Ecommerce Marketing: An SEO Guide for Ecommerce Websites
Ecommerce marketing is the practice of using promotional tactics to drive traffic to your online store, converting that traffic into paying customers and retaining those customers post-purchase. We can use ecommerce marketing to promote your online store as a whole or to drive more sales for specific products. We should follow the ever-changing SEO rules to make it more customer-centric. In this article, we’ve built a list of some of the best SEO practices for all ecommerce businesses.
Ecommerce SEO is known to be one of the most renowned practices of digital marketing, allowing your brand and business to land upon higher ranks over Google SERPs. Unlike paid advertising, eCommerce SEO is an organic way of being able to gain more attention from your niche audience.
Building traffic and sales for your website will always seem like an overwhelming experience. We can check some references of SEO techniques that were used in 2019 for traffic generation to make a comparison with new 2020 SEO practices specially designed by google for customer convenience during this pandemic. Even if you hold prior experience and knowledge about the subject of being able to bring in organic traffic to your website, the process is new every time you try it. Technology advances with every passing moment, giving rise to new methodologies practically every second.
In a world that’s advancing this quickly, it’s crucial to understand the best of the methods available for your business’ success. In this article, we’ve built a list of some of the best SEO practices for all eCommerce websites, to allow you to make the most of your digital marketing strategies to bring back traffic by measuring the effectiveness of SEO-necessary marketing strategies.
Adequate Competitor Research
Possibly the first and most important process to follow through with, competitive research is what allows a business to build itself up to a level that sets it apart from the rest. If you don’t know what strategies the competition is building, you will not be able to work your way through to the top. Moreover, it gives you a good boost, to begin with.
For example, let’s assume that you’re new to the world of on-page optimization for SEO. Not only will you be able to get a thorough understanding of how competitors work with their digital marketing strategies in the world of SEO, but you will also be able to gain insights into what could land you on top of the ranking pages.
Besides gaining an understanding of the backlinks they’ve built and the content marketing strategies they’re following, it’s equally important to understand the keywords that they’re using.
Diving into Details - Keyword Research
Before AI was introduced into the world of search engine optimization, keywords were the most important part of a successful digital marketing strategy. However, as time has passed by and technology has skyrocketed, keywords fall in the same category as understanding user intent.
This has to lead several businesses to believe that keywords don’t matter, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Surely, you can no longer impose keywords in your titles and meta descriptions or even the content itself, but the presence of keywords in your landing pages and content is still a must. If you fail to do so, the user’s intent will not be able to link to your brand or business.
The key to using keywords on your website ideally is latent semantic index (LSI) keywords. LSI allows search engines to relate your content to the behaviour of the consumer, allowing your products and services to be discovered at a point of need.
Before you choose to use a keyword for your business, it’s important to analyse the keyword in a way that allows you to understand it completely. For example -
- You need to understand the volume of keywords being used, i.e. the search volume of the keyword being used. This allows you to understand how high the value of the keyword is in the market and how well it can help you in getting discovered. The higher the search volume, the more the competition.
- CPC (cost per click) helps you determine how much people pay per click on the keyword on paid advertisements. A high cost displays how competitive the keyword is.
- The last but not least, user intent. Artificial intelligence has allowed us to gain the benefit of understanding the thought process of a potential customer. For example, when you type in ‘water bottle’ onto Google, are you hoping to buy a water bottle? Or do you want to recycle the old plastic bottles that you have in your home?
Website Optimization
A well-promoted product with optimal love on the web falls useless if the website fails to be well-optimized in comparison to the rest. Think about it yourself, your website is the centre of all your products and services. When a customer is driven to your website, the last thing you would want is for them to end up getting lost on your website, with no understanding of where the products or services are located.
We tend to think of being able to get a click as the most important part of a digital marketing strategy. If you truly think about it, however, if you manage to drive a potential customer to your website, you’ve managed to capture their attention. But in most cases, this is not enough - it’s about keeping the customer’s attention intact. Once they’re on your website, they should be inclined to stay there and opt for your product or service. If they end up getting confused and don’t know what to do next, you’ll end up losing a potential conversion. This can impact your business in a severely negative way in the long run.
Internal linking and backlinks can help in optimizing SEO furthermore.
On-Page Optimization
While off-page optimization is extremely important for optimal SEO, it is also important to set up on-page optimization to make the most out of your digital marketing strategy. Off-page optimization can be carried out by focusing your attention on the following targets:
- Keyword optimization - As spoken about before, it’s important to get the right number of keywords onto your landing page since it also helps search engines understand the user intent and ultimately drive traffic to your page.
- Usability - If your website is too confusing to use, it can be hard to turn a potential lead into a conversion. Your website needs to be optimized to work for all devices - be it a mobile or a laptop with fine internal linking to help the user go about your website easily. An easy-to-use website is likely to attract customers to your website again and again, which is the end goal!
- Display of customer reviews - Whenever you browse a product or service online, you’re bound to be sceptical about it. To get rid of these doubts, most customers tend to look over the reviews provided by earlier customers to see if the brand can be trusted or not. It’s extremely important to have a display of customer reviews if you want to be able to build a trustworthy relationship with your customers.
- Social media - For businesses, social media in modern times is as important as having an accountant or a lawyer on board. If you don’t have social media, your business simply does not exist on the web. No matter how many promotional strategies you build, you will not be able to accomplish what you hope without the presence of multiple social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn are considered to be some of the most crucial additions to your digital marketing strategy.
Social media itself is a very wide concept and is crucial for a successful digital marketing campaign. If you don’t have the platforms to promote, what will you display? Your customers need to be able to connect and reach out to your business easily to ensure that all problems are tackled efficiently. Moreover, it is also a crucial element that helps in keeping your brand’s image alive in the eyes of all of your customers.
The best SEO practices are capable of rebuilding your business to become the best it can be within a short span of time. At the end of the day, it’s important for your business’ brand image to last in the long run and not fizzle away after multiple paid advertisements. Although the organic method might seem to be unrealistically long, it’s a method that you can trust.
After doing the SEO on an eCommerce site, you must be looking forward to the channels you can use for your eCommerce business. It is essential to know the mediums to reach out to potential customers to get your product purchased.
- Email Marketing
- SMS Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Paid search
- Referral Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
Online shopping is very quickly becoming the new normal, it is the suitable time for running an online store. An appropriate way of operating SEO for eCommerce marketing ensures, that you are going to have a profitable business and a larger customer base. Use the proper channels, track the records, use the analytics and tools for better progress.
Written by Kiara Mccoll- She has expertise in web marketing, search engine optimisation, social media, affiliate marketing. Her strong passion for technology always drives her to explore the changing trends in the digital marketing industry and making people know about it through her blogs.