According to Statista data, the UK has the largest online shopping market in 25 countries in Europe in 2021.
At the pandemic’s beginning, many businesses felt a dire need for an online presence, since there was now no way to sell offline. Many of them started building websites and trying to run ads online as much as they could. As a result, some entrepreneurs lost money because their sites were not optimized for the search engine requirements, and advertising was not effective.
With this in mind, here is how to build a strategy to promote your online store and minimize online business risks using SEO, PPC, and email marketing tools.
SEO at the website development stage
The first step in a website-making process for your business is refining the search engine optimisation (SEO). It is important to immediately consider the search engine requirements so that your site is ready to be marketed across the Internet. Optimizing your online store from the beginning will allow you to avoid mistakes that could potentially harm promotion in the future, create a logical foundation, and improve the site’s functionality.
Things to do during the development:
- Analyse the search demand to create the structure of a future website and landing pages, for all the necessary categories and filters of goods.
- Make a forecast for the traffic growth based on demand and seasonality. Comparing your future site with a similar one advertised in the same field of business, region, and niche enables you to forecast and better understand future growth resulting from the promotion compared to its initial traffic.
- Conduct an analysis of competitors and SEO tools they use. When assessing your competitors, you need to pay attention to the following:
- Site structure
- Unique selling proposition
- Ways to increase conversions rate optimization. (online consultant, feedback forms, and so on)
- Develop the site structure by engaging your design, development, and customer relationship teams. Creating a logical and easy-to-navigate website is part of the user’s experience.
- Conduct basic technical optimization based on the recommendations of search engines. Technical optimisation can include: URL optimisation; generating HTTP caching headers; and optimising the load time site optimisation for mobile devices, to name just a few.
Following these steps will save you time in the future. Fixing errors on an existing site is always accompanied by a search ranking drop, as search engines need to consider the changes made to redefine the site’s quality. By performing basic optimization at the development stage, you will avoid this drop – further promoting growth on your site.
Keep in mind that SEO is a tool which requires your constant attention, and does not yield instant results. However, SEO does help bring in new customers regularly.
PPC or Paid Media Launch
At this early stage, it is crucial to determine your advertising budget with the resources and data that you have in order to drive more customers. Attracting such customers will cost less than those who need to be targeted from the beginning of the sales funnel, using more tools.
Advertising campaign performances are based on users’ search queries. As they are already looking for a specific product, the purchase is more likely to happen. If a banner is shown to someone who doesn’t want to buy our product right now, purchase chances are low.
Email marketing and engaging with regular clients
Many clients underestimate email marketing, believing that the tool is ineffective because they do not buy anything recommended in newsletters. However, Litmus conducted a study confirming that:
- Email marketing is one of the most profitable tools in online marketing
- This method can produce 5-10% of an online store’s total revenue
- The average conversion rate for promotional emails is 8-14% per transaction
Here’s an example of how to utilise emails:
- A potential customer is browsing your online store, and adds several items to their cart
- Suddenly, they are distracted and leave to do other things, having closed the page of your online store without making a purchase
- Therefore, you could send an automated email a couple of days later, reminding them of the selected items.The customer then returns to your store and their cart to complete their purchase
This tool makes sense if your store already has a subscriber base of at least 10,000. The essence of the device is to work with those customers who already know about you and are ready to buy.
Final thoughts
If your website fails to attract the right audience, you might not be using all the SEO functionalities. Although SEO may sound like a technical term, it is actually a creative process which combines the creation of high-quality content and analytics to achieve the best possible results. Hopefully, this article will bring you one step closer to promoting your online store successfully and achieving your business goals.