Gaining traffic is a crucial aspect of your website. After all, more traffic means more sales. As an e-commerce seller, rising above your competitors on Google is a must. However, most online retailers have unique SEO considerations than most websites out there. But how do you step up your SEO game? Whether you’re starting out, or looking to improve your site, you have to realize that landing on the first page isn’t enough.
So, how do you build a solid e-commerce SEO strategy? Here is an in-depth strategic guide to gaining more leads, driving more sales, and landing that coveted #1 spot.
Research Your Long-Tail Keywords
You need to come up with a solid keyword strategy. It’s critical to know the long-tail keywords related to the particular industry you’re in as well as the products you offer.
Short-tail keywords are usually related to product and landing pages, lead magnets, as well as blog posts that are designed to target certain related content and specific search queries.
Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, focus is on solving whatever problems, queries, and questions your readers. Then, finding a viable solution to these long-tail concerns.
Although most keyword strategies will focus on both of these at some point, it’s vital that you have a good grasp of your customer’s lifecycle and level of brand loyalty. You first need to identify the specific keyword strategy that works well for your company.
Optimize Your Pages around Your Keywords
Once you’ve come up with those targeted long-tail keywords, you need to optimize your site around those keywords properly. There are specific steps that you can do this:
First, always use shorter URLs. Take note that Google prefers shorter URLs over longer ones. John Mueller said, via-Google hangouts, that they prefer shorter form URLs over longer ones.
Second, try to make your site’s product pages at least 1,000 words long. If you have some difficulty coming up with at least a 1,000-word article, you can try adding product descriptions and its possible uses. Additionally, you can feature positive reviews from satisfied customers. Doing so makes your page look more credible because you went out of your way to produce a well-researched page that’s useful to your target audience.
Give Google as much useful content as possible. A well-researched and in-depth 2,000-word article about the top marketing trends in 2018 is preferred over a 500-word article of the same material.
Third, your keywords need to be strategically placed. Ideally, it should appear at least three to five times throughout your site’s pages. Be wary of keyword stuffing though. Google will know if you’re just trying to jam irrelevant keywords in your entire article and penalizes websites who are doing this tactic. As a result, this can significantly affect your rankings. It doesn’t help if your goal is to land targeted search traffic on your site.
Finally, try adding internet links. If ever you have a high authority page that gains a lot of traffic and has been linked to many times over, use that to your advantage. From there, you can link from that page to the other product pages on your site.
Create Content around Your Products
The web is filled with mediocre content. So, how do you produce a type of material that stands out? Essentially, you can start a company blog and start creating quality articles that are useful to your audience. That way, this can help with generating search traffic as well.
Focus on high-quality product images and content that captures your reader’s attention. Google loves well thought out, well- researched material that proves to be useful to a specific audience. The goal here is to solve most people’s problems. For example, if you’re in the health and wellness niche, you can write an article that explains how regular exercise and a healthy diet can help reach one’s fitness goals. You can then link your products or service somewhere on the page.
It may be tempting to write shorter content for your site, but it’s better to go in depth as much as possible. Give your readers exactly what they need and Google will reward you with higher search rankings.
Use Analytics to drive your E-commerce Strategy
If you’re an entrepreneur, you should invest in data analytics. Do you know that only 20% of online retailers are making use of data to improve their website performance? Most e-commerce business owners hardly have time to check and measure critical metrics, but this is a crucial mistake that you shouldn’t make.
If you want to improve your marketing efforts, gaining access to data analytics is the best way to leverage your business from the rest of your competitors. It will give you valuable insights into the ever-changing trends in marketing. Moreover, you’ll be able to interpret vital customer behavior that can have a significant impact on your business, then prepare techniques for other marketing tactics designed to work based on your insights. As a result, it helps you better understand who your specific audience is, know what their needs are, and how to cater to them effectively.
Having an in-depth and integrated analytics approach will prove to be valuable if you want to step up your e-commerce strategy. If you want to know more on how to use analytics to build an effective e-commerce strategy, here’s a guide about e-commerce analytics for beginners from Shopify.
Conclusion
The concepts behind coming up with an effective e-commerce SEO strategy is simple. However, the results aren’t seen overnight. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It does take time to put these strategies in motion effectively. Once everything falls into place, the results will pay off. Before you know it, you’ll be landing more leads and driving up more sales for your business.