When it comes to SEO, there are proven methods that work, however, just as any strategy, some of your SEO efforts might bring better results than others. It is a trial and error. However, smart people learn on errors of others and employ best practices in the industry to minimise their risks. This article is for those of you, who want to know proven and time-tested SEO best practices to learn from.
Year by year eCommerce business is gaining great popularity all around the world and becoming an inseparable part of people’s life. No matter if you are a newcomer or an industry expert, you need to put a lot of effort to keep ahead of the competition.
In our highly digitized world, online marketing is the main key of your success. It is a type of investment that guarantees your business growth. However, you need to understand all its nuances, advantages and disadvantages, and which tactics are ideal for your business needs. That’s why it is good to consider digital marketing courses to understand your needs and practices you should apply.
One of the very important parts of digital marketing is considered to be SEO. Especially for an eCommerce website, it brings relevant traffic, that is ready to convert, without spending any money.
SEO for eCommerce websites is a critically important marketing strategy. Why? Just analyse how well your website is optimized for search engines and you’ll see it that it covers many important issues your business may face.
The role of SEO is gaining visibility and high ranking in search engines bringing that highly desired organic traffic to your website. When it comes to implementing the best SEO strategies for your online store, first of all, you need to understand what SEO is and what it includes:
On-page SEO refers to the content and HTML, for instance:
Technical SEO refers to the process of indexing and interpreting your website:
Off page SEO refers to the details that do not have a direct connection to your website, however, is an integral part of it:
Taking into consideration the statistics of SEO 2019, you can see that it is the most stable source of gaining traffic and boosting sales for the coming years as well. It will take you time to have better results in terms of quantity and quality, however, its results will last longer than you can expect.
Before starting your SEO “journey”, first of all, you need to find out where to start from. There are a lot of contemporary SEO trends that really work, however with the marketplace novelties, each year some changes take place. As your SEO success depends on your marketing approaches, let us have a look at SEO best practices that can bring tangible results if done properly!
Choosing proper keywords is the key element of getting more search engine visibility and quality traffic. They can either help to build your eCommerce business or ruin it, everything depends on your actions.
As the saying goes, learn from the best! eCommerce giant Amazon
When optimizing a website, you should put a great emphasis on picking relevant keywords, as it is a fundamental ranking signal for Google.
With the help of keywords, you attract the right audience. Plus, with the right keyword strategy, you rank higher on SERP. When researching keywords for your SEO strategies you should take into consideration several important points:
Among
Your content should be unique and informative. It should bring you more traffic, leads, conversions as well as social shares. Your content should answer queries completely and be simple for the reader.
When going deeper into the stories of the SEO best practices implemented by the companies, you can never ignore the brilliant strategies of “OPTUM”, which reached success due to its content marketing strategies. “OPTUM” finds that nothing can drive people to buy more than information.
For getting a positive user experience and a positive “image” in search engines you need to pay proper attention to your website URLs. It is the text-structure which makes communication between your server and computer. You can provide the idea of page destination through a well-optimized URL.
Using relevant keywords in your URLs is also a great ranking factor. It plays a role in the process of making your website easily accessible for searchers. So, when creating your URLs try to keep it short and simple, following the standard structures.
There are cases when anchor text is absent. In that case the URLs contain at least one outgoing anchor link that can serve as an anchor text.
Title tags are an integrated part of search engine optimization, so it demands a high level of attention. When speaking about title tags, the first thing that you should remember is its length. You should be attentive to keep your titles in a proper length, otherwise search engines may cut them off, harming their value. In this case searchers will find it difficult to read them.
Overdoing your SEO keywords in your title tags will have a negative impact as well. So, you can make a plan including each of the important details to keep you off negative experience. You need to include relevant titles to show the uniqueness of your website.
Paying attention to SEO does not mean forgetting about your customers. So, besides SEO factors, you should remember to create them in a way to attract searchers and target them.
Meta descriptions help searchers to understand what the website is about.
It is the summarized option of your website content. It is a great way to catch your audiences’ attention with the underlined keywords included in the meta description.
You should attract your audience with your meta descriptions and encourage them to visit your website. Which means that you should be one step ahead of your competitors.
Google finds page speed an important ranking factor. People prefer websites which are fast and easy to navigate.
Speed has a huge impact on User Experience. If a visitor spends too much time on the website loading, they will go to other similar websites and will hardly come back again. Such type of websites stay behind from their competitors.
However, improving your website speed is not a hard task. You just need to pay proper attention to it and check the speed regularly, constantly working on improving it. Among the factors that affect your website speed in SEO best practices the loading speed of your website is a top issue. Improving the speed of your website will improve SEO rankings in search engines and lead to more conversions.
When it comes to speed performance of an eCommerce website, we can learn a thing or two from bestbuy.com. The website loads in less than one second, which is 18 times faster than your “average Joe” slow website.
Having a mobile friendly website is a must on the list of your SEO activities. People use mobile phones everywhere they go. It means that they should have an opportunity to connect to you whenever and wherever they want. When building a website, be attentive to optimize it for all types of devices (including mobile gadgets, computers, etc.). If people find it difficult to navigate, they will change their mind and go to your competitors.
Among the main reasons of building a mobile-friendly website you can keep in mind the following:
A great example can be Shutterfly that has cultivated its own strategy to make its website mobile friendly. It has a targeted approach of sharing information. It’s really easy to browse their website, which allows people to quickly find and make a buying decision.
Setting up an internal linking strategy can boost your SEO. Google need links in order to find your content and get information about the structure of your website. Links help Google to make an idea about the content value.
Evaluating and improving your internal linking strategies are very important for the ranking of your website. Your strategies inform search engines about the relevance of your website and the relationship between different ones. In the section of link schemes Google gives you an overall idea about link-building tactics, which can negatively impact on your ranking.
If you don’t know how to do it correctly, you can always turn to EO experts success stories and their experiences. It will help you in your link-building process.
This clickable text in a hyperlink has a significant role for search engines. You need to use them in a relevant context and they should point to topic-related content. If not, they will fail to send relevant signals and your ranking will be low.
It means that your content and the topic of the source page should share similar intent. With the help of the Penguin update Google will easily understand if there is a relevancy of the linked website.
These signals refer to the social media visibility and its connections to search engines. It has a direct impact on SEO, as Google refers to them as a ranking signal. It means that each activity in social media platforms (including shares, likes, reviews, etc.) can impact your website ranking in search engines.
Although SEO completely differs from social media marketing, it is worth mentioning in the SEO best practices. Why? Your ranking depends on your website visitors and conversions.
Although according to Google there is no direct link between your social activity and ranking, the correlation between popular sites on social media and high ranking sites on search engines is evident. Plus, Bing algorithm takes into account your social media presence when ranking your site.
Thus, make sure you pay proper attention to your social media activity and share as many links to your website and relevant content as you can, since those links will bring traffic to your website, and as such will improve your rankings.
There are a lot of companies who have succeeded in this tactic. However, let us have a look at Starbucks. Being involved in almost all social media channels, it has become an example for a number of advertisers. After Starbucks created its own platform called “My Starbucks Idea”, where people share opinions.
SEO for ecommerce websites is an inseparable part of leading an eCommerce business. There are many SEO services for eCommerce websites to bring your business to its final goal. Implementing SEO best Practices is important, however it is worth mentioning that with the coming changes they are always updated.
Dealing with these changes helps you to keep your place steady in the growing competition. Before implementing SEO tactics you need to understand the main role of SEO for your website. It can give your business more than you can expect. Understanding this cost-effective marketing strategy helps you to understand online marketplace.
Through SEO you can overcome the challenges that the online world has prepared for your eCommerce business. The benefits of SEO are many. Among the main benefits we can mention that:
These benefits are endless and the list can be continued. In short, it is the smartest investment that you can make in your marketing strategies. In case you face any type of difficulty when making a decision in your SEO strategies, never mind! There are a number of eCommerce SEO agencies that can help you on your business path.
