If you run an online store, you need to attract customers to your shopping site. Whatever you’re selling, there’s bound to be a lot of competition, so how do you stand out from the crowd and make sure your shop appears in front of your target customers. There are lots of companies out there offering expensive consultancy services, but your go-to ecommerce assistant could be much cheaper and just as effective – improving some of the SEO elements in your Ecommerce site.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation is a marketing and technical discipline that helps to match websites with the people searching for their services. Good SEO will help a website to appear higher up search results on Google and other search engines. It also makes your website easier to analyse, track and index.
SEO is important to your ecommerce site because a significant proportion of your target customers will find you this way. In fact, Hubspot suggests that 60% of people research a brand online before buying. You need to be visible in order to drive customers to your site and then persuade them to buy.
On-page SEO is where you use the content on your site to drive traffic. This includes headlines, product descriptions, advice and image captions.
Off-page SEO is the work that goes into the back end of your website. This includes loading speeds, image quality and schemas – the way your content is organised and presented.
A good ecommerce strategy
While all websites need a good SEO strategy, an ecommerce store needs to focus attention on particular areas. There are some standard good practices that you can use – and you can do most of these yourself or hire an ecommerce virtual assistant who can reliably take this task off your hands. Here are our top tips for a better approach to ecommerce SEO.
- Do your keyword research
You can’t optimise your online store unless you know what your target customer is searching for. Look for relevant keywords, rather than focusing on volume – you always want quality over quantity. That may mean looking at longer, more focused keywords that are really detailed, rather than wide keyword categories. You should also look for product-focused keywords that match the way your customers search for products like yours.
- Write good meta titles and descriptions
Meta content is what your customer will see in the search results. Your meta title will be the search title, and the description should be enticing enough to encourage your potential customer to click and see more. Use your keywords, perhaps add pricing and show how you are different.
- Keep your slugs simple!
The URL for each page on your site – also known as a slug – is important. Again, use your keywords, hyphenate each word and keep the structure clear. That makes it easy for search engines to find and display your content.
- Be mobile-friendly
Most websites today are built in a ‘mobile-first’ environment. This means that developers build the site to be fully accessible and usable on a mobile device as well as a desktop device such as a laptop. Google, for example, no longer gives prominence to a site if it is not mobile first or mobile responsive, so you are definitely losing out if your website is old, or unable to change to be easily viewable on a mobile device.
- Up your product description game
Your product description is a key selling point. This is about far more than rushing through a bunch of online data work so you can throw your products up on the site. It’s about thinking about what your customers want to know – sizes, materials, who’s made it, where it comes from, why you love it, how you can use it, what you can match it with, the colours it comes in, the best way to care for it – make your customers see how much you love your products and how much better they would feel if they bought it too. Use your keywords, use clear language and add keyword-related captions to any images or videos. And every single one has to be unique – search engines will penalise you for duplication.
- Develop some FAQs
We’ve found that when providing virtual assistant ecommerce services to clients, creating FAQ pages can be hugely valuable to your customers and to your SEO profile. Good quality SEO relies on the quantity of content you have as well as the quality. But ecommerce sites are often light on content because they focus on selling products. However, your visitors may have questions – and if they have to work too hard to find the answers, they’ll bounce off your site and go elsewhere. A good, comprehensive, keyword-rich set of FAQs gives you great SEO value and improves your customer service.
Much of this work you can do in-house for less cost than you think. It’s time-consuming, though, so if you want to concentrate on growing your business, why not consider outsourcing data entry and website updates to a virtual resource you can trust? Having a knowledgeable and reliable ecommerce assistant on board can help you optimise your online store and drive more motivated customers to your website.
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Related articles:
- How a customer relationship manager can transform your ecommerce business
- Developing an ecommerce strategy – from a virtual web assistant’s point of view
- Building and maintaining websites: When should you consider SEO?