We all know that Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is instrumental in getting your business to the top of search results on engines such as Google and Bing. SEO can be defined as a holistic effort of all pieces of a business, including social media, marketing, web design, networking and copywriting. 95% of search engine users do not go beyond the first page, which means if your business is not up there in the first 5 results, you’re essentially lost on the web.
Now, if you have an eCommerce website through which you sell your products or services, and all your digital marketing campaigns point back to your webshop, SEO needs to be your number one priority. To put this into perspective, if you optimise your landing page or website content for specific keywords that matter, you can increase your sales exponentially. For example, the term ‘red velvet cupcake’ gets 11,000 searches per month on average. If you have a bakery that makes red velvet cupcakes, and you optimised your content for that particular keyphrase, assuming 35% of those clicks go to the first result (the average across keywords), ranking #1 for that keyword would get you 3,850 clicks. Now let’s say that you have a typical conversion rate of just 10%, ranking #1 for that keyword will get you 385 extra sales per month – for free!
SEO for eCommerce does not have to be difficult, as long as you keep a few key points in mind. If you’d like to read more about the terms used here or learn more about SEO, then check out our learning resources at the Creometric Academy.
Keyword Research
All SEO starts with keyword research, and eCommerce SEO is no different. If you don’t do proper keyword research, you’ll end up either trying to rank for a keyword that is too difficult or words that don’t get a lot of traffic. In the best-case scenario, you want to target keywords that are fairly easy to rank for, have decent search volume and have high conversion rates. Finding the right keywords includes looking at buyer intent, finding keyword difficulty, and search volume.
Site Architecture
After finding the right keywords, it’s time to restructure your site architecture. Most websites don’t do this, however, it is extremely important because the way you set up your site navigation, category, and product pages helps in SEO ranking for the products you sell. You want to get your most relevant content in front of users so that they can find it easily. The key to good site architecture is to make it simple and scalable, should be navigational in the least number of clicks, and use keyword research to create highly relevant page URLs and subdirectories.
On-page SEO
A major priority of SEO is on-page SEO. It’s the process of making sure that your keywords are in the right place with regards to the content that is on your main webpage. This allows search engines such as Google to figure out what exactly that particular page is all about, and rank it accordingly on a SERP. When it comes to SEO for eCommerce, you need to optimise your content for three important pages – the category pages, product pages, and your blog content. It is also important to ensure that images used are optimised for SEO by filling in alt tags, and meta descriptions are written using the keywords required.
Technical SEO
If on-page SEO is what the end-user sees in the form of content, then technical SEO is the stuff that brings it all together (even if they can’t always see it). Technical SEO includes things like user experience, links, site speed, and mobile-friendliness. Essentially, Google’s priority is the user experience of the end-user, so if your site is good for your users, it’s great for Google. You can use a number of different tools like site crawlers to run site audits in order to find out what technical aspects of your site need to be improved.
Local SEO
Local SEO comes into play specifically if you have a physical brick and mortar store. Local SEO revolves around the concept of optimising your site or landing page content to direct footfalls to your store. Another way of doing this though is through Google My Business (GMB). The GMB app for Android is also very useful in this regard. GMB allows a store owner to ‘list’ their establishments on Google with information such as location, store timings, and most importantly, customer reviews. By incorporating off-page SEO techniques like backlinking to your listing on Google, you can greatly improve your local SEO.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is becoming increasingly relevant to Digital Marketing agencies and individuals alike. According to Social Media Today, 45% of marketers say blogging is their #1 strategy, and 70% of people would rather learn about a company through an article than an advert. Additionally, 68% of consumers feel more positive about a brand after consuming content from it. So not only is blog content great from a consumer standpoint but as a digital marketer, it’s a gold mine for SEO since you have a great opportunity to rank for keywords while building backlinks. Having a blog section on your eCommerce website allows you this opportunity since there is only so much you can do with product and category pages.
Link Building
We’ve already looked at backlinks in some capacity so far, so we know that it plays a significant part in SEO. With regards to eCommerce (or really any) sites, Google prioritizes content and links. Since we already have the content in place, let’s discuss building links. Your aim should be to have websites with a higher domain authority linking back to your website or landing page. Off-page SEO is a time-consuming process, and often requires collaboration with other website owners. You can request backlinks by getting in touch with domain owners and asking them to if they can give you dofollow links back to your site.
Measuring SEO success
Any and everything you do in the pursuit of SEO is pointless if you can’t measure success. Unfortunately, this more of a challenge that analyzing advertising insights or engagement. Having your website grow through the rankings takes time, but it is indeed measurable. SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs allow you to track progress and continually check for improvements in keyword rankings etc. You can even use Google Analytics to set up a dashboard and present data direct from Google, however, only the latter is a free service.
eCommerce SEO is tedious and time-consuming, but by taking the effort to research and implement all these tips in your digital marketing strategy, you’ll be on your way to drastically improve your rankings and converting leads to sales. On the other hand, if you’d rather have a professional agency take over all the heavy lifting, get in touch with us at Creometric today.
