Ecommerce allows you to share your brand and create an online presence, but people will only know about it if they find your website. This is where search engine optimisation (SEO) comes into play.
Your business needs to use SEO if you want to gain more traffic and improve your sales. With this in mind, we have five of the best SEO practices that you can apply to your ecommerce marketing strategy to help your website grow.
1.Plan your starting point
If you want to work on your SEO, you need to create a plan. Doing so will help you decide where you should start. For example, you could begin by researching keywords or updating your product pages. If you don't know where to start improving your SEO strategy, you should look into some of the starting points recommended by marketers.
SEO isn't a one-off project; it requires constant updates and optimisation. However, you can start by creating a well-optimised foundation and making improvements as you go. For example, keyword optimisation, technical SEO and optimising existing content are the most recommended starting points. Ideally, you'd want to create content for your site with SEO in mind from the off, but this isn't always the situation for ecommerce marketers.
2.Use social media
Social media has become one of the most popular forms of communication. Many businesses use social media to increase brand awareness while they interact with their customers. It might seem like social media won't impact your SEO, but it makes sense when you look at the statistics.
Google loves sites that are updated frequently with fresh content, and since social media networks are constantly updated with user-generated content, they have tons of SEO clout. This means that yes, social networks are indexed in search engines, and your social pages will be indexed too. You can use this to leverage your own site's ranking until you build up your own.
As you can see, more than 1-in-3 users say that social networks are their main inspiration for online purchases. This means that your customers want to learn about your business through social media and they expect you to have a presence on social networks. If your business uses social media, then you can improve your SEO in multiple ways.
- Optimise your social profiles for the keywords you're trying to get your site to rank for.
- Leverage social networks' internal search engines to drive traffic to your page (and site).
- Create CTAs to drive more traffic to your site and products.
Social media will allow your business to grow and gain more customers, so it's important that you utilise it if you want your website to succeed.
3.Cross-promote to gain traffic
SEO requires you to get more people onto your website. If people don't visit your website, then the search engine algorithms won't recognise it as important. This will cause your website to drop in the search engine rankings. If you struggle with website traffic, then you should try and cross-promote your website by creating content and sharing it on other platforms.
Here are a few examples of ways that your businesses can cross-promote its website by using content on other channels.
- Making social media posts that mention new products and articles with corresponding links.
- Creating blog posts that include hyperlinks to your product pages.
- Offering deals in your email newsletter that send people to your website.
- Communicating on LinkedIn or other social networks where your audience spends time.
Many businesses create content for Facebook, their website, Instagram, YouTube, and many other channels, as shown in this image. If you want to cross-promote, then you need to figure out which channels you should use to send those users to your website.
4.Create a blog
SEO also involves creating new content for people to view. It can be difficult to constantly create new content or update your website, so many businesses create blogs. As many blogs have tons of text for search engines to crawl, it makes it easy to update your site with fresh content. For this to work, the blog post typically needs to be longer than 300 words. What's more, these blog posts offer a great opportunity to rank for keywords that are related to the main keywords of your site.
As you can see here, adding a blog to your website can lead to a 400% increase in your search engine ranking. If you want to optimise your blog as much as possible for search engines, then you should strive to post weekly, throughout the week, or daily if possible.
However, make sure that your blog's content relates to your business. For example, if you offer online tutoring services, then you can create posts about the industry, education, and how an online environment can help children to learn. There are many good examples of Shopify SEO tactics.
The idea behind these posts is to drive people who would be interested in your products to your online store. Creating a blog post on a subject that has nothing to do with your brand, no matter how interesting it is, will do nothing for your site. Make sure that you spend some time planning out the blog so you can create high-quality content that relates to your business.
5.Improve your product pages
Some businesses become so focused on creating new content that they forget about updating and improving their existing pages. You should spend some time improving your website's product pages by updating them with features and details that your users will care about.
The image (above) shows which features users value the most, so you should look into those aspects of your product pages. For example, product images are the most important feature to users, so if you don't post images of your products, then you should add them to your page. This way, you can focus on the aspects of your page that customers care about.
While search engines primarily crawl text to index pages and search results, you can optimise the images on your site by making sure to add your relevant keywords to alt text, descriptions, captions, and image titles.
On top of this, search engines will prioritise websites that have been recently updated since they care about relevance and recency. So not only will you draw in more customers, but you will improve your SEO as you update, maintain, and improve your product pages.
Conclusion
Part of optimising for SEO is putting yourself in your customers' shoes and asking yourself what they'd search for to find your products. By making your site searchable and optimising for the things your customers are already looking for, you can increase your site traffic and your sales. These five practices will help you to see what you need to change in your digital marketing strategy and how you can fine tune your SEO.
If you look through these practices and apply them to your ecommerce website, then you will help your business to succeed.
Copyright 2020. Article made possible by Laura Narušytė. Laura is an experienced digital marketing and SEO specialist at Omnisend - Ecommerce Marketing Automation platform.