SEO Guide: Improve the Visibility of your LA&C Shop Brand and Products – Part 1

Here at LA&C we are passionate about giving UK Artists and Crafters a real opportunity to showcase your creations and for you to get the exposure you deserve. And to that end, want to give all our Seller’s an equal opportunity to benefit from our platform.

I have written a short guide (cheat sheet, if you like) containing a few lesser known secrets to improving the visibility of your LA&C Shop and your product range on search engines and through Social Media channels (Premium Member’s we will manage and implement these changes on your behalf).

If you are considering becoming a Premium Member or upgrading from your FREE Account please Click Here to Compare Plans.

This guide is broken down into two parts:
Part 1 will cover Shop branding and the general setup / configuration of your LA&C Shop.
Part 2 will cover best practices when adding or editing products using your Seller Dashboard.

Please take a moment to read through the Guide, and feel free to reach out to the team at anytime via Facebook Messenger (m.me/localartandcraft), or via email (sales@localartandcraft.com).
N.B. Always for the best possible user experience, where possible, please use a laptop or desktop PC to create / edit your shop and products. Also, please note that the LA&C shopping App on Google Play is a Shopping App for customers and not for managing your shop or products and therefore should NOT be used for this purpose.

Part 1 – Store Branding

Dependent on your individual circumstances, many of you will have a unique brand that is easy to find when searching online. Other’s will have a brand that gets lost among many similar sounding brands. This is a common problem and should be top of the list when deciding on a brand that gets you noticed.
How can I check the current status and visibility of my brand?

A good way to test the feasibility of your current branding is to simply search for your brand on Google (I will always refer to Google as the definitive tool for this purpose) as you would expect a potential customer to search for you online, having some familiarity of your brand, as either an existing customer or by reputation / recommendation.

If your brand is visible on the first page of results (be this as a link to your LA&C shop, your own website, or your social media pages) then you can rest assured, that you have a strong enough brand that has enough unique and individual merit to serve you well.

If you find that you are scrolling through pages of results for any reference to you and your brand, then it is time to rethink your branding and marketing strategy.

An example of how we can improve our brand awareness and reach our target audience:
If my business was creating handmade Greetings Cards (which is a very competitive market on search engines) and my shop / brand name was “Greety Cards”, When tested (at the time of writing) by searching Google.com on a Laptop, Google will return 534,000,000 results! It would be very difficult to get seen in a crowd this size, and you are competing with companies that have very deep pockets. So managing expectations and the application of a couple of common sense rules will make a big difference. If I search for “Greety Handmade Cards” the number of results falls to just 3,380 results and we now see tangible image search results also. One simple word can make that much difference.

How do I change my LA&C shop settings to improve my Brand and search rankings?

Login to your LA&C Seller’s Dashboard and go to settings. From here in Store settings you should change the following…
N.B. Premium Members can contact the Team to carry these changes for you.

1. Store Name: Ensure that your store name clearly identifies your brand name (e.g. “Greety Handmade Cards).
2. Store Slug: Your store slug (which is the part of the URL Website address that identifies your Shop) should follow suit in the format “greety-handmade-cards” (all lower case with dashes to separate the words).
   N.B. Changing your Store Slug WILL change the address of your shop and therefore invalidate any links that you have made to your shop as it would have previously been known. If you have a Premium Plan with LA&C you can contact the team for a solution to this issue.
3. Store Logo / Store Banner’s: When selecting / changing your logo or banner’s, within the popup modal window, there are a few features you can use to enhance the visibility of your brand.
   
   First, image size and shape. When selecting your desired image, you can click on the edit link to edit the image you wish to use. For Logo’s, ideally you want to resize and crop the image to be square and no larger than 600 x 600 pixels (px) in size.
   
   Then once resized / cropped and saved, you can then add the ALL-IMPORTANT Alt and Title information in the boxes provided. Search engines and social media channels read this information to identify images and their relevance to your web page. I cannot stress enough the importance of entering this information. So in the Alt and Title boxes for the logo you should enter information relevant to your brand as follows “Greety Handmade Cards – Logo” and “Greety Handmade Cards – Banner”. This gives search engines the information they need to identify the images as related to your brand. Tip: Once you have set the Alt and Title tags for any image, they will be used anywhere you choose to use the same images.

4. Shop Description: And finally ensure that your new Brand is reflected within the first line of your description as a H3 Title (e.g. “Welcome to Greety Handmade Cards of Northamptonshire”).

This concludes the first part of our guide. Thank you for taking the time to read our guide to Improving Brand Visibility. Part 2 will be available shortly as a second instalment, so stay tuned!