Ecommerce SEO
Why is E-commerce SEO so important?
In a few words, your store needs to rank, and to rank, it needs high-quality content and a well-organized search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. This is very true for e-commerce sites.
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Why is E-commerce SEO so important?
Despite the fact that SEO has the highest ROI of any eCommerce marketing campaign, most online shops are put together with little to no consideration of search engines.
Instead, we rely on social media or paid ads. Which are great and all, but require a constant effort and stream of income.
SEO, on the other hand, only requires effort upfront — once you rank, you practically make sales on autopilot with no recurring expense.
Our Process
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The Benefits of a Website Audit
Before we dive into the things you should be keeping an eye out for as you’re auditing your website, let’s review some of the benefits of doing one. Here are some of the top benefits from a marketing perspective:
Search Engine Optimization
By conducting a website audit, you’ll be able to identify any missed SEO opportunities and remedy any misguided or poorly executed SEO pitfalls (e.g. keyword stuffing, exact match anchor text links, etc.) throughout the content of your website.
It will also allow you to re-focus your SEO efforts on users first and search engines second. This will safeguard you from constantly chasing changes to search ranking algorithms, meaning you won’t be applying misguided practices just to show up in the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Website Performance Optimization
Website audits usually evaluate a site not only for its content, but also for its technical performance.
As a result, an audit will give you a chance to inspect the robustness of your website’s technical framework and infrastructure, assess how friendly your website is to search engines, and determine how easy it is for users to navigate and intuitively find content on your website.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Thirdly, website audits enable you re-evaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of lead generation and conversion. As a result, you’ll be able to spot any previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads so you can add relevant CTAs, as well as identify deficiencies in your landing pages so you can optimize them to boost conversions.
As you can see, assessing both the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Thirdly, website audits enable you to re-evaluate the effectiveness of your website in terms of lead generation and conversion. As a result, you’ll be able to spot any previously overlooked opportunities to convert visitors into leads so you can add relevant CTAs, as well as identify deficiencies in your landing pages so you can optimize them to boost conversions.
As you can see, assessing both the content and technical aspects of your website will open up opportunities to drastically improve the traffic and conversions your website generates.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step in an ecommerce SEO campaign.
Do NOT skip this step.
If you get this part wrong, one of two things will happen:
You’ll target keywords that are too difficult to rank for, and you won’t make it to page one.
You’ll rank for keywords that don’t get a lot of traffic or don’t cause customers to buy.
Neither of these situations is ideal, which is why ecommerce keyword research is so important — it will ensure you target keywords that are fairly easy to rank for, have decent search volume and have high conversion rates.
But there is more to choosing keywords than simply looking at how difficult it is to rank or how many people search for it…
To choose the best keywords possible, you also need to factor in buyer intent (aka “commercial intent”).
Buyer intent simply means how far along someone is in their decision to buy.
For example, someone searching for “best laptop” is probably still in the research phase — they may not be ready to buy. They’re likely to be reading product reviews and comparing features and benefits.
But if they’re searching “Asus VivoBook E200HA”, they’re probably shopping around for the best deal on that exact laptop — which means they’re much more likely to buy.
You don’t have to guess at buyer intent.
Oftentimes, buyer intent correlates with the average cost per click (CPC) of a keyword, which can be found with Google Keyword Planner or an SEO tool like Ahrefs. This is because the more people are willing to spend advertising a keyword, the higher its conversion rate!
Pro Tip: “Best X Product” is a great potential topic idea for your blog. More on blogging in the content marketing section.
An Example of GOOD eCommerce Site Architecture
To get the most authority to your best pages, begin with your site structure. And remember the golden rules (simple and scalable, no more than 3 clicks)!
Your home page should link to all your major category pages, and potentially even some of your best product pages as well.
Proper navigation and internal linking ensures those pages get the most authority from your home page, and thus have a better chance of ranking highly in search.
To give you a better idea of this, take a look at the home page I created for my client, The Smoothie Store.
Industry Analysis
Industry analysis is a tool that facilitates a company’s understanding of its position relative to other companies that produce similar products or services. Understanding the forces at work in the overall industry is an important component of effective strategic planning. Industry analysis enables small business owners to identify the threats and opportunities facing their businesses, and to focus their resources on developing unique capabilities that could lead to a competitive advantage.
“Many small business owners and executives consider themselves at worst victims, and at best observers of what goes on in their industry. They sometimes fail to perceive that understanding your industry directly impacts your ability to succeed. Understanding your industry and anticipating its future trends and directions gives you the knowledge you need to react and control your portion of that industry,” Kenneth J. Cook wrote in his book The AMA Complete Guide to Strategic Planning for Small Business. “However, your analysis of this is significant only in a relative sense. Since both you and your competitors are in the same industry, the key is in finding the differing abilities between you and the competition in dealing with the industry forces that impact you. If you can identify abilities you have that are superior to competitors, you can use that ability to establish a competitive advantage.”
An industry analysis consists of three major elements: the underlying forces at work in the industry; the overall attractiveness of the industry; and the critical factors that determine a company’s success within the industry.
On page
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.
For those new to on-page SEO, we highly recommend reading our On-Page Ranking Factors. On-page SEO has changed over the years, so it’s important to keep up with the latest practices.
On-page SEO tells Google – or other prominent search engines – who you are and that you should be at the top of the search results when your keywords are entered in.
Without on-page SEO, your website could be left in the dust.
And why chance it? Especially since you’ve invested thousands of dollars to get it up and running.
Off page SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) famously consists of multiple qualities, and one of the most important is off-page factors. Off-page SEO includes essential SEO factors to ranking well in search engines, like backlinks, and they’re huge parts of any digital marketing strategy.
However, for people who are new to Internet marketing, “off-page SEO” might not make any sense at all.
So, what is off-page SEO? Below, you’ll find a couple important facts that can help clarify the importance of off-page SEO while explaining what off-page search engine optimization means. If you’d like to speak to a specialist about off-page SEO, you can reach us at ___________
Content Generation
Designing a content generation strategy for your website is similar to this process. It begins with brainstorming through things to write about and then writing them out. If you’re doing it right, you’ve already completed your keyword research and your brainstorming session is focused around content centered on those keywords.
Once you’ve determined several great ideas to write about, you should organize them into sets of information such as (vehicles, cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, etc.). This allows you to create a taxonomy of information; the way scientists organize species of life.
Content Generation
Designing a content generation strategy for your website is similar to this process. It begins with brainstorming through things to write about and then writing them out. If you’re doing it right, you’ve already completed your keyword research and your brainstorming session is focused around content centered on those keywords.
Once you’ve determined several great ideas to write about, you should organize them into sets of information such as (vehicles, cars, trucks, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, etc.). This allows you to create a taxonomy of information; the way scientists organize species of life.
