Buy and Sell Online, Your Own Online Shop with Online Marketing SEO (Video)

How to Get Buyers to Your Online Shop Through SEO

Hi, my name is Philip King and welcome to this video lesson, How to Get Buyers to Your Online Shop Through SEO.

Compared with selling on eBay, ebid or Amazon or other popular marketplaces, there are many benefits and a few drawback to setting up your own online store and selling goods on your own website.

The benefits include:

• Saving on marketing fees.
• Having less competition to contend with.

The drawbacks include:

• Less traffic.
• Fewer buyers viewing your items.

In this video article we will discuss some of the best ways to negate the drawbacks of getting traffic to you online store from Google, Yahoo and the other search engines through search engine optimization. As Google is the top search engine, I will use that for this demonstration.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO is about getting your website to rank high in search engines, preferably on the first page of search engine results pages, particularly Google. Ranking high in their listings will enable your potential customers to find your website when they search for the products you sell.

Google Search Example

The easiest way to learn SEO is to see it in action, so let’s do a general search on Google for “baby bouncer swing” without the quotes, and see what kind of results we get.

Search Result Types

The first thing to notice about the results of the search is that Google is displaying several different result zones.

At the top of the search results, in both the left and right hand columns we have lots of Google Ad results – these are paid advertisements the website owners have created. They pay to have them displayed here. You may have heard of Google AdWords, these are they. For SEO purposes, you can ignore them, they are not relevant.

• On the other hand, these are your competitors, so you might like to take note of their listings and gather what tips you can.

Below the paid for ads on the left, we have the “organic” search results. You don’t have to pay to have your listings here, and in fact, they tend to get more clicks than the paid ads, so it’s better to rank here anyway.

Who are the Competition?

Take note of the companies appearing on this first page of Google, they are your main competition. With the likes of Argos, Mother Care, Amazon, Kiddicare, Mamas and Papas, Tesco, Asda, Boots and Littlewoods this is going to be a tough market to break into.

On the other hand, how tough? Could you get better results by trying some of the related search suggestions? Just how many ads is Google indexing? Lets find out shall we!

• Type, “&start=990″ at the end of the text in the address bar and press Enter.
• Scroll down to the end of the search results page.
• Google is saying it has a maximum of twenty pages of results.

A quick calculation means there are actually only 200 search results in the Google database that need concern us (20 pages at 10 results per page = 200 results). That’s not too bad.

In fact, in this instance, Google tells us that there are only 197 results that should concern us.

Type of Search, General or Exact

Notice, the search we just completed was a General search, this means that when Google looked for matches it simply searched for any of the words in any order on the web pages and displayed the results. What would happen if we asked for an exact phrase search? Lets find out shall we!

This time, enter “baby bouncer swing” within quotes, into the search bar and see what kind of results we get.

Notice the big names have gone! We now have five eBay entries and one Gumtree entry in the top ten.

If we look at how many pages Google is indexing for this search, we find there are only 73 pages to compete with.

This type of result would indicate that good writing skills combined with good SEO could get our page ranked on the first search result page of Google.

The reason I say this? Well the general search was none specific, so the results were anything related to the search keywords. The second set of results was for a specific keyword phrase that people are searching for. These are the people we want to target.

Getting Ranked on the First Page of Google

So how do you rank your website and get good results, without getting on the bad side of Google?

Well there are two things you need to do to get good page rank high in the search engines:

1. On-page optimization and
2. Off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is when you make edits to your website to improve SEO. This enables the search engines to easily read and index your website. Essentially, it’s about telling Google what your website is all about. This enables the search engines to show the right pages to their users who search for your products.

Off-page optimization is mostly about showing search engines how trustworthy your website is. Search engines do their best to stop their customers being scammed.

How to Get Good Page Rank

On-page Optimisation

Getting ranked on the first page of Google or any search engine, takes good writing skills, good page SEO and time. When your pages get ranked all depends upon when the search engine spiders next trawl your website, it can take as little as a few day or several weeks.

There are no magic bullets for getting good search engine rankings, so beware of services that claim that they can get you fast, rankings on page one of Google. They are probably using techniques which are not approved by Google. In such cases, your rankings won’t last long and Google might even de-index you, which, to all intense and purposes means your pages will not be found.

Now your probably wondering what are the best ways to do on and off page optimization so I’ll cover some essential tips for you.

Write Content Rich Product Descriptions

First, write content-rich product descriptions. As I mentioned, one of the ways that Google and other search engines determine which sites to rank is through the text content on the site. Therefore, it is crucial that your product descriptions contain keywords that your buyers will search for when they search for items you stock.

Try to write descriptions that are at least 300 words long and remember to include the keywords that closely relate to the product, but remember not to stuff your description with too many keywords. Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules, but a maximum of about 5% keywords should suffice. Stuffing your content with keywords could tell Google that your content is not genuine. It’s also makes your content difficult to read for buyers!

Write a Killer Meta Description

You should also write a killer meta description. Your meta description is the text that displays in search results. The meta description should contain your keywords, baby bouncer swing, in this case. It should also provide a good description for the person searching which encourages them to click-through and visit your online shop.

Keep Your Content Fresh

To achieve good search engine rankings, you should also focus on keeping your content fresh.

Google and other search engines love you when you update your site with fresh, new content. When you update your content, Google knows that your website is a ‘live’ site and not just a static website that is never updated. This will improve your rankings.

The easiest way of keeping your content fresh is by blogging. Writing blog posts not only helps with your Google rankings, but additionally, when you write about the products that you sell, you show off your passion for the products, which inspires your customers to hit the “Add to Cart” button!

Keep Your Blog Posts Short, Informative and Entertaining

Most products or product lines are relativity easy to blog about. There is always something new happening. Blog about the latest season’s colours, styles and trends. Blog about related products your audience would adore, but would never be able to purchase themselves!

Your blog posts do not need to be long or sophisticated. It’s best to keep product blogs short and personal not dry or boring. Aim to give valuable, informative and entertaining content to your readers and avoid blasting them with advertisements.

How to Get Good Page Rank

Off-page Optimisation

Next, you need to do off-page optimization. Off-page optimization is mostly about showing search engines how trustworthy your website is. Google is looking for websites that are of high quality and trustworthy. Search engines measure trustworthiness and quality in a couple of ways, but they primarily look at how many other websites link to yours. This is called backlinking and each backlink is like a vote or a referral and when another website votes for or refers to yours, it tells Google that your website is a good one and therefore it will rank better in search results. Once again, keep your blog posts short, informative, entertaining and encourage backlinking. Try to become an authority in your field.

Get Backlinks

Getting good backlinks to your website from other websites can be difficult. One of the easiest ways is to post on forums or discussion boards that are related to your products. For example, if you were selling baby related items as here, you could join a discussion board for new moms and offer helpful and useful advice. Then in your forum signature, you could include a link to your website.

Do this on several discussion boards or forums. Just remember, always provide valuable advice, never simply “spam” the forum in order to get a backlink! The readers will not respond and the owner of board or forum may simply ban you.

Lesson Recap

Here is a quick recap on what we have covered today:

• Tell Google and the other search engines what your website is all about by using product descriptions containing relevant keywords your buyers will search for when looking for items you sell.
• Write item descriptions which are at least 300 words long relevant keywords.
• Focus on keeping your content fresh through blogging.
• Use discussion boards and forums related to the products you sell to gain backlinks to your website.