How do new people find out about your e-commerce store? Is it via word of mouth, paid advertising, or social media posts? Wouldn't it be amazing if your site came up when they search for something related to what you sell? SEO can help!
In this article, we'll take a look at what SEO is, why you need it, and how you can improve your SEO so that more people find out about your business without you needing to spend more money on advertising.
What is SEO?
So, first thing's first: what does SEO actually mean? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It basically involves making your website easy to find on search engines, such as Google or Bing.
SEO helps you drive website traffic and grow your online strategy. If your SEO is good, then your web pages will be more likely to be found organically - that is without you having to pay for these pages to appear at the top of a Google search.
This is important for e-commerce businesses to consider as you want new potential customers to be able to find out about your online store when they search for products like the ones you sell. And you don't want to have to spend your entire marketing budget on paid ads.
The three elements of SEO
There are various components that make up SEO. These can typically be divided into 3 discrete categories:
On-page optimization: which refers to all the measures that you can take within your website to improve its position in search rankings, such as improving your meta descriptions, title tags, server speed, source code, content quality, and including alt-tags, internal links, and URL structure. You might want to think about it this way: on-page SEO refers to the content that tells search engines and readers what your page is about.
Off-page optimization: refers to any effort made outside of your website to improve your search engine rankings, such as being featured in guest posts and linked to on other websites with backlinks. This also includes brand mentions, social media marketing, and influencer marketing. Put another way, off-page SEO tells search engines how popular and useful your page is through votes of confidence from others.
Technical SEO: refers to the technical building blocks that need to be in place to enable search engines to crawl, index, access, and rank your web content and to make it "clickable". This includes choosing a preferred domain, implementing SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to secure your site, optimizing your page speed, creating an XML sitemap, fixing or redirecting broken links, and optimizing your site architecture.
Why is SEO Important for E-commerce Businesses?
By optimizing your website for search engines, you can increase your visibility in search results and attract more traffic to your site, which can result in more clicks, more leads, and more sales.
A website that focuses on SEO may also provide a better user experience for customers, making it easier for them to find what they're looking for and to complete their purchases. This, in turn, will mean that they are more likely to become loyal customers who will spread the word to their friends and family.
Food for thought
As we noted in our article on Shopify benchmarks, providing customers with a simpler checkout process can improve your conversion rates.
Moreover, with the right SEO strategies, you will be able to attract more targeted traffic to your website, meaning that the kind of people who are more likely to buy from you will start clicking on your store. And if you are high up in the list of search results, your brand will be perceived as more credible and trustworthy, which will ultimately lead to increased sales.
How to Implement SEO Strategies
So, now that we've established what SEO is and why you should care about it, the question is: how do you implement an SEO strategy for your business? Here are a few of our top tips:
Do keyword research: identify the keywords and phrases that your target audience (the people you want to buy from you) uses when searching for products or services like yours and include those keywords frequently in your website.
🚨 Warning
Avoid keyword stuffing, i.e. filling your content with the same word or phrase over and over again. Search engines are smart enough to pick up on keyword stuffing and they don't like it. So, yes, use keywords but don't go ham and litter them everywhere.
Optimize your product pages: make sure that your website's content, structure, and code is optimized for search engines to crawl. You can do this by ensuring each page has a title tag (preferably 60 characters or shorter) and meta description (preferably between 110 and 160 characters), header tags (H1, H2, and H3 tags), and images.
Build backlinks: this is a tricky one as getting other pages to link to you requires some relationship building, but if you can get other sites to link to you, especially big and credible sites, then this will improve your ranking greatly. Perhaps you may consider writing guest blogs for other sites as a start.
Technical optimization: this includes ensuring that your website has a logical structure with a user-friendly navigation system, improving the speed at which your pages load by optimizing images, using caching, and minimizing code, and making sure that your site is optimized for mobile devices. Plus, if you move to HTTPS, this will provide greater security and Google typically prefers secure websites.
💡 Pro tip
Every so often, it's a good idea to conduct a site audit with a tool such as Ahrefs to ensure that you don't have any broken links or other technical issues that could lead to you having a poor SEO score.
Over and above these methods, it may be fruitful for you to engage in content marketing - whether that be starting a blog or a monthly newsletter - and posting on social media.
While content marketing is a long game, the rewards can be great for improving SEO, brand awareness, brand credibility, and, ultimately, sales further down the line.
Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid
We've already mentioned keyword stuffing and that this is something to be avoided when creating content on your site, but there are a few other traps you should be aware of when it comes to working on your SEO. Let's take a look at a few of these:
Not knowing your audience: to truly enhance your customers' experience of your site, you need to know who your customers are. As the Search Engine Journal puts it: "SEO is the customer's voice." While you might have a specific way of describing what you do or sell, when it comes to selling this to others, you need to consider the words that your target market would use to describe what they are looking for. By using their language, you are more likely to come up in their searches.
Buying backlinks: yes, it is important to have other sites linking to your site but buying backlinks actually breaks Google's Terms of Service. You cannot exchange money, goods, or services for links and if Google discovers that you have, you may get penalized.
Missing internal link opportunities: if your site has a lot of pages, you have the opportunity to link those pages to each other, which is great for strengthening your SEO. Internal links help Google to discover new content and aid the flow of PageRank around your website.
Make the Most of the Information You Have
In addition to working on your SEO, you may also want to monitor key analytics for your business to see which products are performing the best, which customers you are most reliant on, and when you are likely to run out of inventory. To make the most of your customer and product data, you may want to invest in a tool like Syft that can help you visualize, analyze, and report on your data. By leveraging data analytics tools in this way, you can take action to increase revenue and grow your business.
Key Takeaways
SEO is vitally important for e-commerce businesses as it helps search engines to find and rank your pages which, in turn, helps potential customers to learn about your brand and to consider your business to be trustworthy. However, SEO isn't a one-and-done thing. Building on your SEO is a continuous process and it's something that needs to be continuously monitored so that as your business changes over time, you know that what you've put online is still relevant to your target market.
SEO requires a multi-pronged approach that considers on-page and off-page criteria as well as more technical criteria. Annoying though you may find it, if you optimize your site successfully, you will reap the rewards both in terms of brand awareness and increased revenue down the line. For this reason, SEO is something that should be taken seriously if you want your business to thrive and grow.