How To Build Your ECommerce Store On Google

As a small business owner many merchants struggle with what the strategy should be to market themselves on Google and through the web in general, in this article we are going to cover some of the most effective ways to promote yourself without breaking Google’s guidelines and damaging your future success.

Google have many added features in their search engine which have been added since their humble beginnings as merely search result listing pages during the early part of the new millennium.
Firstly I would like to point out that businesses have an opportunity to create free Google maps/Places listings and these also appear as special rich snippet listings in organic rankings for localized terms.

You should not underestimate the effectiveness of advertising to people in your local area because they might want to order online and have a product delivered or even visit your offline store. Now with local listings aside, the main objective of having an online business is that you can cater for a larger geographic, especially with the technology advancing to give people the ability of searching for a product while on their mobile devices.

Google loves when your site is listed on local citations sites because these are genuine indicators that your website caters for a large area of people, there are plenty of citation services across the web and it recommended that you sign up with them.

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You can also join local forums related to your niche and while it might require a bit of time to get familiar with the regulars on the message board you can eventually slip in a link to your eCommerce store, but don’t spam!

Most boards require that you make a certain amount of posts before you can have a signature link, so make friends and learn from these boards and it will benefit you more in the long run because you might make valuable contacts.

Don’t try and take shortcuts by paying for the latest deceptive link network or by paying for links on cheap sites which are offered to everyone and anybody. The golden rule is to be creative with link building, write a quality post and ask some site owners if they want to share it with their readers for free as long as they include your credit.

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Finally I would like to make some points about the usability of an eCommerce website because this is one of the key factors Matt Cutts recommends webmasters concentrate on. You will want your visitors to find your site useful and not just be a quick sales pitch, since the more informative it is the more a larger number of visitors will consider purchasing.

It is rather clever how big ‘G’s algorithm judges the usefulness of a website and it acts like an interlocking cycle ‘Quality Content = (Usability + Informative) = Higher Rankings + More Conversions’, while ranking high alone can get you some conversions, they want you and users to benefit from higher site quality.

One way you should improve the usability of your site is make sure you have a high quality payment gateway and not just any gateway will do because some do not offer shopping cart integration or provide security features such as ‘Mastercard 3D Securecode’.

Businesses owners should ensure they choose a package which includes every aspect of merchant services including the eStore design templates and not just the merchant services. Visitors want to feel secure and they won’t mind entering a security code or checking your SSL certicate to make sure their card details are safe.

   Richard

About the Author:

Richard has been an aspiring online publisher for several years now, he began writing general topics on communities such as Hubpages and Self Growth and has gone on to specialize in writing topics related to finance and draws his knowledge of the above article from blogging regularly with pages related to eCommerce discussed in posts such as this one:http://www.seymourdirect.com/merchant-account-services