A Quick Guide On How To Promote Your Ecommerce Site

Starting an ecommerce store is tough. You’ve got to consider hosting, finding a good store builder, uploading all your products, signing courier deals for shipping internationally, managing stock…

And when you’re through with it all, you might not have any clients to sell to.

Because once the hard part is over…

Another hard part starts. Marketing your store. That’s why today, we’ll give you a quick guide on how to promote your ecommerce store. Let’s get right into it.

SEO & Organic Traffic

Getting organic traffic through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) won’t be easy, and it will take a while to do right. However, if you’re bootstrapping you can do it all for free, and the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll see results.

All you need to do is:

• Research the keywords you want your store to rank for
• Optimize your site and pages to target those keywords
• Do link building to have authority in the eyes of Google

Sure, once you get into the details of it, you’ll find a lot of extra things that you can do to gain a competitive advantage on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Today, we’ll just give you the quick intro.

Keyword Research

Keywords research is the process through which you can find what people are Googling when they’re looking for your products. That’s important, and I’ll show you why. Let’s say for example that you sell jewelry. If you have black earrings in a feather shape, people looking for that product may Google “black feather earrings” or “black earrings feather”, and it’s important that you know the difference, to feature the right keywords on your product pages.

To find that out, go to Ubersuggest and input a seed keyword, like “earring” if that’s what you sell.

Once you do that, browse through the keywords suggestions by looking for keywords that match your products, have a high monthly volume, and low SEO difficulty:

Rinse and repeat for all of your products.

Site Optimization

Once you have a list of keywords you want to feature on your site, go to each individual product page and write catchy descriptions that feature those keywords at a normal pace (which means don’t just stuff them in there as much as you can).

Once you do that, you need to add meta-descriptions to your product pages, featuring the same keyword. If you use WordPress, you can install YoastSEO to help you add meta-data, and if you use anything else just Google “how to change meta description” followed by your tool’s name.

After that, go to GTMetrix and input your site’s domain.

This tool will let you know how fast your site loads, and what you need to do if there are any problems with your site’s loading speed. It’s important that you go through each suggestion, because site loading speed is an important metric for Google.

There are a lot of other keyword research tricks, and site optimization tweaks you can do, but these will suffice for now. Up next, you’ll need to do some link building.

Link Building

Link building is the process through which you acquire backlinks. In turn, backlinks are any reference to your site, made from a different site. Basically, a link back to your site from someone else’s site.

And these are the most important things in SEO, because Google uses backlinks to determine who it trusts. To acquire backlinks, we suggest you start writing helpful blog articles (like this one) about topics in your niche, and then reach out to other blogs in your niche and ask for a backlink.

Sounds easy, but you’ll quickly find out it isn’t. Here are a few tips to do link building the right way:

• Only aim to get backlinks from authoritative sites in your niche. Anything else can be seen as spam and may actually harm your Google rankings.
• Offer to write guest posts in exchange of links.
• Don’t pay for backlinks, as it’s against Google’s guidelines.
• Use HARO (Help A Reporter Out) to get backlinks.
• Read Authority Hacker’s guide on the Shotgun Skyscraper Technique

And lastly, remember that link building is all about authority. You want to inspire trust, both to Google, and to the people that you contact throughout the link building process. That’s why you definitely want an SSL certificate for your site, and you might also want to consider integrating with as many payment processors as possible. We can help with that, if you click here.

Social Media Marketing

Besides SEO, you might want to get organic traffic by building a social following, whether that’s on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter. It won’t be easy either, but if you have a clear content plan and growth strategy for your social pages, it won’t be as time consuming to do it right.

Here are a few tips to do SMM (Social Media Marketing) the right way:

• Post consistently, and at the same hours
• Analyze your post interactions and try to publish content in the time frames that get the most engagements
• Use stories, whether that’s on Facebook, or Instagram
• Do contests and giveaways
• Partner with bigger pages to exchange followers
• Consider paying for exposure on bigger pages

Paid Advertisement

Between SEO and SMM, you might have your hands full promoting your ecommerce store. However, if there’s any budget left, or if you want to give your store an initial boost, investing in paid advertising on Google or Facebook might be a great idea.

However, beware. Google and Facebook Ads make this whole process seem very easy, because they want you to spend money on ads without really thinking it through. Granted, getting started is really easy, but if you want to make the most out of your money, you’ll maybe want to hire an experienced agency to take care of your paid advertising campaigns.

It’s a very complicated medium, and it’s better if you leave it to the experts. If you don’t want to do that, make sure you:

• Spend a lot of time on targeting the right keywords (use the process we outlined above for SEO)
• Focus on getting the targeting right, if you use Facebook Ads
• Don’t write the copy just to be there. Refine it, edit it, polish it, and split test it
• Start with a smaller investment to gouge out your possible numbers
• Always stay on top of the campaign by constantly calculating your cost for conversion and ROI

In Conclusion

Marketing your products is tough, but we hope that this quick guide on how to promote your ecommerce store helped you get an overview of what you need to do. If you have any questions, feel free to ask us in the comments section below!