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One of the things that you are going to have to do to make yourself successful in your webflow eCommerce efforts is to choose a niche and make yourself an authority for that niche. We’ll explore what becoming an authority on a particular niche actually means and why it is so important to sell products, as well as some of the ways that you can do it. But first, let’s define what a niche expert is.
What are Niche Experts?
When it comes to retail, niche experts are those websites where people go to buy products in that niche because they trust the niche expert. A niche expert is a website that ranks high in Google for particular niche keywords and who can be found being recommended on social media and word-of-mouth and whom other websites link to when someone asked whom they should ask a question about that niche.
Niche experts are websites that have a reputation for knowing the niche that they are in and being able to provide not only great products in that niche but also support for the products, recommendations, and a high degree of trust.
Why Should You Make Yourself a Niche Expert?
Obviously, there are a number of advantages to becoming a niche expert but the most important one is that you will make more money. People want to buy from someone who is an expert in a particular niche.
Many people would rather buy from a name that they know and trust rather than a site that sells just about everything. That’s why there are people who still shop at Best Buy and other electronic stores online or buy their computer parts from Newegg rather than Amazon. They know that the retailer is an expert in the products that they are buying and can trust in their recommendations or the products they have listed.
There are other reasons that you should make yourself an expert in your niche as well. For one thing, you’ll rank higher as a result of the links that you get and the reputation you achieve as an authority site. Google will recognize this from various telltale signs and will give you more ranking juice.
Also, people will want to link to you, so you’ll get traffic from those sources directly as well. Also, when you have an authority site, it is very easy to expand into other related areas. For example: if a website is considered an authority on shoes, they will rank higher and easier if they expanded into clothing than a new website that was devoted just to clothing would.
How to Make Your webflow Site into a Niche Expert Site
So, how do you create an authority site within your niche that will give you all of the benefits mentioned in the last paragraph – being able to rank higher in Google, getting more links to your site, and more sales because people consider you an authority? It isn’t all that difficult but it does take some time and a great deal of hard work. There are two types of authority, page authority and domain authority, but for the purposes of an eCommerce site, you should be concentrating on domain authority. webflow gives you an inbuilt feature in the project setting where you can add your domain or buy a new domain through go daddy or google.
Linking Strategies to Build Authority
The first thing you need to do if you want Google to consider you an authority site is to tell them what is it you do; they aren’t going to ask so when the spiders come crawling you want to have your website’s internal linking strategy in place where you can show Google what sort of topics you are an authority in.
You do this by creating strong bonds between the pages of your site. Each page should be optimized for a specific keyword or group of keywords and then linked to from deep links within your site. That means linking topics of the same type to each other. For example, if you have 10 products that are tools or hardware, on each page for those ten, you want to put something like a “related products” widget beneath it.
That’s the great thing about webflow: it makes tasks like this very easy to do. You should also create a page that lists all of the products within that particular topic and then make sure that Google knows this is your “Daddy” page for the child products that it lists by making sure that you link to that page 3-4 times more than you link to a specific product page.
These “Daddy” pages are going to become the authority figures of your site, with Google understanding that whatever topic these pages are about, that topic is something that your site might be an authority on.
So, suppose your site was about hardware and you had a page for hammers and another for saws. You would be ranked more highly for hammers and saws than any other tool that comes up, even if you sell that particular tool. Also, make sure that you are linking to these “Daddy” pages from your ‘About’ page, contact page, footer, or other areas in your site than just your product pages.
The next part of building your authority is getting links from outside sites – not owned or frequented by you – with the link containing keywords that are related to your site topic somehow. Now, you’re going to get some of these naturally, especially if people think you know what you’re talking about and can be trusted to recommend a product or service in that niche.
But to begin with, you might have to send some of those links your way on your own. The way that you do that is by writing or publishing-related content on other sites, or simply finding a site that is willing to link to you. Note that an inbound link doesn’t mean much to Google if it doesn’t come from a site that is related to your topic in some way, or is from a massive authority website.
Creating Video Content
Creating video content is another great way to get your name out there as well as get some traffic to your store. If you can make an expert video showing that you know what you’re talking about, and it gets views on YouTube or another video-sharing site, you’ll get traffic coming to your store, as long as you provide a link for them to navigate there. If you feel comfortable creating video content, this is a great way to go.
Google’s Own Recommendations on Building an Authority Page
Google has actually recommended that you ask yourself these questions when trying to create an authority site. If the answer is NO to any of these questions, you probably need to fix it.
- Is your content original, not like anything else on the web, and definitely not plagiarized?
- Is your advice practical? Are you advising people looking for a mortgage to get a “Construction for Dummies” book and build it themselves to save money?
- Did you correct all of the misspellings, grammatical errors, and typos?
- Is the information that you’re providing valuable? Providing obvious information will not make you an authority site.
- Is the article cluttered?
- Would you bookmark your page?