Online shopping is becoming the norm around us. Especially in the uncertain situation like pandemic in which, both businesses and consumers have to experience new ways to life while still abiding by restrictions, governmental and healthcare guidelines.
Online shopping is rising and so do the businesses shift towards the digital landscape from traditional brick and mortar era. In this blog post, we will walk you through the steps that how you can promote your cosmetic store online in the growing online consumerism.
Writer of the post is a digital marketer at GuruApp – a leading online cosmetic store in Pakistan that sell all trendy and imported makeup products online nationwide.
How to Market Your Cosmetic Store Online
When it comes to marketing your products online, you may either chose to reach out to people by running paid campaigns or resorting reach out to target audience organically. Both strategies have however their own merits and demerits.
- Running Paid Campaigns
Running PPC campaigns may bring you intent results, however it cost you money to reach out the target pool of audience. Unless you have properly planned to budget for running paid campaigns, investing into paid marketing avenues may not be a good strategy, especially if you have just started up.
- Search Engin Optimization Strategy
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one the most viable and result oriented technique that allows you to reach out to the target market segment organically. One of the downsides associated to SEO is its timeline. SEO implantation isn’t an overnight strategy, but rather takes time that could actually reflects results.
SEO Strategy Activities Checklist
Implementing SEO strategy entails a list of activities. Following are the checklist of tasks that will help you craft a result-oriented strategy.
- Research – Finding Keywords
- Site Audit
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Performance Monitoring
Let’s explore each of the above listed task one by one in order to make you fully understand how to promote you your online cosmetic or any online small business.
- Research – Finding Keywords
When you turn into SEO, a whole array of tasks begins with researching into multiple avenues. Finding keywords that could brings you people onboard and may convert. By using tools like Google keywords planner, Ahrefs, and SEMRush and Google Trends to find out keywords.
Keyword are terms and phrases that internet surfers use to type in the search bar when they are searching for something via internet.
Types of Keywords – Intent Based
When searching keywords, there are different types of keywords you should be mindful of. Find the keywords that have an intent associated with buying and purchasing intent. Based on customer intent, keywords are further categorized in for broad types.
- Navigational Intent Based Keywords.
- Transactional Intent Based Keywords.
- Informational Intent Based Keywords.
- Commercial Intent Based Keywords.
Target commercial intent-based keywords that indication visitor intention of potentially looking for something to buy. Such keywords typically include, buy, order, discounted, cheap, best prefixes in the long tail keywords.
- Site Audit
Run a though audit on your site, to see if there are any glitches and technical issues that my hinder your site SEO rankings.
Typically, it includes:
- SSL certificates
- Navigational Issues
- Checking site’s loading speed
- Responsiveness
- Backlinks audit (if any SEO work is done previously)
- Disowning spam and toxic links
- On-Page SEO
Now that you have found all the relevant keywords, then it comes the time to come up with search engine friendly onsite or on-page content. It includes composing keywords- rich content and formatting the content for your website. Pay due attention to properly incorporating:
- Titles & Headings – Must include your top keyword related to business.
- Meta Title and Meta Description – This makes the content easily readable by the search engine.
- Keyword Density: You must avoid keyword stuffing. A viable practice is to use a particular keyword not more than 4% to 5%.
- Of-Page SEO
Of-page is where you need to be actually making your site appear in the search ranking. It includes getting back link for other relevant high authority sites that will push up you site on the search engine result page (SERPs). You can acquire links from other sites by:
- Guest Posting
- Local directories submissions
- Local business listings
- Forum submissions
- Google Business Profile (GBP)
The more you get quality backlinks, the better your sites ranking get. Guest posting is one widely and highly result oriented technique that build up your site authority.
- Monitoring Perforamce
While on SEO, make sure you monitor the performance. Make a list of high yielding keywords that you want your business to rank for, and after months of optimizing your site for those keywords, check weather your site appears on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) against the target keywords.
Tip 1: Try not to target one keyword excessively but rather use different combinations of the same keyword.
Tip 2: Don’t get backlink from spam websites.
