SEO Tips to Promote Your Shop – Guest Post by Jeremy

Today is another guest post in our series of Shop Partner guests – this time from Jeremy Gill. He is going to give you a few tips on how to use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your shop. Note: his searches are relevant to the UK, but his tips can be used anywhere. Jeremy, the stage is yours.

I spoke to a friend a couple of months ago and recommended Spreadshirt as a supplementary means of income, and he immediately set off on his goal to create a Spreadshirt shop. A few months down the line, I asked him how many sales he had achieved and he said “none” and I can bet this is what a lot of people say? So why am I getting loads of sales and he’s not getting any? It’s not that his designs are not very good but the answer is simple – nobody is finding his Spreadshirt shop!!

I’ve been running a few on-line businesses since I was made redundant 9 years ago, and it’s not rocket science – if no one visits your website, then you don’t sell anything. It’s like building a supermarket in the middle of a desert and not telling anyone it’s there.

I now run quite a few Spreadshirt shops, but let’s just look at my Biker T-shirts site and see how it’s performing in Google. So, you are looking for a t-shirt for a friend that rides a motorbike – what are you going to type into Google? Perhaps biker t-shirts, motorcycle t-shirts or motorbike t-shirts? Go on try it – type “motorcycle t-shirts” into Google and you will find links to my Spreadshirt shop on page 1 in positions 1, 2 and 4 (at the time of writing). OK, one of them is www.biker-gifts.co.uk/t_shirts.htm but this is my website and links directly to my Spreadshirt shop. The other 2 are the main website www.biker-t-shirts.co.uk and the Spreadshirt shop www.biker-t-shirts.spreadshirt.co.uk so not too bad out of 9,730,000 results!!

So why am I doing so well in Google? 



It’s because I spend the time doing SEO, but what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization or in other words – Great Content + Quality Links = Search Engine Success. Basically pages appear in a Google search result because their content matches the search and they have links to them from other pages indicating their importance.

Just follow some simple rules and suggestions:

• I would highly recommend having your own domain and giving it a name that’s appropriate to the product. For example, I wanted to sell biker t-shirts so www.biker-t-shirts.co.uk instantly tells the customer what I sell and helps tremendously in Google rankings.
• Give your Spreadshirt shop the same name, so in this case it’s biker-t-shirts, so that your Spreadshirt shop becomes www.biker-t-shirts.spreadshirt.co.uk
• Think how your customers will think when using Google – what search term will they use to find you and ensure that these search terms appears within the text of your website.
• Make sure that you use all the tools that Spreadshirt provide for SEO, on the info & meta page, and enter descriptions and keywords for your shop ensuring that whatever keywords you use, also appear in the description.
• Create meaningful product names for each product and also use the description & tags – the more wording the better.
• Get as many appropriate links to your shop as possible and link back to their website.
• Don’t forget to submit your shop to Google – quite a simple mistake, but you will be surprised how many people don’t do this!!! Go to https://www.google.com/addurl/
• Shout about your website from the highest mountain and don’t be afraid to brag on blogs, forums and wherever you can get a link – why do you think I’ve written this Blog?
• Use a free tool such as Cleverstat to monitor your position in Google for search terms. Change some wording and see if you move up or down, but bear in mind that each change can take a few weeks to filter through the system. If it moves up then great, if it doesn’t then change it back – don’t expect overnight success.
• Create a Facebook page for your products and use Twitter.

Don’t expect to create some great designs in a Spreadshirt shop and then expect the sales to come flooding in, so believe in your product, be patient and your hard work will hopefully be rewarded.

Jeremy Gill