Starting An Online Store & SEO

Anyone these days can start an online store, but not anyone can be successful selling their products on the internet.  Many people are excited to put up an online store but then find it very difficult to get any traffic.  The very nature of the usual online store people start makes it very difficult to optimize for the search engines.  While it’s true you can try PPC, not everyone can make a profit from the increasingly higher PPC bids.  So that really leaves SEO as the best shot someone has at doing well selling products online.

SEO is very difficult for online stores because they often have little real content and product descriptions are often all there is for the search engines to spider.  Creating more detailed product titles and descriptions is of course smart and will help, but it only goes so far.    The other problem is quality inbound links are essential to getting your site ranked high on the search engines and nobody ever cares to link to Suzy’s Candle Shop.  This got me thinking of an idea for those who want to start an online store.  This really isn’t my idea as I’ve seen others implement this before, but instead of just opening up an online store, first create a content based site about the main products you will sell.  For example if you were planning on selling snowboards online, then first create a site all about snowboards.  Create the online guide to snowboarding and write articles about everything you can think of related to snowboarding such as top snowboarder bios, top places to snowboard, a news section or blog about the latest in snowboarding, etc.  Now optimize your “Guide to Snowboarding” site and work on building steady traffic.  Once you get a steady stream of traffic coming in, now open up your store!

Once your store is open be sure and include links from your content pages to your online catalog.  For example at the bottom of an article about a particular popular snowboarding champion, you can have a link to purchase the brand of snowboard they use.  Blend the two sites together and create the ultimate online store/guide to snowboarding site.  When doing this it is best to focus on niche products as opposed to the type of store that sells many different unrelated products.  Try it and please send me an email if you find success!