The how to guide – SEO for e-commerce.

How to build an SEO strategy for ecommerce

An SEO strategy should look at your entire e-commerce picture with the ultimate aim of creating the most effective way to connect with your clients. 

As a minimum:

• Include search terms that match the questions your clients ask.
• Answer those questions quickly and concisely.
• Review your web pages. Can clients easily find what they want? How many clicks or pages take them there? Are they navigating to dead-ends, broken links or something you no longer sell or offer?
• Provide fresh, engaging content to keep people coming back.
• Apply it to every customer touchpoint.

Make sure your strategy sets realistic expectations. There's nothing more demoralising than an impossible task. Unless you have the clout of Amazon or are selling something unique, you're unlikely to break into the top 10 listings on Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. – at least not immediately.

Instead, think your short-term and long-term goals – more web traffic, more click-throughs or more conversions into sales. 

Regardless of what you decide, a robust SEO strategy will certainly help more people find you and what you have to offer. And that's only good news for your bottom line.

When creating your SEO strategy, you should always start with keyword research.

Create a keyword strategy 

A keyword strategy is essential for an ecommerce website as it allows you to focus on what you want your website to rank for and how you want customers to find you.

Creating a keyword strategy is pretty straightforward. No one knows your business better than yourself. So as a starter for 10, put yourself in your clients' shoes. If you were trying to find your own business, what question would you ask or type into Google? And how would you rephrase that question?

For some simple alternatives, Google and sites like Amazon autofill potential search terms as you type, based on the most popular. But for a more robust assessment, its worth investing in tools designed for that purpose.

Ahrefs and SEMrush are just two examples of many paid-for keyword finding services. For limited budgets, Google's own SEO analytics tools - Google Keyword Planner and Google Search Console - both are free to anyone with a website. It provides tools and reports to help you measure your site's search traffic and performance and what search terms (keywords) people are using to find you.

When you have an idea about what keywords you'd like to target, write them down focusing on one keyword per web page.

What are long tail and short tail keywords?

Before we move on, let's quickly answer a common keyword question, "What are long tail and short tail keywords?"

Short tail keywords are usually one to three words you would use to describe yourself or your business or your product (think of these as decision making keywords). For example, 'copywriting and editorial' or 'denim dress' or 'employee benefits'.

Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific. We always use these for blog posts and target readers in their awareness and consideration stages of their buying journey. For example, 'copywriting for small businesses' or 'best dress for pear shapes' or 'how to increase employee engagement'.

As short term keywords are more basic, they generate more traffic, though this is typically more generic. Long-term keywords are more targeted, so generate less traffic, but are more likely to attract the customers you want. For effective SEO use a mixture of
both.

Generate backlinks 

Backlinks are links to your website from another website, ideally from sites ranking higher than yours in searches. They are important as they show search engines that your site is credible and trustworthy. Which is why the more backlinks a website has, the more likely that website has a higher Domain Authority and higher rankings.

One good way of generating backlinks is to create compelling content that people want to read and share with their audiences.

Creating regular blog posts that appeal to your target audience is an excellent way of attracting regular visitors. And don't make it all about you. A good mix of content will have posts that relate to your products, highlight or solve your clients' problems, share news related to your sector, and fun pieces for light relief and interaction, like competitions. Over time you'll find other websites linking to your content, and therefore generating a backlink.

There are numerous of other ways to create backlinks, including using digital PR techniques, creating business directory listings and getting bloggers to write about your business and link back to your site.

For more information about how to generate backlinks, Backlinko.com has a great guide for the best ecommerce SEO practices. 

Optimising copy, video and images for SEO 

How you write copy, and upload the videos and images on your site are vital for a good SEO score. 

Copy

Using your keyword strategy make sure you include your keyword in your headers, body copy, meta title and meta description, and URL slugs. This is how Google will identify what you're trying to rank your page for.

Images

Ensure your chosen pictures are relevant and add captions that include your keywords. Change any generic file names to match your image so searchers (and the search engine) can find it. The longer your website takes to load, the worse it ranks. Compress images or reduce image sizes wherever possible. 

Videos

Videos hosted directly on your website (rather than a site like YouTube or Vimeo) can boost engagement, but keep it to one per webpage. Like images, make sure you choose a relevant title and description. And if you can, add a transcript. As well as providing a good user experience, search engines recognise copy in transcripts.

Social media

Clients now search for products, services and businesses on a wide variety of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. Your social media should grab people's attention with great content, build trust and brand awareness, encourage sharing and aim to send them back to your website. After all, the more referral clicks your website gets, the better it will look and the higher it will rank.

Another tip for using social media to aid your SEO - make sure your keywords are used in hashtags so you appear in searches that relate back to your keyword strategy. This will not only help users on social media find what they're looking for, but search engines will also take note further strengthening your communication that you want to be ranking for those keywords. 

Blogging

We strongly believe that blog platforms are a underutilised marketing channel and tool. In 12 months we drove 57k web hits to our client's website through blog content alone! Blogging however does take time, which is why it gets put to the bottom of the pile in most marketing departments.

To see a monumental difference to your SEO score, a blog is essential. However, a blog with no SEO strategy is just a waste of time. So go back to your keyword strategy and identify all those things your target customers are searching for while in the awareness and consideration stages of their buying journey.

Using these keywords you can develop a blog strategy that will drive organic web traffic, raise brand awareness and position you as an authoritative figure in your field.

Other things to consider for ecommerce SEO

A website is never 'once and done', and certainly not in e-commerce. But when was the last time you gave your website an overhaul?

Over time, a company's website can become a sprawling leviathan, with multiple, superfluous pages, duplicated content, dead-ends and vanished links. Good search results rely on accessibility and continuity (which is also good customer experience). 

Here are some housekeeping tips to work into your website maintenance:

• Ensure your clients can get to where they want to in as few clicks as possible. As clients usually visit your home page first, these have the most authority with search engines. The deeper clients journey into your website, the less the SEO impact.
• Think about your URL. Though less important than it used to be, your URL still affects your ranking. Make sure your top keyword(s) feature in it. However, make it naturally readable, keep it to about 50 characters and don't repeat keywords
• unnecessarily.
• Open up dead-ends. Each of your webpages should offer one or more internal links, even if it's just to your home page. Internal links to other interesting and relevant content keep your clients onsite longer.
• Delete broken links or old content. It can be easy to miss or forget older content, but navigating to a dead link is annoying, makes people switch off, and affects your credibility.
• Search engines penalise duplication. Rewrite or remove any duplicated copy that has crept in, and redirect or remove links that point to it.
• Make your website mobile-friendly. Older websites may not load correctly on smartphones and tablets, making them hard to navigate, potentially costing you business and damaging your reputation.

What's better – an organic search or paid ads?

Now that you've learnt all about SEO for ecommerce, you may be wondering if it's worth all the effort and whether you should take part in PPC instead.

Organic search and paid ads (PPC) both have benefits depending on your needs and your budget. 

These include:

Organic search

• Low cost – organic searches cost nothing but time. However, it can take several months to build consistent results.
• Good return on investment – organic searches can provide impressive results given time – usually for zero expense.
• Ongoing benefits – organic searches continue to build over time and continually produce visitor traffic, leads, rankings, links and revenue.
• Credibility – We typically pay more attention to and have more trust in organic search results than a paid ad.
• Usable data – an organic search provides real-time, up-to-date data, allowing you to measure the success of your SEO strategy and tweak it where needed.
• All-round marketing – the content used to drive organic searches can support and connect to other online marketing, including social media, email, videos and paid searches.

Paid ads

• Instant results – It can take a matter of minutes to get the platform's approval for an ad, and once live, it appears at the top of searches for almost instant results.
• Good return on investment – paid advertising can produce good results, especially when used across multiple channels.
• Keyword data – online advertising can provide information such as user location, age, or keyword preference to help marketing or create compelling content.
• Budget control – Online advertising offers better financial flexibility than traditional print advertising. Whether you're a small business with limited funds or a larger company with a marketing budget, there's something to suit you.
• Driving sales – paid ads are aimed at ready-to-buy customers and puts you front and centre in their thinking.
• Usable data – your paid ad gives you information on keywords, demographics, click-throughs and how much time people spend on your website, enabling you to fine-tune your strategy or create marketing tools like an email subscriber list.
• All-round marketing –a paid ad can support and connect to other online marketing, such as social media.

The future of SEO

Devices like Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant and Apple's Siri already handle voice search requests – and this medium will continue to grow as voice-recognition tech gets more sophisticated. The good news is if your website keywords, content or headlines are answering your clients' frequently asked questions, you're pretty much voice search-ready. However, keeping your content conversational to mirror the way people speak will help you get noticed.

Are you looking for SEO or copywriting support for your business? Get in touch: abbie@mondayclicks.co.uk or 07477987943