Not on the High Street is a retail platform that allows creatives to sell their products to a market of buyers without requiring you to have your own platform, like Shopify. This can save the brands a lot of money in terms of website upkeep, however it comes with its own pros and cons.
If you decide there are more pros than cons, then comes the biggest task - making sure your products stand out from the competition. According to Not on the High Street, there are over 5,500 brands on the platform selling over 350,000 products, all of which are vying for the attention of the same buyers.
So, how do you sell on Not on the High Street? The answer, coming from an SEO blog from SEO Bitch, may not shock you: With SEO!
SEO, which is Search Engine Optimisation, is all about making sure you are meeting the requirements from a particular Search Engine, so that is puts your listings first in the rankings. Not on the High Street (and all platforms, like Etsy) have their own search engine, which is just the search bar that shoppers use to filter through all of the listings to find what they're looking for. And, by following the SEO guidelines, you can put your own product listings toward the top of the results.
How does this work? Well, in simple terms, NOTHS search uses an algorithm (stay with me), which basically takes the input that the buyer types into the search bar, and compares it to the text within the product names, descriptions, and other core sections like alt texts and tags, looking for the same words.
So, for example, if a buyer types "Vanilla Candle" into the search bar, and there is a product listing that has the exact same words 'Vanilla Candle' in the product title and the description, this will be considered a match, and therefore shown to the buyer.
Of course, it's more complicated than that, because it's quite hard to know or guess the exact words that someone might type into the search bar. Then, there are all sorts of rules on how many times you can use those same words (which are called keywords - more about those in my blog on Understanding Keywords).
As part of my efforts as an expert in SEO for small creative businesses, I've put together a free guide on how to best optimise your Not on the High Street product listings so that they follow SEO best practice. If you'd like a copy of this free guide, just email me at bee@seo-bitch.com and I'll send it over to you.
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