ChannelOnline provides a single web store with every account of 1 seat or more, with the ability to license additional stores as you go. The default ChannelOnline store is set to 'private', meaning that customers visiting the site are required to log in to view products and interact with the shopping cart. This approach was designed to provide ChannelOnline resellers with a means to offer a shopping portal to their existing customer base.
There are settings within the StoreSite Admin to switch your StoreSite to ‘public’. A ‘public’ store grants varying degrees of visibility and/or purchasing ability to users without an account within your ChannelOnline customer base, depending on the options selected in the Admin.
ChannelOnline also offers a custom domain license. This license allows your store to be hosted on the domain of your choice. This lets you provide your customers with a URL to your StoreSite that is easily relatable to your business, for example: www.MyTechStore.com. Without the custom domain license, the ChannelOnline store is hosted at and accessed through: https://global.channelonline.com/account_name/storename.
If you're planning on offering a public store, it helps to understand the implications of SEO and marketing with respect to the limitations of ChannelOnline's public store offering. If you're unfamiliar with SEO or need a refresher, we recommend you spend some time reading up on the subject. Some of the metrics involved in SEO are (this is by no means intended to be a comprehensive list):
- Inbound Links - This is the volume of websites that link to your web pages, as well as the size and importance of the websites that are linking to you. A link to you from your company website is worth more than a link to you from Joe's Taco Shanty, for example. Social media mentions are another form of inbound link, which will factor into your overall ranking.
- Quality of Content - Originality of the content on your page. The uniqueness of content on your page is vital. Keep in mind that most product content in ChannelOnline comes from two other services (DataSource and ContentCast) and is shared across all ChannelOnline resellers.
- Quality of your URLs - If your website's site map is clean and easy to understand in the address bar, it counts toward your rank. You cannot edit or modify URLs of product pages within your store. You can, however, create custom pages and partially control the naming of their URLs, for example: https://global.channelonline.com/account_name/storename/SanDiegoLaptopVendor. You can enable the Site Map feature from within Store Admin settings for better exposure.
- Titles - Are the titles of your pages clear and worded to take advantage of the market you are targeting? The page title appears in the open web browser tab.
- Page Domain & Authority - These are two metrics that essentially amount to how long your site has been around the Internet and how influential it is among Internet-connected sites.
- Meta Tags - These are HTML tags that describe what a web page is about. Metadata is information about information. Tags can be used with custom pages and tabs.
It helps to think of SEO as just one tool in your arsenal, which ultimately must work together to make your business profitable. Your SEO strategy should align with your business plan. Let's look at some different approaches, and we'll compare them with what we already know about SEO.
Approach 1: "Direct search traffic to my store when someone searches for a technology product."
Getting your website to appear in search results when a customer enters a product name or part number is difficult, as you will be competing with mature, established online marketplaces. If your goal is to run a true e-commerce site, then ChannelOnline is not the ideal tool for you.
ChannelOnline does offer a license called 'Shopping Engine Export' [SEE] which allows you to export a catalog of products, along with key attributes such as Manufacturer Name, Part Number, Store URL, Images, etc... The exported CSV file from the SEE can then be imported into online marketplaces such as shopper.com. This route is an attractive alternative to direct website competition since your products become listed in an established market directly.
Approach 2: "I want to be the best laptop vendor in San Diego."
This is a more focused approach and can actually fit into an SEO strategy. In this example, we've identified two keywords that can be summarized into a search term: San Diego and Laptop.
Since we've identified a business direction and SEO strategy, we can turn this into an actionable plan. Without getting into too much detail, that plan will go a little something like this:
1. Set up your account with Google and use the ChannelOnline StoreSite Admin to configure your Meta Keyword Tags using the Webmaster Tools section.
2. Use the StoreSite Admin to make your web content as original as possible, while mentioning the key search terms from your SEO strategy. Rename the Spotlight and Featured Products sections and write completely new marketing texts for
your featured products. Make a couple of custom tabs and add unique content about your business and the services you offer.
3. Go out and market your site! The more inbound links you can generate, the better off your rankings will be.
Limitations and Workarounds
Of the SEO metrics listed above, ChannelOnline offers the ability to work with some of them via the StoreSite admin.
- Quality of Content - Some of the pages in your ChannelOnline store may be edited for content - ChannelOnline's HTML editors will allow you to provide unique content for those pages. The Marketing Banner Carousel and Featured Products tools will allow you to change your product marketing descriptions as well.
- Quality of your URLs - ChannelOnline does not currently allow you to change the URL structure of your store(s).
- Titles - The only page title that can be modified in ChannelOnline is the title of your 'Home' page via a setting called 'Greeting Text'. This feature can be found under the Messaging section of the ChannelOnline StoreSite Admin.
- Meta Tags - ChannelOnline currently allows for only the Meta Keyword tag to be edited. This value is set on a per-store and custom page basis.
- Crawling - Web page crawling is partially restricted in ChannelOnline as well. A crawler is a search engine utility that scours through your pages and generates an index for the search engine to process. The ChannelOnline home and custom tab pages are crawlable; however, the product pages are not.
- Security – Site security is very important for you and your business. For this reason, ChannelOnline may restrict end contact access based on the type of activity, place of origin, or IP Address.
If the above SEO limitations affect the marketing plan you have in mind for your ChannelOnline store, you may wish to develop and market a website outside of ChannelOnline. A website of your own control can be marketed to the fullest of your ability without any restrictions, since you own the entirety of the site. To take advantage of ChannelOnline's shopping cart and product data, you can either link customers to your ChannelOnline Store URL or iFrame the store into your website.
We hope you found this guide helpful. If you have any additional questions about ChannelOnline's StoreSite capability, please reach out to our support team.
