-commerce platform, that is well used by business communities and also well supported technically from a developers standpoint. Read forums and glean what you can from other peoples experiences.
3) You have a live e-commerce shop but your product pages aren’t ranking in the top 200 after 1 year. Well this can be a number of things wrong.
It can be down to domain authority, number of backlinks, but on occasions it can be be the way the site hierarchy and the way the page internal linking structure has been created, or even down to the performance and load time/speed of the pages.
I came across a bed and mattress site once which didn’t have links from the main category pages from the product names listed. The only links were from images. There were also too many products listed in each category – it’s not recommended to have more than 100 internal links from one page.
Another common issue is page pagination and duplicate content. Know about the canonical tag and how to use it to make it clear to Google, which pages should be the master.
If your company falls into the SME bracket, and you’re looking for a search marketing agency with the Rankability factor for your business, look deep, look hard and look sharp!