How to promote your online store with a low budget (1)

Starting an online business is a challenge. Of course, entrepreneurship is beautiful, motivating and stimulating, but it is not advisable to romanticize it too much, because it also requires a lot of effort, dedication, and investment of both time and resources.

ECommerce has matured, and everyone now understands that it is not enough to just open a store; it is also necessary to make an effort to attract customers through different channels.

That is what we are going to talk about in the next Oleoshop posts, how to promote your online store progressively without getting broke during the process.

Get ready to take notes, this will interest you.

Historically, the best way to achieve cost-effective customer acquisition has been SEO or organic search engine positioning.

In case you are not entirely sure what this is, I will summarize it for you: it consists of a series of good practices in your store that combine usability and functionality criteria with a content structure designed to facilitate its indexing by search engines such as Google or Bing for keywords and search intents.

Notice that in the introduction I said that “historically, SEO is the best way to promote your online store with a low budget.” The truth is that it still is, because well-done positioning has the huge advantage of not requiring a constant flow of investment as happens with SEM platforms like Google Ads or Meta Ads.

Organic positioning also has another big advantage, which is authority itself. People trust an ad less when we know it appears because someone is paying for it, than a search result that appears naturally in top positions.

In recent times, the landscape has changed radically: the enormous volume of organic traffic has shifted to fewer but more qualified visits. Can you guess why?

We will develop the reason in the next section, but before that I want to emphasize that, in a different way than it was 5 or 10 years ago, SEO is still profitable for online stores that do not have a large advertising budget.

Obviously, it would be absurd to deny that SEO has changed with the arrival of AIs. What used to be a keyword-oriented approach (“buy sneakers”) has evolved into a much more natural interaction at the language level, as well as new players (ChatGpt, Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini…) and formats or placements within search engines themselves, not to mention conversational experiences where there is not even a screen in between anymore.

This means that before there were 10 organic results on the first page, but now the search engine itself filters and curates the answers.

To stay with Google as an example, let’s see how it now resolves an informational query about whether “sustainable shoes exist.”

What you see displayed with all sorts of information is a summary generated by artificial intelligence, what’s called an AI preview.

Where does all that text come from? From the sources it links to in the snippet itself, the ones it lists at the bottom under brand examples, and in the right-hand column. Many people find that enough; they no longer need to keep scrolling through results to get an answer, even a commercial recommendation.

In practice, this means that the first position now occupied by Vogue no longer carries the weight it seems to, and that Ecoalf, even though it appears second in the ranking, is actually better positioned for this search. And what about Natural World Eco: it appears in fifth place, and also after a block of videos, which reduces its visibility even further.

How did they achieve that? It is not magic, it is SEO.

If we click on one of those links on the side, we access the URL that Google used to feed that AI Preview; in fact, it even highlights the exact part that it borrowed.

To make this post more agile and focus on the most current aspects, I will leave you with a complete guide on on-page and off-page SEO. It covers the key topics to monitor in depth to ensure we meet the basic requirements.

We will complete this information with a couple of important articles about core web vitals, another explaining how the crawl budget works, and, never a bad idea, a list of SEO tools that will solve many problems for you.

Do not worry if some of these concepts do not sound entirely familiar, by reading the guide you will  understand them perfectly, and since it is already available for your reference, it does not make sense to rewrite it here.

So, what are we going to talk about then? Especially about SEO and AI, something we had pending to cover, and which is essential if you want to promote your business without dedicating a large marketing budget to it.

Keep in mind that AIs generate their responses based on:

The most important thing, at the content level, is that in this new paradigm it no longer makes sense to stick to a keyword-based strategy. That is, we will focus on a more organic and conversational language.

We need even our product pages to answer questions, as we saw in the case of Natural World Eco, not only in your online store’s blog (very important to have one), but also on the most transactional pages.

Add a well-structured and well-written text, with titles such as: How to choose...?, Which is the best...? It would also make a lot of sense to use a section that works as a summary of the essentials, precisely to make it easier for AIs to show this information in their previews.

Another interesting resource is to use lists and comparisons; AIs are always thirsty for data, so this helps improve our chances of being cited.

So far, what we have proposed does not involve a significant economic cost (it depends on how much you invest in link building). In fact, you can optimize your eCommerce pages yourself if you have software like Oleoshop, which allows you to easily edit content.

I hope you found this post about promoting online stores with a low budget interesting, because there are more posts coming soon. Stay tuned for them.