Whether you’re the sole employee or have a team of ecommerce wizards at your disposal, digital marketing might be the most time-consuming part of running an online store. Entrepreneurship is all about growth, and marketing is how you grow your online presence.
In the digital marketing realm, SEO often gets a bum wrap. It seems technical, whereas marketing tactics like establishing your social media presence and putting an email marketing plan in place might seem more straightforward. It’s true -- SEO is multifaceted and can be technical. Luckily, today’s pre-built tools take most of the heavy lifting out of the technical elements. (So go ahead and drop that “learn to code” class from your weekend and spend some time with your family.)
If you’ve so far successfully avoided putting together a robust SEO strategy, it’s high time you get started. The success of your store absolutely depends on it. In fact, according to Yotpo’s Justin Butlion, thirty percent of traffic to the 18,000 stores in the company database came from search engines. That means optimizing for search can drive one-third of your referral traffic.
Let’s start with the basics. What are some basic SEO tactics your online store might be missing?
Colorful, detailed product descriptions
Leveraging product descriptions written by the manufacturer sounds like an efficient way to save time on your online store. Unfortunately, what you’re really doing is posting duplicate content that can hinder your SEO efforts.
Product descriptions are the perfect places to write detailed content the search engines will love. You can’t cut corners here -- aim for about 100 words, complete with a header and feature bulletpoints.
A consistently updated blog
One of the hardest parts of SEO is generating enough new content to keep the search engines constantly crawling your website for search terms. Fresh content is core to improving your search rankings, and there’s only so much you can do on your product pages to continuously update content.
Your blog is the perfect solution to generate new content consistently. It’s also a great way to make sure you’re ranking on search for an array of different keywords that may send traffic to your site. By 2020, the number of bloggers in the U.S. is set to reach 31.7 million
If your website doesn't currently have a blog, check this begginer's guide to successful blogging.
Simple, clean URLs
If you picked a nice, clean domain name for your store when you got up and running, we don’t blame you if you never thought about URLs again. The hard truth of it is your URLs are important, and if your store isn’t configured correctly, you might be suffering serious SEO consequences.
URLs for your store should be clean, usually descriptive words with dashes between them, rather than random strings of letters and numbers. This makes search engine indexing much more efficient.
A strong link-building strategy
One of the most crucial things you could be doing for your SEO is propping up your link-building strategy. When you link-build, you find ways to get high-ranking websites to link to your store, whether it’s through social media, blogs, or professional online publications. Sites that link to yours lend you their authority, upping your online store’s value in the eyes of the search engines.
Get a comprehensive guide to fixing common ecommerce SEO problems
Though these are some good areas to start improving your SEO, substantial change requires a holistic plan. Download our SEO eBook for free to get started with a comprehensive SEO strategy guaranteed to help your online store earn more traffic and more sales.
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