Search Engine Optimisation, or more commonly referred to as SEO, can significantly impact the amount of traffic you can pull to your online store.
You want the right visitors, because attracting the wrong traffic will fail to covert and is a waste of your valuable time.
If you have an online store, here are the essentials. How many of these have you done?
Create unique content
Quality, unique content is going to have positive outcomes for your ecommerce store. Not only will it add something for your readers, but it will encourage the search engines to keep coming back.
While you should include a blog, and update it regularly, this isn’t the only type of content you need to consider. It is clear that duplicate content could have a negative impact on your SEO efforts, so everything you write needs to be as original as possible.
Instead of copying and pasting common product descriptions, try to change them to your own words. Longer content is always better, and you should be aiming for at least 300 words per page. To avoid overwhelming your readers you can include dot points to break up masses of text.
Choose your keywords carefully
Choosing the right keywords requires some research. You can begin by checking out which keywords your competition are ranking highly for.
If you have a good AdWords account you can use it to discover new, but similar keywords. Long tail keywords can be less competitive than shorter phrases, try to include the product brand in this. In the product title, include any keywords you want to feature, as well as in the body of the text.
Think about what your potential shoppers would be searching for in order to find you. Know your traffic and set yourself realistic goals.
Make sure your site is running efficiently
Your store needs to make sense to both your shoppers and the web crawlers. You should always include breadcrumbs as it allows for easy navigation.
A slow website is going to frustrate your customers, try making your image files smaller and fix anything else which may be causing slow loading times. There are free speed tests available and these can be accessed to gain further information.
You may find your website ranks higher when you have a https:// rather than a http://. At the very least you will increase your customer’s perception on the safety of your brand.
Make sure your website is mobile friendly. This means it should be easy to read, fast loading and resizes to fit a smaller device.
Use tags wisely
Simplify those title tags and try to use header tags to define what is important. Look at your URLs, are they unique?
Make sure you include the product name in the web address and use title tags for all of your products.
Links, links and more links
Building quality backlinks will allow you to collect votes and rank higher in the search engines. The more authority a website has, the more it will boost your own.
Try to get your link on .edu, .gov, .au or similar, and anything which has a good page rank. You can ask to guest post or offer something useful which they may like to include on their resources page.
Don’t forget your internal links – this is where you link back to other relevant pages on your site.
Think about your users
The main goal is to increase conversions. You can do this by including previous customer ratings and reviews, while utilising social media.
In your blog, write product reviews and how to’s with images and video. Make them shareable and you might just find they spread on their own.
Your homepage should be able to direct shoppers and is normally the first stop. You’ve got them there but will you be able to keep them?
What makes you stand out? Many fashion brands have a look book which clicks to the individual product, and this could be modified for different product types.
More and more consumers are shopping online. You can be successful but you have to put in the time. Make sure you have quality products and the correct processes in place for customer satisfaction.
Stay on top of trends and follow the pros, making sure you don’t get stuck in your ways.
SEO should help but the user experience still matters. After all it will be your customers who are completing the checkout, not Google.
We wish you every success for your online store!
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