No matter how good a website may look, in order to start making sales customers need to find the site first. That’s why “driving traffic” is essential to the success of an online business.
Most people will begin their online shopping on a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. For this reason, keywords are extremely important for enhancing SEO or “search engine optimisation”. SEO is the process of increasing the number of visitors that arrive at a website, by increasing the site’s ranking in "natural" search results.
Search engines use “spiders” to trawl through the web and find the most relevant matches for words entered into the search box. The simplest way to maximise natural search is to always think about keywords when writing the copy for your website. Try to use the names of the different types of products you sell, or other descriptive words that people are likely to include in their search. The more matches your site has to commonly used search terms, the more chances it has of getting seen by potential customers.
Shopcreator Transact provides search engine optimised templates to assist you with SEO for your website. This means that the search engines can easily crawl and find your website.
In addition once you have uploaded all of your products to your site it is automatically submitted to the major search engines prompting their spiders to crawl your site quickly.
You can also upload your products directly to Google Shopping from Transact providing another channel for potential customers to find your products, discover your site and increase your sales.
Paid search or “Pay Per Click” (PPC) is a form of advertising on search engines, in which advertisers bid on specific keywords which they predict their target market will use. It is when a user actually clicks on their "sponsored link" or "sponsored ad" that the advertiser pays. These ads appear either above or along the right hand side of the natural search results, when one of the chosen keywords is used in a search.
It is important to be selective when choosing which words to bid on, as the wrong choice could end up costing you a lot of money without generating any revenue. If the words you bid on are too generic, certain users who make very broad searches (for example, “original gift ideas” or “women’s fashion”) may end up clicking on your ad only to find it is not what they are looking for. In these cases even though there will be no sale from this visitor, the click is still paid for.
Another way to promote websites is in online directories or marketplaces such as eBay or BT Tradespace, both approved PayPal Partners. Here you can showcase your offering and drive traffic through links to your website. The buyer recommendation or feedback ratings offered by these well established shopping sites can also be very valuable in raising the profile of a good business at a relatively low cost.
Another way to promote websites is in online directories or marketplaces such as eBay or BT Tradespace, both approved PayPal Partners. Here you can showcase your offering and drive traffic through links to your website. The buyer recommendation or feedback ratings offered by these well established shopping sites can also be very valuable in raising the profile of a good business at a relatively low cost.
There are numerous ways to market your site online and help improve your positions within the search engine. With this in mind the Transact package contains a section on marketing full of helpful tips and documentation to help you achieve as much online visibilty as possible without having to spend lots of money.
You are the most important channel for driving traffic to your site.
Make sure you add your web address to all of your company collateral, from stationery to newspaper ads.
The more your web address is seen, the more it will be remembered.