Starting an online business is no more a tough job. Now we don’t have to depend on any ecommerce shopping cart company paying a huge some of monthly subscription fee or run after the customer support in getting help on fixing bugs in their systems. Many open source shopping cart enabled ecommerce applications are available for free download and it is very easy to start an online business. But starting an online business does not guarantee success unless and until you have a great plan on how your store operates, what makes it unique from your competitor website, what the best you offer to the visitors. It need your lot of your time, for which are paid off on each sales. Given below are a quick check list to find it yourself whether you are ready for an online business.
1. Do I have a demanding product to sell?
You need to offer something that can attract tones of traffic to your system. Selling something that no one is willing to buy does not help you. Whether it is a product or service you sell, it needs to be something that people search for. Brainstorm on different product ideas and find out the market demand for those products. There are many tools that help you find the demand of a particular keyword and which geography demands it. Few of them are Google Keyword External Tool, Overture, Keyword elite and Google Trends.
2. Am I capable of serving unique content in my website?
This is one of the most important factors that affect your website performance in all major search engines. In any ecommerce business, the website content looks to be duplicate content when it comes to selling a product from a wholesaler. The wholesaler will give the retailer a sheet of product information that he can use in his websites. It is not you alone doing business with the wholesaler. He may have 100 other websites selling the same kind of product with the same product or category description. When you use the same content provided by the wholesaler, search engines count your websites as a duplicate website of the same niche and chances are there for your website not to get listed in top search results in all major search engines. If you are doing drop shipping or buying product information from a wholesaler make sure that you rephrase the content provided by the supplier in such a way that it looks unique. Search engines love your website when it has unique content. And bet you will be valued for that in search listing. The bottom line is that if you don’t have time to rework on the content provided by the supplier, better hire a content writer to rewrite the product description.
3. Does my website meet the best usability criterions?
Compare you with your top 5 competitors and see how good are they doing in the website layout, navigation and ease of usage. As a new user, is my competitor helping me find what I am looking for? Is the information provided on each page helping me to understand why I am here? And what I need to do from here?. Write down what they miss out and plan how you can improve. Once you have your website in place, a user need to feel the difference in shopping from abc.com or xyz.com
4. Does my web page have a Unique Value Proposition (UVP)?
Your website need to have a goal point set for your entire pages. What is unique with your website when your competitor has thousand other best things to offer? Write down what is so unique with your website. What unique shopping experience is your website going to provide your user? What are the values your website considers to give the best shopping experience? Make out a clear statement on your UVP on your pages and make it unique in your competition crowd.
5. Schedule a meeting your ecommerce SEO consultant before start coding your ecommerce store.
Once you have all the above given expectations set, you are ready to consult an ecommerce SEO specialist. Discuss on your ecommerce operation plans and ask him for suggestions on how to manage your website architecture. Information architecture is very important to any website so does for an ecommerce website. Your website may have a huge inventory of products and you may need to categorize it based on lot of sales factors. Ask him to give you a wireframe view of the website architecture like,
- The number of static web pages
- URL structure
- Category naming
- Category URL structure
- Subcategory naming
- Sub category URL structure
- Home page information architecture
- Individual product page design
- Meta content formation
A website with the right product when showcased in an ecommerce system with the best information architecture powered by unique, fresh and keyword rich content = Successful Ecommerce Store.
Search Engine Marketing Consultant. An entrepreneur, mentor, speaker, blogger. Google Analytics and Adwords Certified Professional.
