Capitalising on the evolution of shopping is one of the best business ideas and can indeed be profitable if you know what to do. E-commerce entrepreneurs invest a substantial amount of resources to start up their business. They spend countless hours researching products, manufacturers, marketplace, e-commerce websites and all the other aspects of an online store. After painstakingly designing the online store and posting products, why are there no customers?
There is a straightforward answer to this question, online shoppers simply cannot find your online store or even the products posted in various marketplaces. There is an art to listing products, and posting them without SEO in mind is a waste of time and resources.
Master Ecommerce SEO
Learning new skills is only natural when entering a new field of business. Building the infrastructure takes a lot of work, now all that’s needed is a little bit of fine-tuning. When the term SEO is thrown around, some business owners might think it’s a complicated process to implement. But really, once you do a bit of digging, you’ll find that optimising for search engines is a matter of following a few steps. All you need to do is adjust the content of the website as well as the product listing itself.
Research and Discover Keywords
Find out what keywords are the most effective to bring more traffic to the website. Figure out what customers search in Google or the various marketplaces like eBay or Amazon to look for the products you offer. Create a comprehensive list of the best possible keywords.
The best way to do that is to extract the data from the website’s GWT(Google Webmaster Tools) account. Retrieve the keywords that drive the most impressions for each product on the site. You can also use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to do more research and discover even more useful keywords. If someone else managing the site then ask them to provide you with the list of keywords relevant to your site and products.
Create original content for the site based off the keywords you found, and the kind of questions shoppers ask about your products. Make sure the content is as SEO friendly as possible. Sites that do not have SEO in mind will get lost in the limbo of the world wide web.
Meta Titles are the clickable words that bring customers to the product listing. Creating an SEO friendly title will help improve the rank of the product listing when a customer searches for the product in Google. The same thing applies to Amazon.
When an online shopper searches for a product, only listings that have taken SEO into account will show up in the first couple of SERPs. Carefully preparing a product listing to be Amazon SEO friendly will give your Amazon listing a boost in product rankings. The same applies to eBay.
The use of header tags to separate different sections of a blog post or sections of a site does more than making the web page more readable. Header tags make the webpage crawl friendly to search engines which also help rank the page for SEO.
Optimise the structure of the site
Maintain a site that keeps each section of its many pages SEO friendly. Ensure that each webpage and every header is correctly themed. Use the keywords that your research uncovered for the headers and other relevant sections of the site.
Make the site easy to navigate for customers. Optimising the structure of the site will drastically increase its visibility via search engines and help customers navigate the site faster as well. This means they will be able to find the products they are looking for easily.
Structuring each aspect of the site to be SEO friendly will also help improve your site’s ranking in search engines. The more those relevant keywords are used on the website, the better it is for the search engine to tag the site as a resource pertinent to those specific set of keywords.
If done correctly, search engines would then list the site among the top results of a search using the relevant keywords to the niche or site. Beware not to use the keywords too often! This is called “keyword stuffing” and can land you with a penalty from Google. The trick is to use your keywords as naturally as possible within the text on your site.
Internal Linking
Once a website goes live, search engines crawl each webpage and every word to index it in their database. Websites that have strong internal linking will rank higher in terms of SEO. When search engines crawl a site with the purpose of indexing it the search engine looks at the relevance of each link to the overall theme of the website. Proper internal linking will help solidify the entire framework of the site.
Each link should correspond to the keywords used on each webpage. The usage of all too obvious anchor text sometimes puts readers and customers off. It is essential to make the anchor text look as natural as possible.
Sure, ranking for the keywords that are important to the niche is crucial but make sure the anchor text flows naturally with the rest of the post or text. Integrate the site with popular social media platforms to help bring traffic directly from those channels.
Enable customers to easily share the products they see, purchase and review on the site. The extensive reach of social media can bring new customers from far and wide right to the product page for a quick purchase.
Optimise product images
When uploading images of products to the website, do not forget to change the file name of that image to a keyword associated with the product. Rename the images to the most popular keywords, slang or alternative names of the product as well. Some sellers ignore this vital step and let the product images keep their default names straight from the camera or downloaded image file.
Rename the photos and upload them so that the search engines know that the images are relevant to the keywords used on the site as well as the whole theme of the niche.
Beware of Duplicate Content
Search engines do not look kindly on websites that use duplicate or copied content. Duplicate content such as product descriptions from the manufacturer is somewhat acceptable but should be clearly marked as such. Google knows that this is just the general information about the product and it will not negatively impact the product listing. However, you should put in some effort to also create a unique product description to make the content entirely original.
But why is duplicate content a problem?
When a person performs a search, the search engine wants to return the most relevant and useful results. If your website has hundreds of pages with duplicate content, the search engine will struggle to determine which of those pages is the most relevant to the user’s search query. If the content on each of your pages is unique, using relevant keywords, then the search engine will be able to better determine which pages are relevant to the user.
Get your e-Commerce site optimised
Optimising an e-commerce site is a systematic process that needs to be meticulously accomplished. Invest in discovering the most effective keywords or long-tail keywords relevant to the site.
Create the most SEO friendly meta titles and headers which can help direct traffic to the site. Use internal linking to connect to other relevant sites to help boost SEO ranking. Rename product images to keywords associated with the product niche.
Learn how to avoid duplicate content or make it work for the site. Make it a point to create original content as often as possible.
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