Start Your SEO Before Your Ecommerce Begins To Sell

Selling in an online store – what does it look like?

Selling online is connected with making numerous decisions that can be crucial for the future traffic and revenues of the store. You need to consider not only the website design and range of products or services you want to offer to your consumers but also the way in which you plan to reach new potential customers. There are certain rules of selling online that you should get to know before setting off your activity.

Effective operation of an online store involves a number of interrelated features. Depending on the type of your activity, you need to choose the most suitable solutions and technologies tailored to the specifics and purposes of the website. In some cases, it may be necessary to use special platforms while in others the popular CMS systems will be enough. You should remember about proper design and functionality of your website. Well-thought-out advertising and SEO activities can be crucial and you should take care of these aspects before you start selling.

When should I start cooperating with an SEO agency?

Very often shop owners who want to improve their sales decide to start cooperation with SEO agencies. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them do it when their websites are already ready. Sometimes impressive layout, technological solutions that cost an arm and a leg, positive attitude or products entered on the site aren’t enough to ensure traffic to the shop. So what’s wrong? Why people prefer visiting other online shops? – These are two questions that our clients ask most frequently. The answer is simple. It’s all due to the fact that most entrepreneurs focus exclusively on the aesthetics of the website instead of considering its functionality and visibility on the Internet. Of course it’s important to design an eye-catching and intriguing website, however, the way in which it’s displayed in the search results or the method users can find it is the real key to success.

The truth is that the sooner you take care of a proper SEO strategy of your online store, the better. Website design and structure noticeably influence search engine rankings and doing everything from scratch is much easier than trying to improve a badly constructed site. A well-organized website is prone to achieve much higher positions in the search results. That’s why thinking about SEO while designing your website can significantly facilitate the whole process of getting to the top. Friendly URLs, appropriate website loading time, unique content, titles and metadata are extremely important elements that have to be considered when designing a website.

Cooperating with an SEO agency

You should start cooperating with an SEO agency while designing your website or even earlier. This gives a significant advantage to the newly created online shop. Remember about technical SEO and optimizing your content before launching the website. You’ll need to take care of elements such as proper site indexing, correct URL addresses, site map, menu structure plan and even global metadata settings. Your website should also have an SSL certificate and a properly optimized robots.txt file. Make sure that it doesn’t generate any errors.

Doing SEO can be really time consuming and it requires a great deal of commitment. If you have a specific plan of operation already at the stage of designing the site, you’ll save the time you’d need in the future to improve the site and domain authority. Doing SEO simultaneously with implementing developers’ works gives a good chance of creating a strong website. This, in turn, will allow more efficient SEO processes and faster achievement of the intended results in the future. When it comes to clients who have never done SEO for their sites, one of the most frequently encountered obstacles is the lack of possibility to introduce longer content or change titles and headings. This usually happens in the case of dedicated platforms when web developers didn’t expect the need for such activities.

Content, or should we say its lack, is another issue. Not everyone knows that content is king and not everyone publishes content on their website. Unique SEO-optimized content with proper keywords is a must if you want to reach the top. Apart from improving the trust level of customers who can get to know products or services on your offer it’s also appreciated by Google robots. Well, obviously creating valuable content takes time and requires expertise in a given field but the results can be really spectacular.

SEO consultations – see if your work makes sense

It happens that companies starting to sell online aren’t too fond of cooperating with an SEO agency at the first stages of their operation on the market. And in this situation SEO consultations can be a real lifesaver. These are meetings during which clients get valuable tips and answers to nagging questions. They can also check whether their strategies make sense. This solution is especially beneficial for companies that don’t want to cooperate with an SEO agency but only need the so-called “ad hoc assistance”. For more information go to: SEO consultations.

When can you expect first effects?

We’ve already mentioned that SEO is a long-term process, therefore you won’t see the effects immediately. Improved sales and traffic to the site that are the consequence of being ranked high in the search results are caused by a regular and proper SEO process implemented over time. This process includes not only the website design but also constant analysis of the competition on the market as well as various off- and on-site activities.

In the case of websites where traffic is built from scratch you need to wait for the first successes a little bit longer. Usually, after 3-4 months from the start of cooperation, the number of impressions and the visibility of your site should noticeably improve. Then, organic traffic and sales begin to increase. However, you need to remember that increased sales don’t always have to be proportional to the traffic to the website. The latter one is affected not only by SEO but also by the competition on the market, prices, product range and many other factors completely unrelated to SEO.

Below you can see a graph presenting the improvement in visibility and traffic to the site of one of our clients. Netcube is an online shop selling puzzles and logical games and all its traffic was built on a completely new website.

How can you prepare and how long does a website audit take?

An audit is one of the key elements if you want to work on your website and conduct an SEO process for it. A thorough analysis enables to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the entire website and specify an individual strategy. If you detect errors and problems early enough, you can react quickly and make improvements before Google robots notice anything. To carry out a full website audit we use a number of specialized tools that give us an overview of the current state of the site. Then, based on this analysis, we choose specific SEO activities that will make your website stand out from the competition on the market and thus, improve your visibility and sales.

To sum up

I hope we’ve convinced you that doing SEO before you start selling online can turn out to be very profitable. Taking proper care of every element of the website from the very beginning of its operation may save you a lot of time you’d have to spend on fixing all potential errors and problems. It’s a good idea to take advantage of SEO consultations already at the stage of designing your site. Then, when your page is ready, consider a long-term cooperation with an SEO agency – this will allow you to further improve the authority and position of your domain in the search results.