How to Start an Ecommerce Business
Learn How to Start an Ecommerce Business from Scratch?
Learn How to Start an Online Boutique?
Transition From Brick and Mortar to Online Store (Current Business Owners)
Welcome to this comprehensive guide for starting an ecommerce business featuring expert ideas, tips, and advanced marketing techniques to scale by Ecommerce & SEO Expert Edward A. Baker:
Please jump between guide links below:
Before you start pondering which ecommerce platform to use like Shopify, WooCommerce for Wordpress, Facebook Shops, or a fully managed ecommerce platform like Etsy, Amazon, or Ebay - please stop!! It doesn't matter which you use, or what color you make your logo, or where you host your store's website yet.
You don't need an employer identification number or need a business plan - please don't waste your time!
Market research & keyword research are the first two things you need to do in order to successfully start an ecommerce business. Taking the time to qualify your ideas prevents you from building out an ecommerce business around an undesired product idea or a bad service idea - something that won’t sell.
The trick is to reverse engineer and qualify what you want to sell in your online store based on existing search data and other competitor stores. Model yourself by mimicking their product & service positioning and names. Scrape page titles and URL addresses to find expansion opportunities. Identify new & less competitive niche areas for quick sales and profit with SEO & ecommerce software tools.
Expect to pay per month for access to the best data! It is nearly impossible to start an ecommerce business without paid tools that take a look at the market and estimate your potential in the ecommerce space. Many programs have built-in affiliate marketing to offset their own high costs. Affiliate marketing enables you to get paid for promotion of their software as a service (SaaS). Sometimes providers use third party providers of affiliate marketing or affiliate marketing plugins. This is a great way for online courses and software alike to be promoted by those successful with it.
With keyword tools, ecommerce software, & social media's "big data" we can find pockets of existing market demand to present "best fit" offers to showcased in an online store. This makes establishing an initial target audience for selling products & services, and making conversions much easier than ever before in traditional business.
We can research and qualify existing pools of customers to determine what to sell them in an e commerce store. The keyword research process is attuned to looking into a crystal ball to make predictions - but is based on historical, current, and live market data sets.
Software providers purchase large data sets via API and crunch it through their own proprietary analysis formulas and project it into an interface and charge per month for access to the manipulated data and research software. You must have a keyword toolset - they exist for Google, Amazon, and Social Media.
Naming for Organic Traffic
Establish the names of all pages, categories, products, and services based on naturally occurring organic structure that exists in the marketplace already. Mirror what people are asking for and present a superior brand, product, service, and/or shopping experience. Place yourself or your offer in front of the existing search traffic - stop trying to build a following on social media. For most people, they need to drop the ego and feels and focus on closing sales! Placing yourself in front of an existing audience enables searchers to get to know you and warm up to you before becoming a viable option in their purchasing decision. Over time you will build an online reputation, reviews, and a memorable brand simply by being positioned competitively!
Stop worrying about what your website will look like, or what color your logo is, your business slogan, etc. Before you sweat all the small stuff, you need to plan and design a profitable blueprint (website wireframe) that presents content or a "best fit offer" to an existing audience in search of the solution. This process is referred to as URL mapping or keyword mapping. This type of technical audit needs to be done at a page by page, category by category, and also at the individual product listing or service listing level.
Every individual page should have a primary keyword target in an effort to avoid cannibalizing another. Pages can be fine tuned to rank for many long tail keywords. This process gets more complex the more terms that are optimized for simultaneously.
If you want to start an ecommerce business, then you know you need to purchase a domain name. GoDaddy or Namecheap or purchasing a domain name through your ecommerce platform provider like Shopify or SquareSpace is totally fine! It doesn't really matter who the registrar is in most case scenarios. You just want an affordable and reliable option with customer support and step by step guides. I also highly recommend you pay for an upgraded Private Registration so overseas scammers don’t call your cellphone 24x7 and spam your email inbox. Google search for the top 10 domain name registrars and see what offer you can use to get started?
Finding your domain: Too many entrepreneurs get caught up in this stage of their idea and never truly get started. I highly recommend a (.com) extension whenever possible for a new e commerce business. Customers don't remember any other extension easier. However ".co" and other vanity URLs are becoming trendy. No matter what domain you acquire, please be prepared to engage your audience with it's address / link via ads, QR codes on poster prints, signage, business cards, sales one sheets, email signatures, and in other creative ways to remind people to visit and shop in your online store. No matter how good your name is or SEO is, you still need to be your own number one cheerleader! Buy a domain you are proud of and feel ready to start with. You can always switch domains, re-build, move, or build a new website relatively easily with modern day content management systems (CMS).
Expired domain names that have pre-existing domain authority, footprints, and backlinks are sometimes acquired so a scrappy business owner can pickup where somebody else left off. Sure, you can revive a site and go from ashes to phoenix, but with the resurrection of any old website or brand also comes the skeletons hidden in the closet. You can wind up with a tainted or poor quality domain or with unexplained Google Search Console (GSC) penalties.
The best technique is to register a new domain name or buy a premium / vanity name with a clear history & slate. This enables you to control the footprint size and positioning from the very first day. It's not all that different than brick and mortar - if your store moves and rents in a new building, the previous business there before you might still get snail mail, foot traffic, and phone calls about their products and services. You will have to deal with some legacy issues, good or bad. The road of reviving websites holds its own legacy issues and is much harder and more advanced, so only go down this road it if you are confident in launching websites and being able to control the SERP results. If you are new and taking your first step to start an ecommerce business - stick with a brand new domain property with it's own branded email address.
There are two directions to take when brainstorming a business name to be search friendly:
(You may also be naming your ecommerce business, brand, company, store, website, or domain name - applies to all.)
A) Brand Yourself or Your Store
Choose whatever name you like and that fits your mission and personality. Or maybe you already have a brick and mortar? Forget SEO. Forget Keywords. The truth is you can make sure any site or brand ranks for a specific keyword in most any niche on the Internet. Sometimes it is best to be unique and memorable with a brand name vs. attempting to fit / use a keyword rich name or partial match or exact match domain to hijack more search volume & web traffic.
B) Pick a keyword rich business name / domain name.
Reading left to right: a keyword rich, partial match domain, or exact match business name / domain name for positioning your product or service or store online is the quickest way of targeting a specific group of searchers. This method is extremely overpowered and you may want to consider applying it in your niche. (I highly recommend it whenever possible.) However, having keywords in your business name / domain name can lead to over optimization in on page SEO, topic expansion limits, and the names available don't always read well or are memorable names.
Instead, try multiple websites - put up two websites: a corporate brand website and then a less important store brand, or supporting content site that supports your ecommerce business and niche ecosystem. Interlinking relevant content properties and stores will provide business owners faster and stronger buoyance for their online business. You can also get away with more rule-bending on non-money site properties.
The key takeaway is that ranking clusters of websites is easier than single standalone sites. Look for niches that can support multiple properties. This will help you create topical authority quickly:
Keyword Rich Domain Suggestions
Exact Match Domains (EMD)
and Partial Match Domains (PMD)
These domains are all viable ways to be OVERPOWERED in specific keyword search results and content marketing. This is NOT a guaranteed method, but the truth remains domains with primary keywords and phrases included in their domain name and URL address tend to outrank competitors despite what Google says about being fair and equal to all sites.
The Google bot indexes pages and favors keyword rich names, properties, and brands to an extent - they still must have great quality content to support their "theme" or content silos.
Identify Existing Brand Players
Generate Ideas: Products to Sell & Services to Sell
Dissect Competitors with Store Audits
An ecommerce business plan must start with at least one single, niche, target market. From this center point, a store theme can be established and built out to fit current budget, overall store size, and annual revenue goals. This creation process starts by performing a marketplace teardown. In order to build a profitable online business you must first understand what market demand already exists & which customers you want to make sure to target and capture.
Identify the top companies & brands in your niche by starting with a single keyword phrase or a single competitor's domain / URL address. Use competitive analysis software to find content gaps, shared keywords, missing keywords, product ideas, and buzzworthy content topics. Analyze the top ten SERP results, find consistently ranking competitors to benchmark ideas from. Research marketing strategies and ecommerce business models by auditing category pages and selling products. Learn which products you want to consider before even taking the first step towards building the actual site or choosing an ecommerce platform.
If you like unfair advantages, auditing the top ten SERP competitors is definitely something great to do for an unfair advantage. It comes from the theory to create and improve upon what Google already favors & ranks. We mimic the top performers, add our unique twist and additions on content, and tactfully take over the market share through optimization. This ongoing SEO process is known as correlative optimization or Correlative SEO. Ecommerce stores need to constantly position, reposition, modify and rank pages, products, services, and create topical content silos around products and services they want to sell in their online store.
Online business ideas typically start as a part time, work from home, or small business idea that is then qualified by operating in addition to or outside of your normal job hours & duties. Store owners often moonlight their way into an actual business that is busy and profitable enough to run full time. This enables them to eventually leave their day job behind and bank both incomes while employed for extra savings. The most successful store owners offer products for sale, professional services, coaching & consulting services, or white glove done for your services. Millions of dollars in sales can be made selling absolutely anything online. COVID19 was a catalyst - forcing the world into ecommerce business models when most businesses don't even have a site. Rumor has it the online sales needle has moved 10 years forward in adoption rate during the first two months of COVID19 shutdowns. If you want to start an ecommerce business or site for your small business - now is the time to take your shot!
If you want to start an ecommerce business with little risk or upfront investment, consider print on demand ecommerce or convert any traditional service into an on demand style online ordering form. Anyone can use ecommerce business to expand their existing operation. Or start an ecommerce business from scratch. On demand manufacturers and providers prevent new ecommerce store owners from having to invest in inventory, warehouse space, employees, etc. Starting an ecommerce business is simply becoming an extension of the sales & marketing team they may or may not already have.
Finding opportunities with true market demand is only part of the battle in planning out your Ecommerce Business. You also have to find keywords or phrases with SERP results that have "openings" or less competitive websites that you can knock out the top 10 search results & place yourself in their existing position.
Find keyword phrases with search volume.
Filter keyword phrases with lower competitive scores & with high purchase intent.
Favorite those that have SERPs with less competitive websites and younger domain ages ranking in them.
Correlate your on-page content to target a single keyword phrase or a content cluster like those pages that already rank where you want to be.
Keyword research is a core activity of developing and growing your online sales. It is essential to ride existing product and service demand and not to try to create a viral clip or trend or new fad. If you think you are ready to start, ask yourself again - have you done enough keyword research? I typically spend a minimum of (1) hour per page keyword researching. Which means if I have (30) products and (3) categories - you can find me putting an entire week into the task. If I want to start a new niche, I need to get a true picture of the existing ecommerce space and what I need to get on my page, step by step to also rank.
I spend MOST of my time analyzing keywords and looking for new opportunities as an SEO as I find the more you put into research, the more you get out of it! It feels like 80% researching & planning and 20% actual execution. Keyword research has been my single most important activity for finding profitable opportunities online.
I cover every keyword research tool as of October 2020 in this article including free keyword tools and my favorite paid tools.
You can also get 30% Off Long Tail Pro by signing up with my referral discount link / coupon if you want to use my favorite tool.
The holy grail of search engine marketing numbers! Search Volume is the number of people actively searching for a specific keyword or keyword phrase per month. The problem with this number is that no SEO tool or ecommerce software is 100% accurate with it's estimate as it's all based on datasets they interpolate from / have access to. We must consider each keyword tool it's own barometer vs. an accurate prediction tool - it's not raw factual data! Some tools use historical search data, some use recent data, some analyze real-time SERP results, and others process with a combination of all three data types.
In certain SEO tools a competitive score is assigned to each website in a SERP. This will be made of / analyze: the domain authority, current page rank, number of pages (footprint), percentage organic traffic vs. paid, domain age, topical relevance, etc. A competitive score helps any marketer find easy to win opportunities when starting an ecommerce business. It prioritizes and analyzes existing websites who are ranking and highlights strengths & weaknesses. This enables website owners and marketers to know which keywords to pursue and which to avoid. Find the search volume per month for your keyword, number of SERP spots which can be bumped out of the top 10, and target outranking any domains with low keyword competitiveness scores. Without any authority yourself, you can rank in the top 10 of SERP by utilizing keyword competitiveness to identify the most probable service and product ideas to target and own.
You can have the best keyword research tool in existence and still fail. What you put in is what you get out of this process. Generating random keywords is easy, but digging deep for high intent keywords that convert into sales takes much more dedicated time on task. This is why I created:
In an effort to save you thousands of hours thumbing through a thesaurus and recording universal attributes and keyword terms that products and services use in their descriptions I compiled an advanced keyword research guide.
Advanced Keyword Research Guide Includes:
Over 1,700 Keywords / Phrases / Ideas
Over 60 High Intent Keywords / Ideas
Over 60 Medium Intent Keywords / Ideas
Over 200 Urgent Keywords / Ideas
Over 120 Hours of Compiled Research
40min personal video walk-through with me
Words that Sell will amplify your existing keyword research! Make sure you increase your results for any e commerce business, lead generation website, or small business site. Pickup up a copy before you start your new ecommerce brand! This list of lists guide will help you generate new ways of selling products or services and will push you further into your target niche than than you would go by yourself. It ensures you start your ecommerce business with the most quantity and quality of data and keyword options available. This guide will make sure you don't leave any money on the table! Created after personally listing over 600 products & services for my 3x online business. Over five years of keyword research created this document for any ecommerce business.
Keyword mapping pairs every page URL with a target keyword in a wireframe, mind map, or brainstorming visual. Every single page, all products, and services must be been paired with a specific & relevant keyword to target. It is ideal to optimize each page towards one single primary keyword target. However, with practice, testing, and time you can optimize pages for multiple keywords and phrases at once.
There are pages that rank for thousands of long tail keywords at a time. The way this is accomplished is through clustering content topics semantically. There are tools that can guide & estimate how semantic / relevant each topic is in the cluster from a central theme. The more accurately you can categorize and create informational hierarchy in your content, the better the Google bot will like your pages. Keep in mind the internet was once solely for university and educational use. The system was designed for pages that were of doctoral thesis / an encyclopedia of information with a table of contents, citations, and references, etc.
Before you start an ecommerce business you should have a mind map or blueprint of each Page Title, Keyword, URL slug, and H1 tag for on page optimization. You should also plan out all of your H2 title tags into an ordered list as this will help expedite your copy writing & content marketing. Create logical, coherent, complete, and semantically relevant hierarchy in how you stack and organize these keywords and articles into niche content silos. Create correlative SEO content templates to model your new on page content to the existing ranking pages in SERP. Plan each page, silo, content cluster, and link around a specific theme (niche). Reputation and consistency will enable you to win topical authority in SERPs over time. Deploying a standalone site or a topical neighborhood of websites that have been silo & cluster optimized is extremely over powered for niche domination and SERP buoyance.
Robots should never be allowed to make decisions!
They should never be tasked with anything subjective.
The Googlebot should never be asked it's opinion or be encouraged to subjectively decide or answer anything related to your website or business information.
Just because Google has AI (artificial intelligence), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) doesn't mean you should trust the search robot. I come from the school of though that robots shouldn't be allowed to make any decisions entirely on their own, especially those concerning my business. Letting a robot dictate the outcome or purpose will produce undesirable results.
Therefore website owners must practice disambiguation - the removal of ambiguity by making something repetitively clear.
Removing ambiguity from the equation, removes your chances of confusing the bot.
Your primary goal is to make it impossible for the bot to think anything otherwise.
This is why many local SEO experts are obsessed with mirroring / reinforcing your NAP (name, address, phone) on as many free, high authority, web 2.0 properties as possible. This creates a network of information. As Google crawls the web and it finds the same NAP and information over and over and over - this reinforces the informational accuracy. An entity with reinforced, validated, and frequently similar information will become an authoritative entity in that geolocation and/or a niche over time. The largest, most authoritative, and dominating entity in online sales is Amazon which captures 50% of all online transactions. This is why Amazon dominates shopping SERPs.
The most important part of creating successful ecommerce sales and profitable storefronts is to do due diligence and research with third party ecommerce software, keyword software, and SEO tools before you launch or build anything! Starting an ecommerce business takes extensive planning and verification to ensure your efforts are even worth pursuing.
Keyword Mapping and URL Mapping should make up the core effort of any new website architecture. Ecommerce store websites typically take longer to plan out as each individual product and all categories must be mapped out and organized accordingly. How the information and words stack as well as the internal linking between these category pages and individual product or service listings is very important to the effectiveness of any content silo created.
Establishing a keywords favorite list from your keyword research allows you to qualify and analyze hundreds of useful terms. Translate qualified keywords into a wireframe or a brainstorming web or a tree of bubbles. Mind-map the overall website structure, departments, product & service categories, and semantically organize content into topical clusters. This type of manual construction, audit, and hand placed care enables you to validate your design every step of the way. This means when you go to build the website, you don't think twice about the design. Refer to your ecommerce business blueprint and bathe in the glory of having learned how to start an ecommerce business without ever actually building it.
My favorite free online mind map tool is Bubbl.us.
Category pages are typically best for organizing products & services by niche, type, sales, or specific attributes. Follow search volume data, seek high intent keywords, research and design content with semantic information. The category page is the top of the content silo. Business owners are notorious for writing very little or nothing at all on these collection pages. When in fact, they should be providing thicker, long-form content. This information may need to be more generic or universal. Use category, catalog, or collection pages to answer people's questions. Implementing Q&A schema and answering questions that are being asked will help build topical relevance to all products or services listed in that category, catalog, or collection. If you hate the aesthetics of lots of content, hide it in tabs or accordion style content boxes. Pay attention to how, and if any, of your category page content stacks or is carried over into the individual product or service listing in your content management system. This can cause under optimization or over optimization on specific keywords and content.
How To Name a Product:
Naming products to sell in an online store has become less about building brand name and more about keyword stuffing your site in front of the right audience.
If you check big box department stores and reseller catalog websites they all have labeled their goods by the SKU enabling price wars, browser coupon plugins, scrapers, coupon apps, and price match races to the bottom. Most small businesses can't play the price game so instead they must position and market to a niche.
Check Amazon and every other online store and you will see product "names" aren't really names anymore. They are extended ways of getting the right type of customer on the checkout page. Amazon sellers are especially guilty in aggressively over optimizing product descriptions to rank them for more long tail keywords being searched by potential clients. Existing search phrases will see traffic boosts from Google NLP terms that will be the next type of keyword stuffing to enhance descriptions and improve ranks in the search algorithm.
I always try to include one very specific keyword phrase in my product name. Sometimes I will put more than one, bust most of the time, one single target keyword is ideal. Many ecommerce businesses will keyword stuff their listing names with attributes that will also be found in their description. What's worse than keyword stuffing is that they stuff them with words that are not searched and lack existing customer search volume.
Product Naming Strategies with SEO friendly positioning is hard. You either wind up with what you think a product or service should be called or an ugly keyword stuffed name with long tail phrases and details. A balanced solution is choosing one primary keyword or keyword phrase and making sure to include that with your other product / service name details. Optimize your product description, tags, and in the additional information areas of your listing to include NLP terms for your best chance at ranking.
Funnel builders will tell you that you can't advertise and convert on a product purchase page alone. They will walk you through top of funnel content, middle of funnel content, and bottom of funnel - eventually converting people into hot leads clicking your call to action. They sell you on this required extended process. The truth is - customer journey matters. Funnels and landing pages can greatly increase ROI for advertisers and business owners who sell online. Remember, transparency matters. If you can provide an exceptional shopping experience and target every type of customer individually with "best fit" campaigns and products ideas you will get ecommerce sales.
In October 2019 Google introduced and tested BERT on 10% of all SERP results. BERT stands for "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers." To put it in useful layman terms, essentially the Google bot went from reading left to right and right to left to converting and cataloging every word on a page into identifiable entities.
These entities are categorized things: people, events, organizations, consumer goods, etc. Sometimes they are even accompanied with a Wikipedia reference noting when the bot has read into a topical subject for more clarity. Each entity is weighted with a points system called "Salience" - a score which identifies how important, prominent, and relevant each term is to every other term in the context of the words.
Google's API also processes each written sentence through Sentiment Analysis to also understand the tonality of the writing. It identifies and grades positive, negative, and neutral statements to better understand topics and authors. If you are interested in the emotional side of machine learning, read into IBM's Watson Tone Analyzer.
This entire process is being referred to as Google's Natural Language Processing (NLP). This machine learning based technology is completely dissecting most every language Worldwide.
As of October 2020, Google announced that BERT is now included in 100% of all SERP Results.
This means content missing topically relevant entities: keywords, visuals, subjects, definitions, references, and citations will not have the same ability to rank as those which do!
Google has always treated web pages and written content online like a scientific report or college dissertation. Google wants to deliver the most precise, accurate, and updated information.
Google knows the fruit an orange is round and that a banana is not. Nobody ever "told" it this, so how does it know? It learns & understands this because whenever an orange is described - words like "round" and "rounded" are accompanied in the description vs when a banana is described.
What is the best kept secret to ranking an ecommerce store on Google? Correlative SEO.
Be careful, correlation flows and trends both ways - it is quite literally a double edged sword. If you choose the wrong competitors to mimic or correlate your content towards you can hurt your content score and topical authority. Picking the most relevant and best fitting competitors is the key to success.
Correlation SEO compares any URL to the top 10 SERP results for any target keyword or keyword phrase.
Correlation software like Surfer allows you to reverse engineer and model yourself after much larger entities which already provide contextual understanding to the bot about your niche topic. By building tight, semantic, content themes you can build trust and authority around a specific topic just like existing websites and brands.
Always seek out an SEO expert with correlative experience to fine tune you a road map to success. Content templates and audits can be created to keep your on-page SEO optimized and correlated to top ranking competitors. Quarterly content audits and daily keyword monitoring should be utilized to track improvements, results, and measure ROI.
The best practices for starting an ecommerce business in recent years has been including social proof on the order page and implementing upsells immediately after they click your call to action! These two advanced methods drastically increase your conversion optimization rate and increase average order value (AOV).
Customer testimonials and social proof are digital currency for your business! Let your audience speak for themselves - this is the most powerful and enticing way to convert more potential customers into actual paying clients. Place a powerful testimonial or raving fan review near your "Add to Cart" or "Checkout" button on every single product or service page.
This single conversion optimization tip reinforces the entire buying decision. By socially reinforcing the customer's intention you eliminate any doubts they may be having. This effectively hacks the buyer psychology - providing comfort in the idea of someone else being really happy with this same recent purchase. A testimonial or review displayed near your buy button or call to action button activates the pack mentality, gives immediate social approval, and provides decision relief - making it much easier to click buy and commit. Social proof will effectively increase your conversion rate. Encourage recorded testimonials with discounts and/or gift cards for a while if you have to get some initial footage / clips that can be embedded.
There are many different definitions of "lifestyle photos" - I have come to believe it is a set of "live action" shots "in use." This is not a graphic, not a rendering, not an advertisement - rather an actual photograph of your product or service being used, by it's target audience, in authentic / genuine / honest scenarios.
Read a testimonial, see somebody during the process, and the finally see their results:
Side-by-side pictures, info graphics, and before & after photos are extremely effective proof. Combine a customer's before and after results, customer testimonials or reviews, and lifestyle images into a power sales image. If you assemble multiples, feature them all in a photo gallery or slideshow and place it near your call to action.
Upsell your customers with similar, relevant, and complementing products & services at the bottom of your funnel. Encourage bulk products, one time discounted orders, sales, packages, bundles, coupons, or FREE accessories as pop ups as soon as they click the "Add to Cart" or "Checkout" option. For too long the focus has been on acquiring new customers, but if you focus on acquiring them and immediately increasing their AOV, you can get less customers to buy more goods & services, more frequently, and ultimately make much more lifetime money with sales consistency.
Year round marketing brainstorms typically result in pulling a calendar out and planning seasonal advertising campaigns. Team members ask "What can we do for Holiday Shopping?" "Black Friday?" "What can we do for spring time?" etc.
Before you get lost hosting your next sale because it's national drink tequila day - start by marketing with the questions you always get from your clients. Any organization can scale itself by simplifying the on-boarding process of a service or simplifying the check out process of a product. So, what articles should you be writing first? Evergreen ones.
Evergreen articles feature your timeless advice. Think of them as the most helpful & relevant information that can always be referred to help your sales process or clients at anytime. Build trust with new audiences by presenting a learning center approach with "next step" style instructions, videos, diagrams, and resources. Here is where you can best set client expectations, timelines, processes, and deliverables.
A content silo focuses on one theme and must contain a minimum of five topically relevant items, media, articles, and/or supporting pages. This group of (5) pages / stack of pages all link to the main top of silo page. Always drive link power up the stack. Heavily link to the collections, catalog, or category pages vs. individual products to reinforce the silo hierarchy. Utilize canonical tags to push power back to the top of the stack page from the less important silo pages.
When building any new section of your website you should research existing content clusters. Experiment with organizing content for semantic relevancy. Dissect competitors with URL scrapers like Screaming Frog. Refer to your ecommerce blueprint / mind map and keyword research to create strong ranking clusters of pages.
Stop thinking about SEO and online business ideas for a second and let's talk actual roadblocks for your current or potential business. What questions do you get every day? What questions does your customer service team get all the time? Where do conversations slow down with the customer? Where are the bottlenecks in explaining your customer journey? Identify the top 10 "implementation" or "streamline" roadblocks and turn them into videos. Video is a powerhouse customer engagement strategy which will provide universal relief to your internal team and improve your clients experience.
Record your top 10 FAQs as talking head videos and post them to YouTube branded. Fill out the descriptions with your NAP (name, address, phone number) and website links to any topical articles that need a backlink. Film videos with a green screen and transition actual footage & photos in the background to engage the audience.
Rather than being scripted, create a card of bullet points and fire from the hip. Chances are you know your stuff, you're just camera shy and production scared. With bullet points you stay on track and feel less formal pressure of content sequence, story, and it helps ease tense people. (Less like a zombie is good.) Drive audience to these videos to break the ice and let people get to know you. Create a mobile friendly interface as Google is mobile first indexing now. Create a list of call to action buttons / links to drive clients, partners, and prospects to the correct onboarding process to work with you. Greet them with a personalized video to give them peace of mind at then point them to the next best step.
Add your top 10 FAQ video links to your e-mail signature. Direct clients to these links and video resources to self-educate and get answers to their most common questions. This will eliminate your most time consuming and repetitive questions and tasks. Additionally this video library can help onboard new staff, interns, and internal teams on current processes and operations.
Drip Email Campaigns
Reassure your customers that their order, booking, quote request, or sign-up was received and is in progress via e-mail immediately after they submit it! Setup a drip campaign to set the customer's expectations on timeline and point them to "next steps" in their customer journey. Use a sequence of email messages:
Order Confirmation
Timeline Expectation
Tracking Confirmation
Ask for a Review: Google, FB, Yelp, etc
Send Loyalty Offer
Send Offer
Regular Email List Offers
Have you seen the People Also Ask (PPA) section of Google? It is a little accordion style interface added to specific SERP results that are questions or show intent of needing an answer. If you hard program your most common product questions on product pages, service questions on service pages, and topical questions on your category pages - you will instantly boost your search visibility with FAQ snippets. There are only an estimated 12million sites using Schema at the time I write this. That means you would be part of the 1% of 1% of 1% of websites that even know it exists, understands, or utilizes these new smart features of Google for marketing. If you are into rich snippets, map packs, knowledge panels, etc - don't forget Q&A faqs!
Google's AdWords PPC advertising system is a fantastic way to scoop more traffic and qualified leads. It's not "new" so most marketers don't pay attention to it. I use paid search ads to amplify and secure my most sought after SEO keywords. Deploying active ad campaigns with laser targeting - focusing ONLY on clusters of individual search phrases and keywords. This enables you to cherry pick clients with high intent and secures / reinforces pages with keywords you already rank for. Inertia drives organic traffic, paid traffic increases the inertia. Paid traffic best amplifies existing organic traffic. When used in combination when you already rank well, it creates two powerhouse signals on authority by being in the top SERP pages twice. Ranking with a strong on-page SEO & organic foundation - then unleashing pay per click campaigns is the fastest and most powerful way to make a page rank higher.
Never let the robots make decisions for you. Reoccurring theme in this article?
Every single advertiser I have ever spoken to says to start off with Manual CPC bids, groom single keyword ad groups (SKAG) and audiences, and if you ever activate any type of AI service, you let it focus on and pay for "conversion optimization" ONLY after you are already getting multiple sales. The worst idea is to utilize "maximize clicks" or let it run a free for all. Spend time to develop specific rules and limitations on your campaigns.
Always limit geographic areas to a minimum of your country. It is best to exclude states, counties, zipcode, or service areas you can't handle or rather not be bothered with. It can be helpful to blacklist countries like India, China, Vietnam, and Malaysia that may engage in click farms with your ads or spam you about pay per click advertising services.
Automatic bidding will always find a way to spend your money.
Let me say that again!
Automatic bidding is designed to spend your money first and foremost - that's the bid strategies' core function. Yes, results will shift and change and it will spend your goal budget in the allotted amount of time you set - but please remember these bid strategies were designed to spend your money. Take full control of your advertising spend by:
There is no better way to optimize your account than to live in it - checking and tweaking every (3) days. Use an absolute baseline test of impressions to clicks to conversions. Target a handful or keywords setup in SKAGs. See where you are eligible to spend money. Limit your CPC cost by setting a maximum CPC. Always start off with something small like $3.00 to ensure you don't overspend per click. Eventually you will see recommendations and the going market rate for top positions and more clicks. You can adjust accordingly to your market share, quality score, and CPC to best spend your money. Get yourself to a handful of conversions and then begin targeting for more conversions. Conversion tracking is a key element to lowering your CPC and also pleasing anyone data driven. Show how many conversions per month you are getting for a specific sign-up, purchase, quote request, survey, etc.
An exact match keyword use to mean precisely that - an exact match. You put your "keyword" in quotes or your [keyword] in brackets to limit your ad to ONLY show when this precise phrase was typed in. However, Google continues to expand what an "Exact Match Keyword" is on business owners. By broadening the rules they claim the ability to deliver more clients. This is true, but it also opens the door to less qualified clients and those who will cost you for clicks. The more Google expands exact matching rules, the more significance creating negative keyword lists for campaigns will have over time!
When I first started shadowing agencies doing PPC advertising, I was surprised at how much of the effort rested in consistently expanding & curating negative search keywords. It is just as important to identify what you want, as to define and block what you don't want, from spending your ad budget. For example, maybe you only sell certain items but a lot of people request to rent this type of item - it would be important to block the word "rent" so you don't show up for customers seeking to rent your product! The more creative you are with the negative keywords, the more precisely you focus and target your ideal customer. Best fit offers sell best fit customers. Be exclusive, purposeful, and careful in your targeting.
If you sell products and you are already utilizing search ads, the next major step and progression is to dive into display ads. These ads are best for ecommerce advertising. However, if you are selling brand name goods or are one of many resellers it may be difficult because this type of advertising can become a "race to the bottom" for price and increase ad placement costs. It is important to A/B test creative and take high quality photos of products or services. Searchers will find display ad carousels at the top of the SERP page most often when the user searches "buy", "purchase", or a "for sale" type query. Other local searches such as "near me" or searchers from mobile devices seem to engage well with this style of ad.
Facebook and Instagram offer the most popular, robust, and advanced advertising platform of any Social Media in existence. This advanced advertising system makes their ad buying ecosystem hard to understand, control, and expensive to play in. In addition to being outright costly, the audiences they capture are not nearly as qualified, engaged, or interested as traffic that is actively searching on Google first.
Target market / top of funnel traffic from Google via SEO should come first and then be amplified with PPC. Create highly optimized pages and then drive more of the same type of qualified traffic with ads. Any of the high quality visitors that then also have social media accounts get retargeted! Meaning, it continues to follow and deliver advertisements and engage with website visitors for 30-90 days beyond their visit.
The visitor either maintains engagement and interest or stops and eventually removes/filters themselves out of our retargeting campaign & algorithm. They essentially self qualify over an extended period of time through planned phases of advertisements.
Smart advertisers control the sequence at which messaging deploys to help increase specific calls to action and to drive user conversions. They also A / B test landing pages, ad copy, titles, imagery, etc. It often takes 20 or more ad design variations to find a winning combination to scale with. Without a winning ad, it is simply not worth investing money into scaling any advertisement! Wait for one to break out and outperform the others and then invest in that. Continuously groom new creative if you can afford to.
If you want to outright advertise on social media and not ONLY retarget. Remember to create and expand lookalike audiences based on website visitors, add to cart conversions, landing page conversions, purchase conversions, e-mail signup conversions, etc. Cater your messaging, support, and responses to the customer at each stage of their journey for best conversion results.
Remember: SEO is the foundation, PPC is the catalyst, and SMA is the reminder.
Google has the highest quality traffic and customer leads you will find online. When someone is searching they are in their "need it now" moment.
If I had to pick two other sources for high quality traffic - searchers with high purchase intent, I would advise you towards YouTube and Pinterest. They are totally underrated for traffic and new audience development!
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the World and complements SEO and Google PPC systems entirely.
Pinterest is 71% female, largely suburban, high earning households with a lot of buying power.
Acquire from Google, YouTube, and/or Pinterest and then re-target with FB & Instagram.
Snap and Tiktok are innovative, but I know the other social media platforms are more effective and have higher intent platforms.
Shopify - Best in class. Shopify is universally loved & used by most modern shops. Look for the CC logos in the footer - chances are it's Shopify!
WooCommerce - Best FREE ecommerce platform that integrates with Wordpress. Popular to start with!
BigCommerce - More enterprise & large scale business focused.
Magento - Enterprise & large scale businesses.
SquareSpace - Start high end boutiques, niche stores, and visual story telling content. Mobile responsive and endorsed for being SEO friendly. Easy to start, update, and operate. Highly recommend and am an affiliate. Not the best system for hundreds or thousands of products.
Wix - Small, novice, easy - but also hated for SEO functionality limitations which continue to get better.
Square - Started as a CC processor, now allows e-mailed invoices and product catalogs turned into simple storefront.
Weebly - Simple, up & coming name.
3DCart - Shopping cart / e commerce business software.
Volusion - Up and coming platform.
Prestashop - European based platform.
BigCartel - Ideal for artists, creatives, & creators. Consider SquareSpace truthfully.
PayPal - Trusted, longest running, $20K before they report your income to the Feds. Lifehack: acts like a secret piggy bank to get your first few business transactions started.
Stripe - Integrates with most everything these days. Fantastic for those who have ever faced credit card fraud. New security rules & radar settings have saved me thousands in fraudulent transactions.
Square - SquareUp, the little cube card reader! They do awesome e-mail invoices and point of sale integrations. Great backup for when Stripe declines a customer's CC. Have never had a single issue or fraud committed with SquareUp CC processing.
Shopify - Many store owners are utilizing Shopify Lite buttons to process orders inexpensively through Shopify card processing. New hybrid online store designs are hosting on SquareSpace for the design templates, ease of use, & SEO friendly boost, and then processing orders via Shopify checkout. Shopify integrates well with many other technologies, scripts, and advertising platforms. Shopify is the top ecommerce platform choice.
Clickfunnels - Founded by Russell Brunson. Look into his storytelling sales process with funnels & his books for great copywriting tips. I personally watched him sell over $2million in 90mins on stage to a crowd of 9,000 people I was in Las Vegas. He came back a year later to do $3.2million in 90mins - he has a digitizing movement like no other. He's not for everybody, but learning about sales funnels is!
Kartra - Famous advertising expert Frank Kern backed this multi-functional funnel, marketing & sales tool.g tool. Swiss army knife functionality for those trying to monetize online.
LeadPages - Create landing pages for your clients.
Unbounce - Heavily optimized landing pages. Great for Ad Agencies & Media Buyers.
SamCart - One page funnels work. One page websites sell! Don't believe me? SamCart makes it their standard.
JotForm - For creating interactive forms for collecting artwork and detailed information from clients.
Etsy - Products' Descriptions and SEO are incredibly important to selling products.
Facebook Shops - I write about whether Facebook Shops is worth it here.
Instagram Shopping - Can sometimes be hard to verify your business for shopping functionality.
Ebay - Old faithful. Kind of started it all?
Amazon - It’s becoming the big box store of the Internet like Walmart became of retail. My recommendation is to leave Amazon for the small items & big brands. Save up money first in order to be able to pay to play because it gets expensive as a vertical.
Digital information entrepreneurs with training modules and online certifications are the future of education. Products are typically video programs, walkthrough guides, and supporting resources which can be accessed 24/7 on-demand. Video courses enable entrepreneurs to scale themselves online / digital to make maximum profit. Popular platforms are:
How much does it cost to start an ecommerce business?
Electronic invoicing is operationally cost FREE, but costs per individual transaction. With services like PayPal, Stripe, SquareUp, etc accepting credit cards is FREE for anyone with a social security number or employer identification number (EIN). Each transaction costs a % and small fee to process the transaction. All inclusive ecommerce stores can be launched as inexpensively as a few hundred dollars via platforms like Shopify or SquareSpace. Best in class ecommerce stores will spend an infinite amount on optimizing and scaling.
What are the steps to starting an ecommerce business?
Qualify your business idea through marketplace analysis, competitor analysis, keyword research with search volume estimates, and correctly creating a "best fit" offer to present to the existing market demand searching for it.
How long does it take to start an ecommerce business?
This entirely depends on the platform you choose, the number of products & services you wish to list, and how fast you can afford to advertise. I know of overnight store launches and those which were carefully built for years.
How to Start an Ecommerce Business Guide
Hi I’m Ed,
If you are feeling overwhelmed and not quite sure where to start, please consider booking a consulting call with me! In a single hour we will cover many valuable techniques and processes around how to start an ecommerce business that is the right fit for you and your lifestyle!
Every session is recorded and uploaded to the cloud to let you watch it again, any time, on demand 24/7, via any device! Reference our video sessions until you implement everything discussed correctly. When you are ready to improve your store more, book another 1:1 coaching session, as needed, and at your own pace!
I sincerely look forward to speaking with you!
-Ed
Ideal strategy sessions for those:
aspiring ecommerce business owners
current online store owners
brick and mortar stores launching an ecommerce business
start an ecommerce business to transition from brick and mortar
lead site or money site owners
business consultants
business coaches
digital entrepreneurs
brand name / retail / big box / department store with online store
startup ecommerce businesses
any ecommerce businesses seeking to increase revenue
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