Online Shop Lesson 101
Let’s clarify a fundamental fact: More visibility leads to more visitors, and more visitors lead to more buyers. When you’re in a shopping mall, consider this: you’re surrounded by hundreds of shops. You’re more likely to enter one of the shops that you can see with you eye. You probably won’t even notice a shop hidden in a corner behind others because you didn’t even know it exists. People should be able to see your shop or your products. You must need visibility.
More Visibility = More Visitors = More Sells
How to Get More Visibility?
Your online store is part of a vast digital space with billions of other shops. Every online store is competing for better visibility to attract visitors. Just as you scan the shelves in a physical store with your eye, visitors use search engines to find products online. If search engines can’t find you, visitors won’t see your shop or products.
So, you need to optimize your online shop to make it easily discoverable by search engines, and your shop should present a strong online presence, making search engines believe that your products are what people will love.
How Search Engines Work?
Search engines use an index, similar to a library’s catalog. If a book isn’t listed in the catalog, it doesn’t exist in the library even if it does physically, no one will know where it is. Similarly, if your site or each of your products isn’t listed in a search engine’s index, it might as well be considered as not existing. When someone searches for a product, search engines swift through their index to find and display the related products.
How Search Engines Chose who should in First Page?
Now, for the multitude of products that people search for, which one does the search engine show some products on the first page?
Think about how you choose a book to buy or read in a library or bookstore. You look at the cover image, read the excerpt, check the price, and so on. Search engines do something similar; they display products which has all the necessary information upfront. This is where meta descriptions, schema, and open graph data become crucial.
The second check search engines perform is to determine which products people click on the most. Just like a librarian might recommend popular books which most people checked out or bought, search engines consider products with more backlinks as more popular, which is like more sites pointing to those products. The more websites that refer to your products, the more important search engines will think your products are.
So, you need two things: an excellent schema or meta description and backlinks.
Tips: Search engines tend to favor shopping platforms over individual stores because they can accumulate more backlinks. You can align your schema and meta descriptions with those on shopping platforms, but it’s hard to match the quantity of backlinks they can generate. So, consider listing your products on shopping platforms too.
With better visibility, you’ll naturally attract more visitors.
How to Find Experts to Improve Your Visibility:
Option 1 – Hire a freelancer who can set this up for you. This may cost around $100 a month. You need to have meta data or schema for each of your products updated regularly. And the freelancer to increase backlinks with the right keywords to gain ranking in search engines.
Option 2 – Engage an SEO company to handle indexing, schema, meta descriptions, and link building. Their services range from about $400 to $4,000, depending on the scope of work.
Option 3 – Consider listing your products on Item ATLAS for $15 per month. This platform indexes your products with search engines, provides complete schema and meta descriptions, and creates backlinks to your online shop. The unique part is that Item ATLAS is a commission-free shopping platform, meaning you don’t lose any earnings per sale.
