6 Sizzling Ways to Promote Your Business When on a Budget

You’ve created a website which is a visual stunner, and you need an audience to click and convert and buy your product or service. You need to rank much higher than the competition in web search engine results, and how quickly you top search engine rankings determines how successful your ecommerce foray becomes. You obviously don’t want to fall for the sales pitch that starts with the word “free” and ends with a red-hot price tag. Fortunately, there are ways to promote your website on a shoestring budget.

The keys to ecommerce success lie in tried and tested SEO practices customized for your business. Whether you’re a locally based growing business or a multi-national business enterprise seeking to scale your level of operations, SEO provides cost-effective solutions that boost traffic and conversions, improve your site’s visibility, enhance your credibility, establish brand awareness in the community, and arm you with a better understanding of your customer’s psychology. Read on to understand what it takes to promote your business when on a budget.

1. Understand Customer Keyword Psychology and Follow Keyword Strategies That Target Your Demographic

Accord first priority to the keywords that customers regularly use to tag, review, and locate your product or service. This is the core strategy you need to follow in leveraging the benefits of SEO for ecommerce success, and the approach plays a vital role in boosting search volumes correlated to your main product categories and subcategories.

A finely-tuned keyword strategy through on page and off page SEO optimization creates a powerful impact rippling across your website architecture, the URLs that people follow, the topic headlines, and meta tags, maximizing the results in customer searches.

5 Ways You Impact Business Revenues Through Product-Focused Keywords

Take a shot at Amazon and enter the keywords that describe your product, and you instantly get a drop-down menu showing an array of long-tailed keywords related to your search. What you’re viewing is a comprehensive listing of keywords or key phrase searches suggested by Amazon that customers are regularly targeting.

For example, let’s assume you’re selling washing machines. The suggested long-tailed keywords that emerge are “front load,” “top load,” “semi-automatic,” and “fully automatic top loading.” You’re effectively pinpointing the top washing machine searches that customers are prioritizing.

Another way is to click the Amazon “Shop By Category” link which takes you deeper into your product and shows you what’s trending (and what’s off the radar). If you follow “Full Store Directory,” you get even more product details showing models, capacities, discounts, special offers, and customer reviews. Ultimately, you get a wealth of keyword related information that you could leverage effectively. Then head for major competing websites and analyze the keywords they’re using.   

Moving one step ahead of Amazon’s autocomplete service is the Google Autocomplete Keyword tool or Keyword Tool Dominator (KTD). When you enter keywords in KTD, Google mimics human users and suggests numerous long-tailed keywords related to your product that real people search. It’s a headache-free way to aggregate keyword ideas to improve site SEO.

Most people are not aware that Wikipedia hosts subject matter under distinct categories that present great keyword ideasi. For example, just type “Keyword” in the wiki search bar and you get an autocomplete listing of great keyword ideas such as Keyword services platform, keyword testing, keyword stuffing, keyword tools, keyword clustering, keyword protocol, and keyword in context. Do the same for your product and wade through the categorized pages for unique keyword ideas.

A great idea is to use the “Ad Group Ideas” tab in the Google Keyword Planner to generate variations of existing keywords for different words that don’t feature in the standard keywords section. These unique keywords can be used to target a specific demographic and deliver increased traffic volume.

Optimizing a web page is the same as making it receptive to Google bots that search for keywords which identify and make your product unique and search engine friendly. An effective method is to carefully study the Google first page results for the keyword that describes your product and to note how the competition is targeting keywords to deliver a better search experience for customers.

Try to zero in on the keywords that the opposition has missed; long-tailed keywords that give you an opening to position yourself in categories where Google’s first page rankings are open and competition-free.

2. Tweak the Website’s Architecture to Improve Page Ranking

When we speak of architecture, we mean the way you organize and design your pages, paying attention to SEO. This is especially true when you’re hosting multiple pages and several product categories, and you want to ensure Google is indexing your categories properly. Unless your pages are easier to navigate and become user-friendly, customers won’t stay long enough to convert to sales.

Ideally, every additional page should be one to two clicks away from the home page. Make sure navigation is a breeze, and the pages that visitors land on are authoritative and effectively fulfil the intent of the visitor. Prioritize the product categories that figure high in search results because that’ll ensure higher traffic volumes deliver better click-conversion results.

If you want to know what perfect site organization is all about, take a long look at petsmart.com. You’ll find the home base chock full of useful leads that cater to all categories of customer intent. The visitor instantly knows where he needs to click for the right information. No fooling around; the site takes you exactly where you want to go without distracting you with useless info. Every subcategory is precisely organized for excellent user experience, and that’s why such sites perform better in search results.   

5 Tips to Make Your Website Attractive to Visitors

• Carefully cover all relevant categories and never omit popular products and services that customers avidly search for.
• When the customer views a product, make sure he sees associated products that you may be keen on cross-selling.
• Keep an unwavering focus on top rated products and offer attractive discounts that make your competition sit up and take notice.
• Create a section exclusively for the “most viewed” and “most popular” products by sales volumes. This could entice customers to convert faster.
• If there’s a webpage with great architecture don’t duplicate its style; maintain your uniqueness quotient and focus on delivering authoritative content that grabs eyeballs. Then add reviews and peer references, testimonials, and opinions to boost credibility.

A Site Audit From the SEO Viewpoint Is Always Recommended

There’s nothing like a site audit to gain more profound insights regarding the inner workings of the site; the behind the scenes problems that if they remain unfixed could be driving customers away from you.

3. Locate Errors so You Can Set Your House in Order

Google has bots crawling all over your website, assessing you in thousand and one ways. If only you had such a tool that could help you locate issues and rectify them before things go from bad to worse. This could be your Eureka moment. Screaming Frog is one such tool; it’s an SEO spider, a web crawler that mimics how search engines unravel you and define your product. The tool goes through your website’s linkages, content and images, your CSS, the script and multiple apps that you run to detect and solve issues silently.

The 5 Site Deficiencies You Need to Overcome Pronto

That’s when a browser, instead of locking visitors to your URL, redirects them to other domains. That’s bad news for your site if left uncorrected.

Your site may be duplicating content that shows up regularly on other websites. This confuses Google search crawlers which may redirect browsers to content in other domains that are more relevant to the searcher. If that happens, you lose potential customers.  

If the content is not correctly titled with clear subheadings, you lose the battle of relevancy.

If the server can’t find your page, the visitor gets a 404 error page, literally a no-man’s land. For a website, the 404 error is like death; you’re presenting a non-functional page that has no value. For the visitor, you cease to exist, and that’s bad news for business. To prevent this, redirect the visitor to an authoritative and refreshed page where you stand a better chance of scoring a sale.

A poorly loading website is anathema for visitors; nobody has the patience to stick around more than 4 seconds for page loads. If this happens frequently, you could end up losing a heck of a lot of traffic. Again, it’s Google to the rescue. Use Google Page Speed Insights. It will analyze pages for you, pinpoint bottlenecks and suggest changes that could make the page load faster. As your company scales in business volumes, migrate to bigger server space and use a reliable Content Management System (CMS) to optimize SEO.

4. It’s Do or Die for Your Business if you’re not fine-tuning on-Page Optimization

People do a lot of off-page SEO through healthy link building but neglect on-page optimization.

8 Best Practices for on-Page Optimization

• Optimize your keywords, matching them to the real intent of customers that are searching similar services or products.
• Improve your site’s structure and layout, making the site user-friendly to visitors.
• Pay attention to extensive internal linking, making sure that visitors can navigate with minimum discomfort and distraction.
• Simplify web content, making your pages come alive with tons of information relevant to the searcher.
• Make your website mobile-friendly so that your pages quickly optimize to smaller screens in handheld devices. This is crucial because mobiles are driving maximum traffic through search engines.
• Present peer reviews, podcasts, testimonials, and customer reviews to improve the site’s credibility in the eyes of visitors.
• Pull out the stops in presenting varied media and enhance user experience and interaction.
• Make sure your pages are optimized to ensure maximum integration with social media channels. Ensure your content is catchy, appealing, and shareable.

5. Don’t Forget to Blog, and Blog Beautifully

You could be positioning keywords in your site with immaculate precision but for best results do SEO more effectively through regular blogging. Keywords skillfully inserted in blog posts lure traffic in higher volumes. The blog presents keywords in a better light and visitors begin to understand and empathize meaningfully with your message. Needless to say, articles should be lengthy, informative, and genuinely add value to the message you are conveying.  

6. Do Extensive External Link Building

An inbound link properly handed connects you instantly with websites that carry great authority and credibility. This is an effective way of posting informative articles on other sites that can be associated with your product or service, and which is good for brand building.

Conclusion

SEO is not a one-shot rocket launch not to be revisited. On the contrary, SEO is a continuous process that pays handsomely by way of return on investments. By properly following our tips on Search Engine Optimization, you gain by getting more clients who convert to sales and boost your bottom-line.  

Harbor no doubts; what we have presented is a virtual Wikipedia of insights into the core fundamentals of SEO optimization which will drive the engine of your ecommerce growth even on a shoestring budget. If you eventually feel all this is too much to handle, hire an SEO strategist to do the job for you while you focus on doing what you do best – bringing business and boosting sales.