5 SEO Strategies For The E-Commerce Entrepreneur
The following is a guest post by Kaileigh McMunagle, Marketing Lead, Yroo, a Shopify connected comparison marketplace.
The name search engine optimisation (SEO) may sound simple but, in reality, a quick Google search can quickly overwhelm even the most savvy entrepreneur. So what’s an e-commerce business owner to do? SEO fundamentals, like having great content and getting quality inbound links will always apply, but there are some other key strategies that are easy to implement which any savvy e-commerce business owner should follow.
1. Keyword and Competitor Research
Leveraging the right keywords is one of the best ways to get huge returns for your business. By doing so, you can attract high quality shoppers to your site which gives you a better chance of achieving great sales. While doing your research you will want to take a look at what the competition is doing so you can see which keywords you’d want to potentially compete against. When doing your research, the key is to pay attention to relevancy, search volume and ranking difficulty.
2. Website Speed
We’ve all been there before. You head to a new website, it takes too long to load and you leave. This situation could mean the end of your business! According to Kissmetrics, 40% of people abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. This is especially true now that mobile accounts for a large proportion of e-commerce traffic. So how can you make your site faster? Some of the easiest solutions include buying more server space and reducing the sizes of any files or images found on your website.
3. Product Pages
Getting your product pages found is crucial to the success of any e-commerce store. You want to sell your amazing products and if those products can’t be found you have a big problem. However, do not fear, there are some easy things you can do to make sure that doesn’t happen. The first thing you’d want to do is create unique product descriptions for every product which can be tedious but it’s a great opportunity to create unique content that showcases your brand’s personality. This then helps your products appear in more search engine results from Google and Bing as well as on more specialized engines like Yroo, our Shopify app, which helps e-commerce stores attract new shoppers through the power of search. Reviews are great to have on every product page as it’s dynamic and adds new and fresh content to your site which search engines love! Finally, this might sound obvious but having high-quality pictures and, if possible, video with the relevant meta data for every product is huge as it gives you a chance to show up in all relevant image-based searches.
4. Website Structure and Internal Linking
When looking at your website the structure plays a key part in how easy it is to use, your ranking on search engines as well as your rate of conversion. You’re going to want to keep in mind that the best structured sites require the fewest clicks from the home page to a product page. The base for your structure is created by using the keyword research you did earlier and creating the most logical path for your shoppers to take. Once you have your structure down you’re going to want to start internally linking, meaning that you link pages on your website to other pages on your site. Be careful that you don’t overdue it as this is actually something that can work against you!
5. Integrate Social
Every savvy business owner knows the power of social media so it of course plays a key SEO role for e-commerce sites. The reason being that the more shares your website has on social media channels the more valuable you seem to search engines which then increases your ranking. An easy way to increase your social shares is having social buttons easily accessible on product pages, blog posts and on your homepage. The last thing you want to do is make it difficult for people to give you free publicity!
One last thing I’ll mention is that any savvy e-commerce entrepreneur should be thinking about optimizing their site for mobile. This is something that we’re constantly thinking about at Yroo anytime we look at our site. Not only is this extremely important now since traffic is increasingly coming from mobile but it will become even more important, and impossible to ignore, very soon.
Kaileigh McMunagle, Marketing Lead, Yroo
