Google, Bing & Yahoo! Did you know that behind these zestfully named search engines lies untold sales opportunities for your shop. If you plan to start an online t-shirt selling business, SEO will become your new best friend.
As a t-shirt seller, imagine customers searching for a t-shirt and it is your online shop that ranks first. Chances are that they would probably click on your shop and buy your products.
You’ve got it. SEO simply refers to a set of actions to improve your rankings on search engines. The higher the better! One famous SEO saying is: the best place to hide a dead body is on page 2 of Google!
Now that you know that SEO is vital to boost your sales, the first question popping in your mind is: “where do I start”? The good news, we are already doing part of the optimization for free but you can build on that to improve your ranking too. We thought we’d share some favorable tips with you. But first, let’s start with the basics.
What is SEO?
Search engines aim at providing the best result to searchers. To achieve this, they crawl every website on the web. Then, their advanced algorithms assess a set of factors to determine which webpage is the most relevant for a given search term.
Still with us? SEO is not complicated. It is all about learning those ranking factors and implementing them on to your website. In other words, you can say that SEO is about helping Google & Co. better understand the content on your website. With SEO, we can also instruct search engines on how to best display our webpages in search results.
In the SEO world, everything starts with a keyword. You’ll hear that again and again. In short, a keyword is a question or anything you type in a search engine to get a result. Keywords are also referred to as search terms or queries.
Key ranking factors
So what are those ranking factors that help your website please search engines? Honestly speaking, there are too many. Some SEO experts say that there are around 200 factors. Nevertheless, one good place to start is the Google SEO starter guide.
And Instead of listing every possible ranking factor out there, we will share some sub rosa principles of successful SEO campaigns. Are you ready? Here they are:
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow
This is the number ONE Google philosophy. And when the world’s biggest search engine says it is important, it probably is! This starts with your website: always provide your customers with the right information and a friendly interface.
2. Offline also serves online
Even if you have an online shop, it is important to build your brand offline too. What we mean by that is traditional marketing such as billboards, leaflets, radio, etc. This will increase your brand awareness so that more people will search for you on the internet. And as more people search for your brand on the internet, the better it gets for your SEO.
Why? Because search engines are now more intelligent than ever. When you have many users searching for your business name, Google considers this a form of trust. It assumes; if people are looking for you, you should be good at what you do and popular too. Makes total sense!
3. Create content with a purpose
Maybe you did not realize it, but besides your website, it is important to create other digital content in the form of a blog post, YouTube videos, and infographics for example. But beware, all your efforts will be useless if that content does not have a purpose. For example, you have a new product line, you might want to shoot a video or write a blog post with the purpose of promoting it.
Don’t just create content to rank for a keyword or please search engines’ appetite. Where it makes sense, try to have only one topic per page. And don’t use the same content on two different pages. Self-plagiarism is still plagiarism!
4. Be original
It is a fact, Google wants you to be original. Come up with your own unique style, use original photography on your website and hey, there’s no one like you anyway. Use that to your advantage!
With SEO as your best friend, you are ready to generate more sales.