If you believe that attracting customers to your physical store is a challenge, know that giving your online store enough visibility to find it can be even more difficult. With a large number of ecommerce sites competing for buyers’ attention and offering similar products, you need to make sure your online store stands out. This is where SEO comes in.
What is SEO and how to optimize your SEO?
What is search engine optimization (SEO)? It’s the process of getting a higher ranking on search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing) for a website, through unpaid search marketing or what we call “organic” efforts “. When a person types a keyword or phrase in a search engine, it generates a list of web pages that are sorted so that the most relevant results appear at the top of the page. The top of the results page displays paid ads followed by organic (or unpaid) search results. The bottom line is to understand that internet users tend to click more on the results found on the first page of GoogleSo you want to make sure that your site appears in the first results.
By making SEO changes to your online store, users will be able to easily find your site on the search engines. How can you use SEO to improve your ecommerce site? Just follow these basic tips:
Tip # 1: Invest in Keyword Research
Imagine that you own a pet store that sells all natural cat and dog foods. You finally open an online store because you want to sell both in-store and online . However, there are already thousands of competitors more visible than you. How to differentiate yourself from your online competitors?
Your SEO keywords are the keywords and phrases on your website that help users find your site on Google, Yahoo or Bing. For example, if you want to optimize for the keyword “iPad” in the title and body of your web page, you should include your keywords on your page in a consistent and natural way. This will help Googlebot (bots) better understand the content of your site. Later, Google will rank your site better and users will be able to find you more easily.
Conducting keyword searches for your website is just one of the first steps you need to follow in order to be found by your potential online customers. What is keyword research? This means finding phrases or keywords that you use to describe your products online. They are based on research volume, level of competitiveness, and other criteria.
By writing your content with the most relevant keywords for the products or services you are selling online, you will be able to help potential customers better find what they are looking for. There is a wide variety of tools made for keyword research that you can use online:
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a keyword planning tool. The tool gives you the level of competitiveness of search terms, the average amount of monthly searches that keywords receive, as well as new suggestions for phrases you have not thought of. You can also search for keywords and filter them by language or country to see how they vary. For example, for the keywords “natural dog food” and “organic cat food”, you can see below that they are very competitive and highly sought after among users. Once you have chosen the keywords you want to use, Google Keyword Planner allows you to add them to your list and download the file.
Tip # 2: Write Relevant Blogs
Finding the right keywords for your products is just the beginning of creating your online store. You will also need an ecommerce platform that has blog features and allows you to view your publications easily. By posting blogs and engaging content, you can build a personal relationship with your users and improve your search engine rankings. The more visitors you have on your website, the more Google sees your site as credible, thus moving you further to the top of the results page. By posting relevant and engaging blogs on your website regularly, you can increase traffic and even sales online.
For example, with a useful and relevant article about a dog food recipe, you give yourself an opportunity to see users who are specifically looking for it to land on your site, and possibly buy a product. Writing tips and articles not only helps you keep in touch with your customers, but also helps you earn points with Google search engines.
Tip # 3: Optimize pages with titles and meta tags
Optimizing your web pages with titles and metadata not only allows Googlebots to crawl and index your pages faster, but also allows you to better promote your online store in organic Google results. What exactly are titles and metadata?
Meta title
A meta-title describes the name of your online store and what you sell. It’s a 60 to 70-character title displayed on the results pages. In this case, the title is “Organic food for cats and dogs | Natura Pet Foods “.
Meta Description
A meta-description is a short text of about 160 characters that summarizes the content of a page. In this example, the meta-description is “Natura Pet Foods offers natural food for cats and dogs. Get a free sample for your pet today! ” Be sure to also include a call to action that will encourage users to make a purchase or try your product.
Keywords meta
Meta keywords are search terms for which you want to be found by search engines. By inserting your targeted keywords into the meta keywords box on each page, you can easily view the content for users who are searching for your products online. Most e-commerce platforms have a feature that allow you to add them.
Implementing your own titles, keywords and descriptions on the pages of your website is necessary to be found online. With an integrated e-commerce SEO tool such as Lightspeed, you can easily create headings and product descriptions giving your online store what it needs to be found at the top of the search engines.
Tip # 4: Be present on social networks
Social networks play an important role in promoting your online business. In fact, there are different ways to use social networks to help you develop your online store. However, they do not do it alone: you need content marketing, SEO and social media must be used together for a winning strategy.
Social media and content marketing can help your site rank on search engines. Assuming many readers share your blogs on Facebook or Twitter, Google will start promoting your website and move your site to the top of the rankings. Here’s what you need to keep in mind when writing content for your customers:
Understand your target market
It is important to identify your target market as this will define the type of content you will publish. The creation of personas buyers is a great way to start. Think about your audience: how old are they? What interests them? In which sectors do they work? It’s important to identify the type of customers who may be interested in your product so that you can write custom content. Your customers will be much more likely to share your blogs, this will increase your ranking on the search engines.
Share first, sell later
When customers are looking to buy a product, they do not want to hear an arrogant sales pitch. So, how can you sell your products without running away from your customers? Instead of trying to sell them something, try to find a solution to their problems and create useful content around it. Fortunately, thanks to search engines, it’s easy for people to find information available online for free. If you can show them how your product can help them and meet their needs, they will be more inclined to buy your products.
Tip # 5: Track your e-commerce sales with Google Analytics
You’ve imported all your products, searched for keywords, and set up all your social networking accounts. What else do you have to do? One of the most important tools you need to manage your e-commerce effectively is a system that tracks your site traffic and online sales. Without any form of e-commerce tracking, it would be almost impossible to know the level of success of your online efforts.
Google Analytics and Ecommerce Tracking
Implementing Google Analytics UA code on your site is the first step to take. With the identifier in place, you can see usage data for your website such as sessions, traffic source, bounce rate, landing pages and more. You can also see which landing pages receive the most traffic and make changes to those pages.
For example, you observe the data collected on Google Analytics and you notice a small percentage of traffic to your product page. To increase your traffic, you can add more detailed product descriptions or even make changes to the way your articles are displayed on this page. You can then test it for a few weeks and see how these changes have affected your traffic, sales, or bounce rate. By testing what works and what does not, you can dramatically increase the amount of organic traffic to your website.
Once you’ve implemented Google Analytics code on your site, the next important step is enabling and configuring ecommerce tracking . Setting up the e-commerce feature on Google Analytics allows you to track the transactions your customers are making. It also gives you an overview of your product revenue, the number of products sold on a specific date, the number of purchases made and much more. With this feature, you can easily find out which products are selling well, which ones are not selling well and you can see the maximum ROI on your ecommerce site.
Reporting dashboards
Many e-commerce platforms offer built- in reporting tools that make it easy to track sales. With a reporting tool for your robust e-commerce such as Lightspeed, you can generate sales data, customer information and product data – all on a dashboard.
Having your online store equipped with a reporting tool gives you the opportunity to track the progress of your sales, but also to see if your web pages are well optimized.
Now that you have basic knowledge of how to use SEO, social media and content marketing, you can start updating your online store to rank higher than your competitors.