Let’s Sell Shoes:
SEO and Converting Retail To Dot Com
As 2021 dawns and COVID continues to sucker punch retail, businesses recognize that online shopping is here to stay. Your SEO is critical to a strong online presence.
Couple of points about SEO….
1. Just because you have a website doesn’t mean it’s automatically search engine optimized.
2. SEO is an ongoing marketing effort, not a one and done.
3. You can make SEO work for you even if you have a small or niche business.
For example, your business is the Magic Miles Shoe Store. You sell sport shoes for casual and competitive runners, cyclists, golfers, crossfitters, tennis and basketball players.
Before COVID, you had great foot traffic thanks to your prime location in a mall and your enticing shop windows.
Because of COVID, you’ve had to transition your business online…and your prime location and impressive retail displays are no longer relevant.
Building SEO is like placing your business in a prime location online. Smart search engine marketing is your new enticing shop window. We’ll get to SEM later, but today let’s focus on SEO – which refers to strategically constructing the text in your website to serve up your results in a high position in search engines like google or bing.
Basically, when an internet user, like Dwayne, who’s at home right now looking for running shoes, types into google: “running shoes for the gym” you want Magic Miles Shoe Store at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Remember:
1. Just because you have a website doesn’t mean it’s automatically search engine optimized.
If you’re building your website, ensure SEO is being considered in the architecture. Don’t be afraid to ask your developer or copywriter about it.
These are the elements of SEO that will need to be considered when building your website:
1 – On-page elements
2 – Off-page elements
3 – Content plan
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO is number one because you absolutely have to get this right from the jump. This is your launching pad.
This refers to:
Your keywords
Your page title
Your page header
Your meta description
And more but these are the most important.
As you know, shoes aren’t one size fits all. Neither are your keywords.
Every individual web page on your website needs to have all of the above on-page elements written into the source code for that web page. And they aren’t input by random selection or divine intervention.
For instance, each of the types of shoes you sell have their own product page, right? They also have unique keywords for example: “Running shoes for the gym” (Dwayne’s search).
On your golf shoes page, your keywords would include “golf shoes” not “running shoes for the gym”.
On your crossfit shoes page, your keywords would be “best shoes for crossfit”.
For track and field athletes, you may have pages with “track shoes for quarter milers” or “middle distance cross country spikes.” They’re different products, worn by different people with different needs, and demand different keywords.
What is off-page SEO?
This is number two, because it really comes second chronologically…BUT it’s also really important! And it’s often forgotten completely.
Some businesses think – I just need the dang website built with the right keywords on the right pages, full stop. But they don’t consider going the well-worth-it extra mile.
Only working on your on-page SEO and not bothering with off-page SEO is like training an athlete, getting her fit and then never entering her in competition.
Your off-page SEO includes building a network of backlinks. It’s how you prove to search engines that your website is valuable, has content people want, and can be trusted. To draw a parallel to social media practices, it’s kind of like being “tagged” on Instagram or having your content shared across Facebook.
So, essentially, building a network of backlinks means that other websites link to yours. Think of it like having word of mouth marketing or getting props.
The types of links you can build include:
If you sell a food product….a food blogger including a link to your website in one of their recipes.
If you sell electronics….getting your product listed in a top 5 products review by a trusted technology website.
Or, something as simple as having your company featured in an online news platform, with a link to your website included in the digital press release.
All of this activity happens off of your website, which is why it’s referred to as off-page SEO.
What do a content plan and SEO have in common?
The O is SEO should stand for….ongoing.
SEO strategy also includes ongoing content creation for your website, which is part of your overall digital marketing strategy.
Blogs and podcasts are really good examples of the types of content that you can create which provide you with valuable SEO for your website!
I’ll break it down for you further.
Podcasts are inexpensive to produce.
You can mix evergreen topics which will always relate to your brand, but you can also talk about items that are trending right now.
Podcasts provide you with long form content, but they can also be broken down into bite sized snippets for social media platforms.
And finally, you think a podcast is just audio? It’s not! You can incorporate video, but probably more important, you can transcribe your podcast into text and place the text on your website. It’s that text that gives you all important keywords and SEO – and it’s automatic blog production.
I’ve worked on a number of podcasts for institutions ranging from the government, to medium sized businesses, to real corporate Barbados and I promise you, it’s easier than you think to produce a quality, informative and entertaining podcast to boost your web presence.
Well, now that we’ve covered search engine optimization, let’s sell some shoes.
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