Seven ways to promote your ecommerce website

An optimised site stands a much better chance of ranking highly in search engines. High rankings equal more traffic and sales which is ultimately, what any business wants.

If you’d like to know how to promote an ecommerce website with SEO, below are some great ways to do exactly this:

Keywords

Do some research to identify the keywords your potential customers are searching for. Incorporating them into your content helps your site to rank for these terms so people can find you.

Blogging

Having a blog on your website is a cost-effective way to keep your content fresh, drive traffic to your site and get those keywords in. It also provides you with an opportunity to share all the great benefits of your products. Remember, blogging might not be for every site, if you don’t have the resources or time to produce regular, high-quality content it could be better to focus on some of these other tactics.

Title tags and meta descriptions

SEO title tags are an important element of on-site SEO and should include the main key phrases you’re targeting as well as the name of your business. Your title tag will show up in search results and can be the difference between someone clicking on your site or choosing a competitor. Anyone can see the title tags a site is using because it’s the text that shows up in the tab of the page you’re looking at.

Meta descriptions are the 160-character descriptions of your webpage which show up beneath the title tag in search engine results pages. This is essentially an advert for your business and again, it’s what will either encourage people to visit your site or choose a competitor. If you don’t have this valuable information on your site, people have no idea what it’s about and neither will Google.

Internal and external links

Internal links can boost SEO by showing how pages are related to one another, signalling important pages to Google and also by encouraging visitors to further explore your site, thus increasing the amount of time they spend on it.

If you have a blog page, this is a great place to do this if you’re talking about a specific product. You’ll also often see ecommerce sites doing this by recommending similar products or items to compliment purchases.

External links provide your site with authority and help to direct traffic. Creating high-quality content is an effective way to encourage other websites to link to you.

The great thing about SEO techniques is the ability to promote your ecommerce website for free, as it’s something you can do yourself if you have the time. Don’t forget that you should optimise each individual product page using the techniques above to ensure they all have the best chance of ranking in search engines. SEO can take time, especially for brand new websites, but it’s worth building these solid foundations at the beginning.

If you’re trying to decide how to encourage customers to your new ecommerce store, sales and promotions can be a great way to do this. Discounts can be an effective way to convince people who aren’t sure about making a purchase to go through with the transaction.

Always put a time limit on your sales and promotions. The time-bound nature of these campaigns creates a sense of urgency which means people will act now rather than waiting. By saying ‘limited time’ or ‘offer valid until stocks last,’ you tap into people’s instinct to buy something impulsively in case they miss out.

If you want to know how to promote your ecommerce website for free, social media is the tool for you. The great thing about these platforms is that there are so many different ways you can reach out to potential customers.

Simply having a social media presence you’re consistent with is a great way to build a loyal community, stay in touch with existing customers and attract new audiences. People expect to see brands on social media and will often use it as part of their research when deciding whether or not to make a purchase.

You can use your social pages to showcase your products, post a link to your latest blog, direct traffic to your website, share video demonstrations of your products and let everyone know about any sales or promotions you’re running.

A branded hashtag can improve the discoverability of your brand. Not only is this helpful for your customers, it means that you can quickly and easily find out what people are saying about you.

This brings us nicely onto the topic of user-generated content (UGC). Customers uploading photos of themselves using your product is an incredibly powerful marketing tool for businesses.

It’s genuine, authentic, provides social proof, increases your exposure to new audiences and people trust it. Don’t be afraid to ask new customers to post something – many are happy to do so because of their desire to play a greater part in a brand’s community of followers. You can also offer incentives such as entry into a competition or the chance to feature on your website.

Social advertising

If you’re happy to invest a bit of money into your social media strategy, there are a couple of ways you can do this to boost your content.

Paid advertising

You can promote posts or create an advert from scratch and then pay for it to feature in news feeds of people who don’t even follow you. This is a great way to reach out to new audiences, especially if you don’t have many followers. You can even target who sees your ad based on gender, location, job title, hobbies and more. If you can team this up with a promotion, it gives people an extra incentive to head to your page.

Influencer marketing

Using influencers is another way to promote your ecommerce business on social media. This is something brands are leveraging more and more because it’s proving to be highly effective.

Influencers have a lot of followers who trust them and like to use the same products as them. With a big following, they can help you build immediate and lasting trust with customers on a large scale.

Ecommerce websites rely on user engagement as a driving force behind building customer loyalty and increasing sales. One of the easiest and most effective ways of achieving this is through competitions.

Additional benefits include being able to attract the attention of new and existing customers, gaining new social media followers and encouraging people to engage with your brand. With most companies already on social media, this is a good place to run your competition.

In a world where a huge amount of purchases are now made online, reviews are incredibly important to any ecommerce business. In fact, over 99% of customers read reviews when they shop online.

With reviews playing such an important role in the buying process, encouraging comments about your ecommerce business and products can attract customers, increase sales, boost profits and even improve SEO.

While many business owners are reluctant to give out free samples, they can be an effective way to attract new customers and generate sales you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to acquire.

It can be very difficult to persuade someone to part with their money if they’ve never used your product before or even heard of your brand. If they can try your product with no risk however, they’re highly likely to do so.

Today’s consumers want to be able to try before they buy. A survey carried out by EventTrack found that 78% of people who bought a product said the reason they did so was because they were given the opportunity to try it out first.

Other benefits of giving out free samples include:

• Builds loyalty with customers
• It’s a perk of shopping with you over a competitor (by giving out a free sample with every order for example)
• Expands shoppers’ knowledge about other products you offer which could lead to more sales of new products
• Can push a tentative customer towards making a buying decision

Although there are free advertising options available to you, such as posting organically on social media, if you really want to give your site a boost, paid advertising can really help.

Google’s Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, for example, is an effective way to get your brand noticed.

You may not even realise when we type a search query into Google, we’re presented with organic search results as well as paid ads. A huge benefit of paid advertising is that the sponsored ads are displayed at the top of the search results, so it’s the first thing people see. Aside from the little ‘sponsored’ ad symbol, the ads look just like the organic search results.

When discovering how to promote an ecommerce website, there are many free ways to do this (such as through social media). If you really want to give your site a boost however, paid advertising can really help.

PPC ads are particularly helpful to brands who don’t feature on the first page of Google organically. They can help you get noticed, drive traffic to your website and best of all you only pay when people click on your ad and with plenty of data available on the platform, you can easily track and measure results.