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Designing a beautiful online store is only the first step in building a successful e-commerce business. The hours and days spent creating the site can feel wasted if no one knows it exists.

That’s where visibility comes in—making sure your brand and store are discoverable and trusted everywhere a shopper is looking across any medium, whether that is traditional search engines, social networks, marketplaces, or answer engines powered by artificial intelligence (AI). 

It’s also about ensuring that your listing is available, promoted, and provides the right level of detail so that shoppers can make their purchases, and so you attract more customers and make more sales.

“You can offer the perfect product, but if it cannot be seen then it might as well not exist,” says Z Mladenovic, SVP of Global Solutions and Field CTO at Commerce, the parent company of e-commerce powerhouse . “Small retailers begin at a disadvantage because they lack relevance that established retailers have built over time. It is not possible to immediately build a brand that will outrank the many larger established competitors.”

Even still, small retailers can win by knowing how, when, and where to promote their products. “Large brands will focus on their brand. A new, small brand must focus on its differentiation—better products, locally made products, target audiences, philanthropic endeavors,” Z points out. “Do not focus on being just as good. Be different, be relevant, be visible.”

If you’re a small online retailer, here are several ways to increase visibility, attract more customers, and make more sales.

Get your online store ready

The notion that if you build it, customers will automatically come, doesn’t cut it. However, a strong website should be the foundation upon which everything else is built.

Your e-commerce site should be designed to represent your mission, value proposition, product assortment, and brand differentiation. The site should feel robust and be highly customizable.

“A basic template cannot do that,” Z notes. “You need a platform that lets you change your design often enough to differentiate from every other store running the same theme. This matters because every dollar spent on search engine optimization (SEO), paid search, or shopping ad listings is just paying to send someone to your site. Land them somewhere generic and that spend is wasted.” 

You’ll also want to optimize for site structure and page loading speed. There’s no point sending someone to a site they can’t easily navigate or where the pages take forever to load.

Make sure customers can find you

Once you’re confident that your online store is ready, the next step is increasing visibility. In other words, making sure customers can find you. 

In e-commerce, this process requires an understanding of several strategies with different acronyms. Here are a few that online sellers should know:

SEO: Stands for —improving your website and its content to help your pages organically rank higher in results pages on search engines such as Google, Bing, and others.

SEM: This stands for . It’s also called paid search. An online seller pays for advertising to increase visibility on those search results pages.

AEO: Stands for answer engine optimization—namely, the practice of formatting and structuring your site’s content so that AI search engines and digital assistants select it as an answer.

GEO: (GEO) refers to optimizing your site’s content, so it appears within search queries on AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

GEM: Like SEM, except for AI tools. It stands for generative engine marketing.

Z recommends trying these in phases: organic first, paid search next, AI placement after—not all at once. Whether you attempt to manage this all yourself or wind up hiring a third-party marketer, it’s important for online sellers to be aware of these different awareness strategies.

“SEO still outranks AEO and GEO, so if you can only pick one, start there,” he says. “SEM is still the fastest way to buy traffic to your site. GEM, meanwhile, is a newer channel that only opened earlier this year but garners dramatically increasing traffic and, as such, demands a strategy as it continues to evolve and mature.”

Enrich your product data

Search engines, AI answer engines, and marketplaces all rank and cite based on the depth and structure of your product information, not just the product itself. “That means you need complete titles, attributes, specifications, quality images, and structured data or schema markup that AI engines can pull directly into an answer,” Z explains. 

is code, or microdata, that you include on your website to help search engines provide more relevant and useful results to users. It assigns meaning to your page’s content, rather than simply telling the search engine what the page says. “Thin or inconsistent product data is invisible to search algorithms and AI models alike, no matter how good the product is,” he says. 

Rich data can also help close the sale once someone arrives at your site. Detailed specifications and imagery can answer questions before the customer must ask. “Centralize product data in a product information management system (PIM) or your commerce platform’s catalog tools so every channel—site, search, AI and marketplaces—pulls from one accurate source,” Z recommends.

Sell where your customers shop

From the various social media sites to popular ad channels and marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, Google Shopping, and even within AI searches, one mistake many small online sellers make is trying to be everywhere at once. They believe casting the widest proverbial net will catch the most customers. Instead, Z lays out why it’s important to determine who you want to sell to, understand where they already shop, and focus your efforts on those specific channels.

“This multiplies your points of discovery without asking customers to change their behavior,” he advises. “Connect your site to those channels , so you manage one set of product data and assets and syndicate everywhere, instead of re-entering listings channel by channel.”

Doing so helps keep pricing, inventory, and content consistent no matter where the customer finds you. According to Z, “This approach guarantees you are selling where your customers shop today as well as where new channels and preferences evolve.” 

Measure what works and invest there

The final step should be an ongoing one: Measuring what’s working and reinvesting there. This allows you to double down on what’s converting instead of spreading budget and effort across areas that underperform.

“Hard metrics are always in play, such as organic SEO traffic that’s softening but still necessary as a baseline, or and traffic on paid channels,” explains Z. “Newer metrics matter too, such as recommendation rate on AI answer engines, which tracks how often you’re surfaced as the answer rather than just mentioned.” 

“From a performance marketing lens,” he continues, “conversion rate and gross merchandise value (GMV) impact tied back to each awareness channel matter more than raw traffic. Set up conversion tracking and attribution from day one, review channel performance at a regular cadence, and reallocate spend from underperforming channels to the ones proving out.”

From getting your website ready, to optimizing product data, to employing a combination of awareness strategies, and measuring what works, increasing your e-commerce site’s visibility and attracting more customers is doable—even for small online sellers.

to learn more about how BigCommerce can help online sellers set up and grow their e-commerce businesses.