It seems that the SEO promotion of an online store has already been written 1000 times. But usually, a marketer or, if there is none, the owner of the company has no time to delve into these tricky long opuses.
Therefore, when choosing a contractor, they usually focus on prices. But before you find out the cost of promoting an online store, you should probably figure out what to pay for?
To do this, we at the effective Internet marketing agency Web promo have created a simple and convenient guide, with which the client can easily figure out what SEO promotion of an online store is for and how it works. So, let’s get to the point.
1. Search site audit
Before proceeding with the actual promotion of an online store, the price of which depends on many factors, a search audit of the resource is carried out. In its course, the site is tested for compliance with the technical requirements of search engines, page loading speed, and adaptability for mobile devices. They also check if the robots.txt and sitemap.xml files are installed.
For a comprehensive, versatile and reliable audit, they also use such paid services as Serpstat and Ahrefs. Their cost is quite high (although justified), so most often the company itself does not make sense to buy them, but it is better to contact a specialized agency.
2. Competitive analysis
As in any other area of marketing, when promoting an online store in Kyiv in Ukraine, and abroad, it is necessary to conduct a comparative analysis of competitors in the market, which will make it possible to take all the best from their SEO promotion strategy and avoid the mistakes they made.
3. Usability audit of the site
It seems that this item ended up here by accident. But actually, it is not. The initial usability audit of the site will help to assess how thoughtful the structure of the online store is, that is, how quickly the user finds the right product. This is especially important for sites with a large assortment. Sometimes it turns out that the names of sections and categories do not correspond to key queries in the niche that the resource is focused on.
In an ideal situation, the structure of an online store should be thought out together with an SEO specialist even before the site is created, focusing on the assembled semantic core.
4. Collecting the semantic core
Not a single high-quality Internet resource can do without keywords that meet the needs of the target audience, which means they bring organic traffic. In order to find and cluster such queries, a semantic core is assembled. As a result of these works, an ordered set of words and phrases is created that most accurately characterize the direction of the online store. It is they who should be present on the site as some identifiers for search engines.
If the site’s CL is not developed enough or it does not exist at all, the online store will be “invisible” to Google.
5. Internal technical optimization
The audit, which we wrote about in the first paragraph, only detects errors on the site but does not solve them. In order to solve them, we need technical optimization of the online store. The pool of work includes setting up the page URL structure, eliminating duplicates, optimizing for mobile devices, compiling sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, setting the rel= “canonical” attribute, and improving site loading speed, creating micro-markup templates and meta tag templates, linking.
6. Filling the online store with content
The content filling is one of the components of internal optimization. But it is worth talking about it separately. At this stage, an editor and a copywriter are involved in the work on SEO promotion, who are responsible for the quality of the texts and prepare them based on the CL formed by the SEO specialist. Further, texts with relevant key queries should be placed on the landing pages of categories, sections, and products. Ultimately, it is the content that is responsible for targeted traffic to the site. However, these are not only product texts and articles. It is extremely important to accompany them with high-quality images and videos, so a photographer, videographer, or graphic designer can be involved in the process.
The final result of the entire SEO promotion strategy, from increasing sales to business loyalty, will depend on how unique and high-quality content is on the pages of an online store.
7. External optimization
After eliminating technical errors and completing work on internal optimization, you can move on to external optimization. It involves placing links leading to an online store from other sites. The ultimate goal of this placement is to build link mass, which is important for search engines.
How does it work? A link to your site from another resource is like a recommendation in real life. But there is a caveat: only recommendations from “good” sites matter to Google. If the search engine “does not trust” the site from which the link leads, it will no longer “trust” your online store. In practice, this means a decrease in its position in the search results, followed by a decrease in organic traffic and sales. That is why an SEO specialist conducts a thorough analysis of the trustworthiness of sites where links can be placed and select the appropriate ones. If you ignore this and place links on “bad” resources, search engines may even impose sanctions on the online store, which will make it impossible to further promote it.
In conclusion, we add that SEO promotion is one of the most important (at least for the next ten years) components of the complex of services for the promotion of an online store. It fully justifies itself, and most importantly – pays for itself.