Of course, ranking high in search results gives your business an edge over your competitors. Higher ranking means more clicks, which eventually results in more sales. So missing out on clicks means you are losing out on sales.
A blog post on Neil Patel website quotes a research study by Optify. According to the study, “websites that ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent, and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent.”
Backed by another study by Gabe Donnini that shows, “share of the impression that comes from the first position doubles the impressions for the second position. SO ranking #1 brings more value than what followed.
In more simple words, it is crucial to have a strong strategy. Or you are likely to lose out on brand impressions, clicks and so on sales.
But how can you do? You don’t know anything about the SEO. Do not worry. All you need is just follow this guide that will equip with you all it takes for an effective SEO strategy in easy steps.
STEP1. KEYWORD RESEARCH
To get ahead of the competition, you must know what keywords are trending your field. This means you should know what keywords would be most appropriate for your business. Keyword research is a key to an effective and powerful SEO strategy.
To optimize the most important pages on your website, you must consider some crucial things such as relevancy, search volume and ranking difficult of a keyword.
Use the keywords that are highly relevant to your brand or products that you are targeting, have a high exact match search volume in Google free AdWords Keyword tool, and have a low difficulty score for Moz’s keyword tool. Also, there are some other ways that work wonders for choosing the keywords highly relevant to your goals.
Amazon:
Though Amazon itself is e-commerce website and so might be your competitor, it is also the website with a sea of product-focused keywords.
To use this e-commerce giant for keyword research, all you need to do is just to go to the website and type a keyword related to one of the products you sell.
This is perhaps the best way to get the high-value long tail keyword. According to the studies, long tail keywords convert better than short tail ones, but they are less competitive.
Also, Amazon suggests categories above the keyword suggestions. For category page, you can use those keywords that work amazing.
Keyword Tool Dominator:
This tool will help you scrape Amazon’s search suggestions. And it is very simple to use. You just need to enter a seed keyword into the tool, it will come out for you with lots of keyword suggestions.
Tool Dominator makes the key planning faster than doing it manually. It not just saves you time but provides you with more keyword ideas.
Long keywords can be a vital element of your keyword strategy. You should understand how important long keywords are for your products and business. And so focus on them accordingly.
Do not do the mistake of taking it for simply longer keyword phrases or keywords variations that are shown at the bottom of the results in your keyword tool. In fact, long-tail keywords are keyword phrases that:
A pure long-tail keyword phase is the one that focuses on topics, questions, and problems of audience and tends to make them clear thereby help you get enough long tail queries.
For an effective SEO strategy for e-commerce, getting into what competitors are doing in terms of keywords and the likes is something very crucial.
An effective strategy tends to look at other sites. This helps in getting keyword ideas. But too much will result in a failure to achieve your goals. So keep it in mind and get to know to what extent you should be targeting your competitors’ keywords.
For example, you should go beyond just copycatting keyword strategy if you are looking for more sales. If you are not selling exclusively and others are selling the same product, you should use unique keyword variations. Or you will lose hugely on rakings. Also, you can consider keywords cross-industry. But make sure they are relevant to the products you sell.
Here are some of the ways you can do this more efficiently:
Learn about the keywords your main competitors are using:
For this, you need to make a list of keywords your competitors are using. Also, check for if they have a higher domain authority and web pages with higher page authorities than you do.
There are many tools that can help you with this. Of which is Moz that will make this easy for you. You can find all information by just installing free Moz toolbar.
Get to know where they are getting links from:
Another way that can pretty helpful is tracking where your competitors are getting links and traffic from. The tool like Open Site Explorer will help you with this. With the tool, you can get a link from these sites as well through blogger outreach, press outreach, or setting up your own company pages.
Study their site architecture:
It is one of the crucial things of doing competitors analysis. Look at the site structure of competing sites, considering their navigation like, how deeper their lings go, and the likes. You should check:
Knowing what your competitors are doing on their sites will help you can decide whether you should follow the same suite or find a quite different route- a route that works for your business.
STEP2: Identifying Problems If Any
Once you are done with competitors’ and keyword research, you should go back to your own website and see if there are any issues that can be an obstacle in your SEO strategy. When you are checking for errors in your website, here are two things you should focus on:
How to spot errors quickly:
Do not spend too much time figuring out errors. And tools like Screaming Frog can significantly help you here. It is free to use and will spider your website links images, CSS, script, and apps from SEO perspective. Based on that, it gives you a brief data about errors redirects, duplicate pages, missing header tags, and the likes.
Here are some of the errors you should look for:
This tool will help you figure out them and many other errors that will help you can better your SEO and overall usability, which helps boost conversion rate.
How to examine your web speed:
How responsive your website is another crucial thing that you consider when figuring out errors. A sluggish website is more likely to divert visitors to its competing websites.
According to research, 40% of visitors leave out a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. So do not lose out on those potential audiences just because your site is slow.
STEP3: ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION
If you want your SEO strategy to work for your e-commerce business, you have to excel at on-page optimization as well. There are eight key target areas you should be focusing on while doing on-page optimization.
Keyword Optimization:
To optimize a page, you first optimize your keyword. Make sure your keywords are placed strategically. SO you must use your keywords in the following locations on your website:
Site Structure:
How your website pages are organized and arranged is one of the most crucial SEO considerations for any site. But it is more so in case of an e-commerce site. This is because an average e-commerce site has significantly more pages compared to an average blog or local pizza shop website. A good site structure has
Meta descriptions:
Google uses Meta description to show results. So optimizing Meta descriptions is crucial for on-page SEO. Use your keyword in Meta description.
URL:
Use short and keyword rich URL. This helps improve the ranking of a page on your website.
According to an analysis by BackLinko, around one million Google search results found a clear correlation between URL length and rankings.
Internal Linking:
One of the most interesting things about e-commerce SEO is that internal linking is done automatically. And this is what helps your website’s navigation create a number of good natural internal links.
Internal linking is a key part of a highly effective SEO strategy for an e-commerce website. So give more attention to this.
Social Integration:
It helps to host a social campaign. Social campaigns are a good way to build the new high-value potential audience and interact with and keep them engaged in a conversation you want.
STEP 4: LOCAL BUSINESS TIPS
Are most of your target customers local? You must use your name, address, and phone number (NAP) for all locations showing on your website. Also, use the same formatting on all websites if you have more than one websites.
Moreover, you should also make sure that your business is listed in all major directories that make a sense for what you do. If possible use location-based keyword. This helps your business to be found locally.
Now you are equipped with all what it takes for doing SEO for e-commerce. However, if you think you need to learn more, there are many free resources online that can help you get a deeper understanding of nuts and bolts of SEO for e-commerce.
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