Promoting an Online Store for Dummies: A 20-Step Guide (Part 1)

This plan contains 20 steps to complete in three months. From defining your business niche to managing your brand's reputation. If you follow this 3-month plan, you will be able to avoid common marketing mistakes and ensure that you reach your goals.

Preparation

1. Define goals

Before you start working on SEO promotion of any project, you need to determine the purpose of promotion. Ask yourself: what exactly do you want to achieve? What result do you want to achieve? How will you check the effect of the promotion?

For example, goals might be:

• achieving high positions in search engines for several keywords;
• outpacing competitors in the commercial field;
• brand promotion and awareness;
• increasing site traffic, and, consequently, increasing sales;
• search for potential buyers; increase in conversion rate and advertising revenue;
• other tasks depending on the specific case.

The goal will help determine the promotion plan and methods for analyzing the results. But imagine that your competitors have set the same goal - to raise the site in search engines to get a flow of customers for thematic queries. What needs to be done to achieve success?

2. Define your niche and market share

Already know what exactly you will offer to your potential customers? If you have not decided yet, carefully analyze the market and make sure that your start-up capital allows you to break through with high competition. With a limited budget at the start, do not plan to mass trade in expensive goods. The stage of analyzing potential competitors is very important, as it allows you to find the most promising niche. You must determine for yourself the following points:

• products that are in high demand;
• market share of competitors;
• Marketing strategies that competitors use to promote.
• To obtain such information on your own, we recommend using special services for analyzing various niches: me
• Yandex.Wordstat is a free service that will help you analyze and select keywords based on data from Yandex.
• Google AdWords: Keyword Planner is a similar service for analyzing statistics for certain keywords and traffic estimation.
• Google Trends is also a free resource with which you can track the dynamics of changes in the popularity of products.

3. Create a smart directory structure

Product cataloging in an online store is the sorting of product characteristics according to specific criteria. Information in the catalog is systematized and convenient for quick search of any commodity items. A well-built and logical catalog will help not only the visitor of the resource, but also the administrator when making changes. The development of an effective selling catalog provides:

• presentation of goods in the best way for buyers;
• sales increase;
• flexible management of commodity items by the administrator;
• automated processing of product data;
• perform statistical sales analysis;
• trade accounting and sales analysis;
• Improve resource indexing by search engines.

What are the "tricks" in the line of INTEC:Universe solutions to improve the catalog?

We have added to the range of solutions:

1. Several types of products - industrial goods card, clothing and consumer goods card, service card, real estate card.
2. Support for trade offers (SKU-product): the ability to set key characteristics (color, size, packaging) and assign individual prices, stock balances to combinations of these characteristics. It becomes possible to order a product with the desired set of properties.
3. Several options for displaying goods and services in the list: tile, table or price list - customize the optimal display of the catalog.
4. Three options for displaying catalog headings: tiles, a list with icons, a text list. You can set your own default display for any category.
5. A convenient product filter by custom fields and characteristics - will help users find a product that meets their requirements. At the same time, the filter works using Ajax technology and filters products without reloading the page.
6. Promotion price (old price crossed out).
7. Sort products by default, price, name, model, or rating.
8. Quick view with checkout option.
9. Brands for products with description and logo.
10. Live search for products by name, description or article works according to a multi-factor algorithm - it shows only what you need, filters out all the garbage. Supports reference properties (highload infoblocks) with icons.
11. Automatic export of goods to Yandex.Market.
12. Synchronization with "1C: Enterprise 8.x" (nomenclature and orders) - will allow you to reliably integrate the online catalog with 1C - to ensure the exchange of nomenclature, the exchange of orders and the balance of goods in the warehouse.
13. Informer for the availability of goods with three types of display: availability indicator, numeric balance, many/little/missing.
14. The ability to compare products.
15. The Wish List improves the convenience of working with the catalog and allows you to mark products of interest for further purchase.

In the next blog post, I will talk about the first month of promotion. I warn you right away that this is the busiest period for work. But high-quality work at this stage will certainly lead to a good result. Don't miss the new article!