Bridgette Hernandez
As an online marketer building an eCommerce empire, you are always looking for new ideas and ways to tap into potential new audiences. Without attracting new visitors, you can’t have exponential growth in your business.
Therefore, it’s essential to find a winning formula of strategies that will keep your customers returning and attract new ones. Among all other marketing channels, organic traffic coming from search engines can be the most valuable source of new customers. Organic visitors are more likely to make a purchase than visitors coming from other channels.
Search engine optimization is also one of the most cost-effective ways for brands to promote themselves: the costs are relatively low (especially if you craft the content yourself), and the rewards can be huge.
This is why it’s impossible for an eCommerce site to ignore the power and potential of search engine optimization. If you want to achieve the best possible results from your SEO content and boost your sales, read our step-by-step advice:
Before You Start: Get an SSL Certificate
When you run an online store, you have to make sure that all of your customer data is encrypted and handled in a secure way. For most websites, the most appropriate way to do this is to acquire an SSL certificate.
SSL is a technology that will encrypt all the personal and financial details that your customers enter into your site, so it couldn’t be viewed and abused by third parties.
Google and other search engines highly value security certificates: as an online store, if you don’t have a secure connection, you’re going to have a very hard time ranking high on search engines. That’s why purchasing an SSL certificate for your eCommerce domain is the initial step before continuing to optimize your website’s SEO.
1. Do Proper Keyword Research
Before you even start creating your content marketing plan, thorough and detailed keyword research is in order. There are many free tools that you can use to find keyword suggestions, such as Word Tracker or KeywordTool.io.
Keyword volumes and competition will show you which topics to focus on. If you want to take your content marketing seriously, you should base your blog posts based on your intuition on what the audience is interested in. There is loads of data out there, and it’s yours for the taking.
Try starting with a basic list of primary keywords that your online store to rank high with and then develop an in-depth list of secondary keywords to place in descriptions and scatter through blog posts.
Utilize the power of search engine queries and tailor high-quality content that will rank well and be relevant to your customers.
2. Set Realistic Expectations
Many keywords are simply too competitive to be tackled by a new online store. For example, if you are selling women’s dresses, it would be downright impossible to rank #1 on Google for the search term “dress”.
In order to find your audience and develop successful relationships with returning customers, you have to go much more niche than that. In this case, it would be much easier to rank for keywords such as “cool floral summer dress” (still very competitive!) or “what to wear with a floral summer dress”.
Aim to rank high on some of your category pages or pages of individual products through good use of keywords.
3. Focus on long-tail keywords
In line with the previous advice, shorter keywords are usually much more competitive and you will be better off focusing on specific long-tail keywords of four words or more.
“Most marketers focus on short and straightforward keywords that are usually highly competitive. Nevertheless, you can reap many benefits by focusing on long-tail keywords. Also, the traffic coming from these keywords will likely convert better”, advises Kristin Savage, a writer at GrabMyEssay.
Let’s use our previous dress example coupled with suggestions from WordTracker. A good example for a blog post would be “how to dress for a job interview”. This is a long tail keyword that has a high search volume on Google and you can embed your own products into the article.
4. Use Versatile Resources and Tools
These days, there are so many writing and proofreading online tools available that there’s simply no excuse to write bad content. Whether you want to improve the style of your content, get writing suggestions or find professionals who will do content marketing for you, it’s very easy to find what you’re looking for.
To craft content that converts and attracts organic visitors to your online store, you can use services such as TrustMyPaper, iWriter or Studicus. On these platforms, you can find experts that will write SEO-friendly content tailored to your business.
When you have the final version of your content, it’s important to re-read through it and spot potential mistakes. For online stores, it’s extremely important that your promotional texts and blog posts are perfect because they help to build your reputation and level of professionalism.
To make sure your content is pitch-perfect, you can use some of the proofreading and editing tools such as Grammarly or ProWritingAid (recommended by Writer’s Digest).
5. Optimize URLs, Headings, Meta Titles and Descriptions
Performing an all-around online store SEO optimization goes much deeper than optimizing keywords in your content. If you want to optimize your eCommerce site to the max, you will also have to take care of many other details.
Firstly, make sure that your URLs are not bulky and that they also follow target keywords. This is especially important for product pages and categories.
Secondly, you should pay attention to all the details that are “behind the scenes” when you upload a product description or a blog post. Make sure every single bit of your online store text is optimized, from meta titles and tags to buttons and menus.
Conclusion and Final Advice: Keep Up With the Trends
Like many other fields in digital marketing, search engine optimization has been boiled down to a science. By following the exact advice laid out by some of the top experts in the field, you can dramatically boost your traffic and sales.
You can hardly find an industry where SEO content has such a direct and powerful impact as it does in eCommerce. So, if you run an online store, you definitely shouldn’t miss out on the potential it has.
As an endpoint, remember to have fun! Content is a great way of communicating with your audience and sharing your knowledge, while SEO is just a boost that allows you to reach wider audiences. Allow the world to see your products and share your industry recommendations in your own online store’s blog!