Promoting Your Optical Online Store. Understanding Content

What is Content?

The word content, related to Internet, as written in Merriam Webster Dictionary means the principal substance (as written matter, illustrations, or music) offered by a World Wide Web site.

Content is text that makes your website meaningful. It is also pictures, numbers, links to other web pages and customer forms (ex. inquiry or rating form) that complement the text. Design of your website, such as colors, positioning or various elements, fonts and font sizes is not really a content, it is simply a way to organize and present your content.

Why Content It Important?

The richer the website content is, the better your web store will sell.

Content is very important. Your website visitors will read you content and if they like what they read and see they will buy from you. Even if your products, eyeglasses and contact lenses are the same what thousands of other websites offer, if customers like the content they will choose your website to buy from.

Rich content is one of the key factors that Google uses to rank your website. In fact Google and any other search engines can not read design of your website, they can only read text. So, not only text itself, but also the sequence in which text appears on your website will be important for your website promotions.

When people look at your website they see logo, name and some main text that will suggest to them that you are selling eyeglasses. Likewise Google will read your website from top to bottom and treat some content as more important and some as only reinforcement of important content. Google will look at the footer of your page and read off all the static pages and other info you have there to make up a picture of how legitimate and useful your web store is as compared to others.

Freshness. Not Just Meaning!

In addition, freshness of content is also important. Obviously if your web store was last updated a year ago, Google will lower your ranking if there are other websites with similar content that was posted to a website more recently.

Types of Content on LiveOptical Web stores

Many new website owners think that all they need to have is a good catalog of the eyeglasses they sell and that is it. This is why so many optical websites never show on Google top 10 or even top 100 search results. Because other websites have this PLUS much more. With LiveOptical you can have any content you wish, but most importantly, the content creation possibilities are given to you with the LiveOptical platform. So, here is what your web store should have in addition to product catalog:

Static Pages

We talked about Static Pages in detail here. These are pages about your web store and selling policies. About Us, Contact Us, Shipping Policies, Return Policies, Privacy Data Gathering, Payment Methods, Currencies, Product Information (brands you carry etc.), Warranty Policies and more.

News

News are blog like articles about what is happening in the industry and your brands. Any high ranked optical web store has ton of news with official ad campaigns, celebrity wearing those glasses, moves where those eyeglasses appear, trends etc. News should not only be focused on eyeglasses, but generally on fashion itself. There are ton of things happening with each brand every day and with LiveOptical News functionality to generate one article a day should only take you 20 minutes or less.

Polls

With eyeglasses store, polls would be related to ranking eyeglasses models to find a best seller or most desirable one. Ranking feature is already built in to LiveOptical website. It would be very easy for you to write a newsletter asking your customers to rank a three pairs of sunglasses as best this year. Some of your eyeglasses pages will automatically get enriched with new content of people opinions. Your website will have polls content that other websites don’t have.

Coupons

We teach you how to use LiveOptical tools creatively. You can create a coupon for your website and spread the news. We talked extensively about Coupons here. Not only you should create a coupon, you should post it on a specially created Static Page (call it Promotions, Coupons etc.) and your website content will get enriched instantly. If no one uses your coupon or coupon has expired, having it is still better because Google will give you points for that.

Social Media Membership

Your website should have Facebook and Twitter page. Ideally your online glasses store also has Pinterest, Flickr and YouTube pages. It is a lot to ask from a small eyeglasses boutique because once you created these pages you should post information to there every week. But with time you should have these pages because modern eyeglasses customers, who spend 5-8 hours a day on Internet will dig those pages and do free advertising for you. Google, in turn will highly appreciate this type of content and increase your ranking into a consistent high level. LiveOptical shopping cart platform makes it easy for you to share the information already posted to your eyeglasses web store. It will only take a few seconds to share one news article with all + 40 other social media websites.

Press

The harder the content is to get, the higher it’s value. Getting mentions in actual newspapers, popular online publications or video channels is extremely hard for free. You can pay, and that is what most of large optical websites do, but you can also work harder on it to get mentions for free. Once you got a mention in publicity, you should post the snapshot, logo of publication directly to the footer and may be even header of your website. Your customers will be very impressed and Google treat this as invaluable content. The sales that will come as a result, will pay off your entire expenses. Read the WerbyParker story to understand a power of this.