Hi there, I'm Noah Learner, the founder of Bike Shop SEO. We help retailers and industry partners across North America make more money. Each month I'll be giving you pointers on how to sell more bikes, bike parts, accessories and apparel online and also in store.
In this first article we'll be looking at how you set up your BikeExchange account for success.
More Detail is Better.
When you are setting up your store's free website that you get from the BikeExchange and also when you are setting up each of your adverts, more detail is better.
You'll appear higher in search both on BikeExchange and in search results powered by Google and other Search Engines that are crawling Bike Exchange adverts.
This sounds like marketing gibberish or worse, but here's why it matters.
Why SEO is important to your bike shop.
Let's say someone is searching for a specific model of Hybrid Bike online. The search volume for that particular model is 1000 searches per month.
Which is like 1000 potential customers walking in front of your storefront and all of them are curious about the exact shiny hybrid bike you have inside your store gleaming out on your sales floor.
How many of those people would you want in your shop? How many test rides would you want to get rolling?
The takeaway: Where your site or advert ranks will determine how many of these people click through to your site.
More than 45% of users click on the first 6 results with the first position in organic search netting between 20% and 38% of all traffic whereas the 10th position is getting around 1.5% of the traffic.
This is when it clearly pays to rank higher.
If you could multiply the amount of people walking into your store by 10x-25x you will have many more chances to sell cycling. You might have other more enviable problems that come with growth too!
And What is a Keyword?
Keywords are individual words or phrases that can be as long as 4-5 words that people use when they are searching for something online. If you use a keyword that a lot of users are searching for online in the copy on your site or in an advert description, you will be more likely to surface in search results.
How can I get access to this keyword data?
Our favorite free tool is from Moz and while it offers throttled data (you get 20 free queries per month), it will give a huge start. It is located at: https://moz.com/explorer
The real fun Starts when you click on "See all Suggestions" inside the Keyword Suggestions box.
This will allow you to then click on sort by Search volume. This will show you the words and phrases that get searched for the most about your parent topic. Use these words in your advert and you'll be more likely to get more traffic.
Pro tip: use words that people use when they are close to buying like "buy, for sale, shop for, price."
Back to your account.
Okay so more is better, but where should I focus?
Retailer Page Information
The first place to focus is your Retailer Page Information field inside My Store settings.
You are allowed to use up to 500 characters in this field. Include terms that help geolocate your shop inside city and state, and also use keywords that will help you surface for terms that are associated with the product you are most likely to sell on BikeExchange.
Advert Page Information
This field appears on every advert page Below the specifications section. It is a great place to put language that will lead to sales.
Think free shipping, price matching, free tune-ups, and any other language you've tested that has shown to close more sales, You can also Include your store Hours there so the buyer knows when to reach out.
Adverts
This is where you're going to get creative and make money. Your advert titles need to have more detail in order to show up for more types of search.
The same goes for the product descriptions. If you use the standard description and specifications that every other retailer selling the same product is using, it will be very hard for you to stand out in search.
We recommend you add more copy, depth, and information to the Description and specifications sections. This will help the reader and search engine know about the page's content and will inevitably lead to more traffic and sales.
Does this mean that I want to repeat my keywords a lot?
Great question! This is known as keyword stuffing and is a poor strategy that will end up with your advert getting penalized by the search algorithms used Google and other search engines.
We also recommend that you add features that both include keywords and help the user get from interested to sold.
If you do this, you'll rank higher and sell more product!
Noah Learner is a 20 year bike retail veteran with 8 years experience as the General Manager of Young's Bicycle Shop on Nantucket Island. He also worked at SmartEtailing where he provided SEO & Digital Marketing solutions for local bike shops. At Bike Shop SEO he is lucky enough to partner with some of the most dynamic shops & industry partners in North America.
