Positioning an online shop - practical tips
E-commerce
24 September 2023
The saying that advertising is the lever of trade has been heard more than once. How does this saying, which has been well-known for years, apply to online business? Through positioning, which is an indispensable part of being visible online. SEO involves a great deal of activities, only some of which can be carried out without specialised knowledge and programmes. However, you should start somewhere and this practical guide is a good place to start.
Positioning of an online shop - what does it involve?
The positioning of an online shop is one of the most important activities aimed at promoting it. Thanks to the activities undertaken as part of this, the online business becomes more visible to users and therefore has the potential to become more profitable. Positioning focuses on improving the position in the organic, i.e. unpaid search results, so that the link to the shop is as high as possible. Activities that make the link visible in the top three in the list of addresses generated by the search engine are considered effective. For this to be possible, it is necessary:
- creation of content optimised for key words and phrases (e.g. product descriptions), i.e. those typed into the search engine by internet users;
- publishing valuable texts which, although they do not always lead directly to the shopping tab, are important for search engine bots;
- linking (link building), i.e. ensuring that links to the web page or product pages of the online shop are placed on external sites;
- optimising the site from a technical point of view, i.e. loading times, adjusting URL lengths, etc;
- analysing both your competitors' and your own actions, thus eliminating any shortcomings;
- continuous monitoring of changes made to the search engine's page indexing mechanisms.
In Poland, as in very many countries around the world, effective SEO is almost exclusively about Google. The reason is its dominant position. The service of this American concern has been used for years by more than 90% of web users. Other search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo and others are almost never of interest to SEO specialists working for an online shop.
It is also worth bearing in mind that the actions listed are not the only ones that can be taken. How can a website be positioned in other ways? To do this, you need to use Google Ads, a paid tool that boosts search results. Advertising links or images placed in the most visible place, i.e. at the top, are, however, paid for. Moreover, the effects of such a campaign can only be seen until it is paid for. For this reason, it is advisable to take care of a long-term optimisation of your online shop that takes into account the organic, free Google search results. A combination of both will increase the chances of visibility.
Online shop positioning - what do you need to know about Google robots?
Just as every owner of an online shop wants customers to buy from them, the people in charge of Google's search engine want Internet users to use it. However, they need to be encouraged in some way to do this. How to do this? It is necessary to correctly guess their intentions and present them with results that are potentially of interest to them. To this end, the technology company uses robots that analyse web resources at lightning speed. They use all available capabilities to present valuable content, namely:
- website resources;
- data from maps and company profiles provided to Google;
- information found on social media;
- publicly available educational material;
- messages found elsewhere, e.g. in open databases.
The tools used by Google, commonly known as robots, are in fact algorithms that check millions of pages in an instant. They use HTML code scanning to more or less accurately guess user intentions. In this way, they check, among other things, the content and files on the site, such as graphics and images. The extent to which the proposed searches are relevant to a person's query is largely determined by the keywords. Efficient online marketing involves finding out what customers type in and under what circumstances, and then adapting to their requirements, needs and habits.
Keyword analysis - how do you differentiate between them?
Online shop positioning cannot do without choosing the right keywords to match both the many businesses in a particular industry and a specific company. In order to be high up in the search results every time, in many cases you need content that displays when the user types in a more complex phrase. After all, it is important to remember that it is these, and not generic terms, that give you the best chance of being listed high in the list generated by Google for the internet user. How do you position your online shop by following this advice? The best way to understand it is through examples.
General key phrases
These types of phrases are typed into the search engine very frequently, being problematic for Google bots and SEO specialists alike. One of countless examples of such phrases might be 'red car'. What is missing from this term? Almost everything, e.g. the purpose of the search (it is difficult to judge whether a person wants to read about vehicles in this colour or whether they can buy or repair one), the brand, perhaps also the price or the condition of the car if the purpose of the phrase is to buy one. On your shop page, such generic terms are only worth using as an aid to positioning, as they do not usually increase click-through rates by themselves.
Frazy long-tail
The structure of these phrases is elaborate enough to understand the intent of the internet user. An example of a long-tail could be "model red folding car". Google will already show far fewer results for such a phrase, but they will be much more competitive for companies, in this case those selling folding models. Such phrases should be on the website, as they largely determine whether it will be visible at the top of the search results. 
Product names
Expanding a phrase to include the name of a product allows a company that has it in its range of products to position itself even better. Narrowing down an internet user's search to display relevant answers to a query such as "model of red XYZ car to assemble" allows you to stand out even higher than your competitors selling other products. In this case, you can increase your chances of finding yourself in an attractive position in a Google search by including both the name (make and model) of the vehicle and the manufacturer of this type of hobby accessory in your website description.
Answers to questions
In keyword analysis, questions that respond to particular problems faced by internet users play a large role. Finding such phrases and using them does not lead directly to sales, but builds the company's image as a team of experts. A prerequisite for gaining high rankings in Google is a subpage with content that relates to the business in various ways. For example, hobbyists interested in modelling may type in the phrase "what glue should I buy to assemble XYZ red car?". Creating text that provides an answer to this question is an excellent starting point for showcasing your company's offerings, as well as making it easier for the site's user to buy by including links to individual products in the content.
Local phrases
The last type is phrases containing the names of professions, companies and cities. In order to position yourself for such search results, you need to complete the Contact section of your shop's website and ensure that it is marked on Google Maps. This will ensure that when you type in, for example, "car model shop Warsaw", your website link will be included in the list of similar businesses.
Positioning of an online shop - importance of on-page content
Content, i.e. the content published on the website, is highly promoted by Google bots and therefore should not be abandoned. At the same time, it is worth bearing in mind that it must be valuable. Fortunately, gone are the days when low-quality texts, but filled with key phrases, could be found at the top of the search listings. For years, Google has been making an effort to ensure that internet users receive articles that are genuinely interesting and exhaustive. This is why, over the years, company blogs have gained in importance, where texts related to the company's activities, the industry in which it operates and the products or services it offers, as well as related topics, are posted.
Bookmarking content on your own website is not all you can do to position yourself through content. Sponsored articles placed on external websites also work well. Here, too, there have been significant changes over the years. In the past, the mere fact of publishing an article on any page (preferably with a link to the advertised shop's website) increased the chances of increasing the position in search results. Nowadays, Google's algorithms are able to distinguish between sites that exist only to be advertising posts and those that have interesting content prepared for web users.
Online shop positioning vs. link building - what is it all about?
Link building is also associated with content. This activity consists of placing links to the target website on other websites. This builds the so-called authority of your website. In other words, adding links is a signal to Google bots that the website is popular with Internet users and therefore worthy of being included high in the search results. Links generally do not exist in a vacuum, being most often part of texts published on various pages.
However, it is necessary not only to know what positioning in this way involves, but also how to perform it so that the effect is not the opposite of that intended. In this case, there is a regularity similar to that known from the publication of sponsored content. If Google's algorithms notice that links are placed in the text on pages that only exist for the publication of advertising articles, without any relation to the content of the text on a well-positioned portal or in a random thread on a forum, they will consider these links to be spam. In such a case, there is no hope for the expected results, but rather for your own website to fall to distant positions in Google search.
In link building, links are grouped by type and value. The first category is divided into:
- graphic links - which take you to another page when you click on, for example, a brand logo or advertising graphic;
- text links - placed in texts or comments.
Text links are further differentiated into:
- URL, i.e. the address of the recommended website, e.g. www.inpost.pl;
- exact match taking the form of keywords with an added hyperlink such as parcel delivery via Parcel Post;
- partial match, similar to the previous ones, but not strictly (and therefore exact), only partially (partial) related to the search topic, e.g. parcel delivery;
- zero match that is not a direct part of the text like TU, click here, see, check etc.
In addition, links are assigned to categories:
- follow - links of this type suggest to Google bots to check the recommended address and thus push it up in the search results;
- nofollow - links that tell algorithms not to check what is underneath them.
From the user's point of view, it does not matter whether they click on a follow or nofollow link. However, it has a huge impact on SEO. Too many of the first type of link can be a signal to Google that it is dealing with spamming. For this reason, SEO specialists also use the second type of hyperlink.
Positioning your online shop - tools to help you do it
For optimising content on your own website and internal services, as well as for link building campaigns, programmes such as Ahrefs, among others, come in handy. It is one of the most popular tools for finding topic-matched links. However, this is only the tip of its functionality. Ahrefs can also be used to find out which sites are the most popular in terms of the number of links, their growth or the most valuable content. The programme can also be used to check the user-friendliness of a website and to select themes and build content according to SEO principles.
Ahrefs is therefore useful for both checking competitors' activities and auditing your own site for errors affecting poor optimisation. However, it is a paid programme, as is, for example, Senuto. Google, on the other hand, offers free tools for positioning your shop's website. One of these is Google Trends, which allows you to find keywords along with location and time period. The internet marketing industry also uses Google Search Console, which tells you which content has been indexed (verified) and which keyword phrases the search engine has responded to. Those running e-businesses will also be interested in Google Analytics, which provides insight into the number of people accessing the website, the time they spend on it, the sub-pages visited and their popularity.
Is a well-designed information architecture important?
Online business owners should not only know what SEO is for an online shop, but also user experience. The readability and ease of navigation of the website has an impact on the position in search results, but, even more importantly, on the number of completed shop visits. This is because it is no longer an increasingly intelligent, but still emotionless bot, but a human being that is at work here. A poorly designed website is a simple way to lose customers. Frustrated by an incomprehensible interface, they will move on to a competitor's site.
Creating the right information architecture requires, among other things, a consistent look for both the desktop and mobile versions of a website. In addition, it is important to ensure that buttons leading to subsequent pages or actions are appropriately labelled. In online shops, it is also essential to categorise products and inform the customer of where they are on the site and what they are doing. In order to fulfil the latter, it is necessary to display clear messages, e.g. when an item is added to the shopping basket.
Technical optimisation of an online shop - why is it so important?
Even the most polished content and the acquisition of valuable links won't do much good if the website is performing badly. But what does this mean? The first aspect to look out for is loading speed. Waiting too long to connect to a page will simply make the internet user start looking for another one. Google's bots know this, which results in such sites being downgraded in the search listings. In addition, it is important to ensure that the website is displayed correctly on both PCs and mobile devices.
As part of technical optimisation, a sitemap is also created. In this case, however, it is not just a table of contents that makes it easier for users to find the relevant sub-page. In addition, an XML version is created for Google bots. The code contains information that is irrelevant to the user, but invaluable to the algorithms, such as the priority of the URL. They themselves also require attention. A good URL should not be too long. Shorter URLs without random letter and number sequences are favoured over more complex ones. Another of the many measures for technical optimisation of a website is adding meta descriptions and tags to the content published on the site.
Online shop positioning - how much does it cost?
Is it at all possible to answer the question of how much SEO for an online shop costs? Creating any indicative price range is pointless, because the final expenditure depends on the number and quality of actions taken, and also the nature of the business. A good example is the content itself, the prices of which start at a few zlotys per thousand characters and end up at sums as high as three digits. The cost depends largely on the difficulty of the subject matter and the expectations of optimising the content for SEO. As you can guess, expert articles with tailored key phrases are worth much more than simple content without them.
It is no different with links. A link building campaign can be conducted in many ways. Those dominated by links costing a few zlotys placed on niche sites can publish thousands of them. But will such tactics have the desired effect? Not necessarily, or rather the effect can be expected to be less noticeable than adding a link to an article on a portal with multi-million dollar reach. In this case, however, you have to reckon with the fact that a single link will cost up to several thousand PLN.
Online shops also incur different costs depending on the expectations of the agencies dealing with the technical aspect of optimisation. The work of specialists in this field is not cheap in itself, and the expense increases with the scope of the tasks imposed on them and the time they will allocate to them. For this and the previous reasons, it is impossible to say how much it costs to position the website of an online business. Some companies spend a few thousand zloty on it, others (if they have a sufficient budget, of course) many times more. At the same time, it must be remembered that this is not a one-off expense.
Positioning is a never-ending process involving the need to adapt to Google's ever-changing guidelines. For this reason, the largest companies in their industries themselves create teams of specialists to provide them with comprehensive services consisting of developing an appropriate strategy, implementing it and responding to modifications introduced by the owner of the world's most popular search engine. Do you run an online shop? Take care of its visibility!
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