How to Use SEO to Boost Your eCommerce Business

Are you one of the thousands of company leaders taking their business online with an eCommerce website? If your answer is yes, you need all the help you can get to ensure your website ranks well and enjoys consistent traffic. To run a successful eCommerce business in 2020 you need to get organic traffic to your website and have these visitors stick around long enough to become customers and buy your products. So what is it that is going to help drive all this website traffic and make you hugely profitable? 

The answer is high-quality content, of course. It is essential that you have SEO-optimized content on your site so it is easily found and ranked while continuing to add value to the reader.

SEO and exceptional content are behind every successful online shop and often what’s missing from those sites still failing to launch. A smart business person would make sure they had a plan in place for how they were going to tackle this portion of their sales strategy. Thankfully, there’s ample research available on how to optimize your content. You can easily find guidance online within a few minutes of a quick Google search. But for now, here’s some quick and easy advice from SEO Consultants to writing SEO-friendly copy for eCommerce.

How to Write SEO-Friendly Content for eCommerce

Why Focus on SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term that was coined back in 1997 and refers to how a website is located by users on a search engine. All search engines use keywords and phrases that locate specific websites, pages and content that are spread across the Internet. If you don’t have the right content on your website for people to find you on Google, no one will know your site exists.

The right search engine optimization strategy will launch you ahead of your peers with regards to ranking, and that alone is a hearty advantage. It’s all about creating content that is valuable and includes relevant keywords and phrases. Your writing skills must be well above average to get this right. Below you can see the essential steps you must take to get your eCommerce SEO strategy working properly for your eCommerce website:

1. Find the right keywords
2. Build a great website
3. Search engine optimization
4. Create superb content
5. Proper scheduling
6. Digital marketing
7. Backlinks

These seven steps are what will get you on the path to success with your online business. When people are able to find your eCommerce site through search engines it starts to open up new revenue streams. Remember not to skip any steps and put in the effort to have it pay off in the long run. Let’s take an indepth look at each of these steps. 

Find the Right SEO Keywords

This first step is always going to be very important, even though you have no way of completely predicting anything. For the most part, keywords are more of an educated guess than real science, but there are a lot of statistics that provide insights on what to try. You need to start with finding out how people would normally search for a business like yours. There are various different search terms people use which all mean the same thing, try to get a list of all the possibilities so you can then start ranking them in priority. 

Go to Amazon and start searching the words you’ve found, you should quickly be able to tell which ones are popular and which ones are not. The key here is not to use the most popular keywords, as this would put you up against too much other competition. You want to find a happy medium, a collection of keywords that will get people searching for you. 

Build a Great Optimized Website

The difference between a great or a poor website is often whether or not you can employ a professional designer and developer. But even if your budget doesn’t allow for a professional make sure to dedicate the resources at your disposal to make your site is easily accessible. Here’s what to prioritize in your website build:

• URL/Address
• Site structure
• Style and aesthetics
• Accessibility and ease of use
• Mobile site

One mistake made in the list of activities mentioned above can cause serious SEO problems. You could have the best content and SEO in the world, but if your site loads slower than molasses with advertisements everywhere, your bounce rate will be through the roof. It’s all about making the user experience while browsing your site. A professional development team would really come in handy.

Search Engine Optimization Matters Most

SEO is where everything comes together to get traffic flowing on your website. Sure, you can try to survive by using the regular social media and blog route, but if you don’t optimize it to get ranked on Google, you are wasting your efforts. Your search engine optimization is best handled by an expert, but you should know as much as you can about it. There are two main areas of search engine optimization to worry about:

1. On-Page Search Engine Optimization

This type of SEO refers to the content on your eCommerce website that is going to help pull potential customers in from web searches. You should have already determined your list of keywords at this point, and be ready to strategically place them in your content to get those pages ranked. 

You start with the URL of your website; make sure it’s easy on the eyes and includes the main keyword you have decided on. Every detail is going to matter here, so make sure you do the necessary research. You also want variations of your main keyword in titles, select subheadings, and peppered throughout the regular content organically. You never want to overuse your keywords and variations, as this is going to be flagged and hinder your quest to get ranked.

2. Technical Search Engine Optimization

It isn’t all about how you word things with your SEO; there are some real technical challenges you will have to face. Variables such as broken links, slow speeds, and more need to be handled on a regular basis. This can be done through various methods, but the most popular way is through crawling software. You can find some free versions for basic service, or you can opt to pay an annual fee for something more advanced. This is really going to depend on your personal preferences, need, and budget.

Crawling will go through your website and pick up on things such as broken links, slow speeds, missing images, and even bad content. You can use this information to spruce up your website and make it easier for the public to browse. Everything you do here is going to help you get ranked better and get more traffic, so make this a routine thing.

Write Superb Web Content

We have been talking a lot about technical parts of your website to make it successful, but you cannot forget one of the most important parts of running a successful eCommerce website: the content. Without content that people are actually looking to read, why would they ever click on a link to your site? It is quality information that the general public is seeking, and you need to be the one providing it in your particular niche. Since creative writing is certainly not something that everyone excels at, you need to take careful consideration of who will create your content.

Many businesses will choose to go with a freelancer or a content creation company to get the writing done. You will have access to some very talented writers this way, but remember, you will pay for quality here. There are now many online writing services like Pick The Writer that hire many niche writers if you’re looking to create content on more narrow topics. If you are going to go this route it is important that you do not cut corners with your budget. You want your content to be the best in your particular category, and budget writers will give you content that may not be up to par.

Proper Scheduling for Audience Engagement

You may ask what scheduling has to do with optimizing your website for search engines, and that would be a valid question. Scheduling actually has a lot to do with how your website and pages will rank on Google. Once you know your content is of top quality you can’t just release it in a big batch and hope for the best. It is crucial to draw up a blog and social media schedule to put out your content on a timely and consistent basis. Having fresh content once a week is going to give you a much better chance of consistent rankings, rather than just dumping it all on your blog at once.

To be successful, you want to have your traffic ever-growing and your website always ranking on Google consistently. If you don’t keep up with new content your website itself will start to drift down in the rankings as it becomes more and more inactive. This could quickly spell the end to all of your hard work, and it would be a shame to have wasted all those efforts and resources. Plan your schedule months in advance if you need to, and make sure you are always on time with the new content.

Digital Marketing

Marketing has vastly changed since the internet boom, and the pace at which it evolves is sometimes hard to keep up with. Your marketing efforts are now going to focus more on driving traffic to your website with intentions of purchasing, rather than driving them into a store. Your strategy is going to revolve heavily around the use of social media, forums, and online communities to get the word out. It is as easy as doing a few internet searches to see what social groups are online in your niche and the best ways to get involved with them.

You never want to overdo your marketing efforts with social forums; you want to get to know the community and offer helpful advice with links to your pages. People are going to be able to tell from a mile away if you are sincere, so do not go in with the intent of bombarding the place with links and advertising.

Backlinking for More Authority

A backlink can technically be part of your marketing when you are posting links to your website, but the real authority comes from getting links from high-ranking sites. There are a few different methods to get your backlinking done properly. The most popular seems to be agreements with other eCommerce professionals to provide links on their respective sites.

The real fun starts when your own website is ranking high enough that others start using it to try and give themselves more authority. You need to make sure that this is not being overdone, just like keywords, so use some analytical tools to keep things in check. Google or your own web provider is going to have many different options available for analytics like this.

Plan, Research and Execute

With so much competition in the eCommerce industry now you need to be smart, resourceful, and creative to get ahead of the competition. Search engine optimization is too important to ignore, and you must do everything you can to understand how it works and, most importantly, how you can implement it to bring success to your business. There is no room for laziness or half-hearted efforts. If you don’t give it your all someone else who does is going to take your spot.

Take the time to do everything the right way, get your keywords ready and create the best possible content. Plan ahead and be flexible so you can adjust things as you are able to correct them. In the age of internet business, anyone can have a chance to make it big. The only thing that will stop you is not putting in the effort to learn your trade and everything that comes along with it.