The key to opening the door to your store
Douglas Adams once said: “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.” And the author of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was way before his time in predicting how an electronic device could hold the answers to just about everything.
He didn’t mean it in the context of internet shopping, but, hey, it works anyway, certainly in the hopes of many online retailers so let’s consider some jargon that is used to explain the process of getting to the top of search engine listings – then get rid of it as none of it matters.
Think instead, about your army of potential customers. It is important to note that there is no “golden bullet” for getting terms right, but it can be done with a lot of careful thought or experience.
What does matter is getting an understanding what you have to do to get buyers to your online store – Getting sufficient numbers of people to click the links to your shop so that a higher percentage of those visitors will become buyers.
Let’s think about what terms they might use and the number of different strategies they employ when they are shopping. Mainly they will search by brand, by location, by price and by quality. We will start, however, with a generic term, assuming they don’t know the starting points for the choices above.
The text on your site should enable people to find the right virtual aisle, the right shelf and section in order to find the honed down choice that you offer there. On a side note, if you can also persuade people to buy two or three things at that point all the better (offers such as “two for the price of..” and “Buy two, get one free” are, more often than not, successful.
Let’s look at the starting text in more detail: What are your customers thinking when they shop? If you put yourself in their mind then it often changes your choices of search term. Classic Example: When selling “Make Up” you might choose to use the term “foundation”
Setting aside the fact that there are thousands of builder references (it might make a good joke, but not a sale) the fact is that “foundation” for “Make Up” doesn’t appear anywhere near the top of the search engines.
A much better choice, used by people looking for Make Up is “foundation make up” but beating even that term by 3 to 2 is the term “skin foundation”
So, you can reasonably conclude that you will sell more make up, by a big (Max?) factor, if you use “skin foundation”.
It follows the same process by introducing brands and this can be a good, early strategy for piggyback riding major advertising campaigns. So if major brands (I’ll make one up) say, “Marybuyleen Cosmetics” are achieving high market share then getting close to their own site in search engine rankings can also help. Be careful, however, not to take this approach too deeply and brand everything in every case as by following this route with all brands may restrict other hits.
As mentioned earlier, price too plays a part but online this needs to be dealt with carefully.
Everyone wants to pay less for goods so they may use this strategy to search but be aware of the term “cheap” it is over used (spammy even), massively competitive in terms of those who are using it and, in our example of “Make Up” returns poor results when you add the word “cheap”.
People tend to want things cheaply but they want a quality item more.
It may sound hard, but once you start thinking like a customer rather than a retailer it does become much, much easier to get into the swing and becomes a more enjoyable process.