In recent years, the eCommerce world has skyrocketed in popularity, causing an increase in acquisition costs. Consequently, online retailers experience a hard time generating new customers at a reasonable rate.
With this background, eCommerce entrepreneurs and marketers are obliged to boost traffic organically, which is a low-cost channel, to keep their online businesses afloat. This is where SEO comes in. It is the most prominent strategy that has proven to work for decades.
What Is Online Business SEO?
Online business SEO is the process of increasing your online presence in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). When people search for products/services that you sell/provide, you want to rank as highly as possible to get more traffic. More traffic increases the chances of conversion, which will ultimately boost sales.
Why SEO for Online Business Matters
Consumers often use the Google search button to help them make informed decisions about the products/services they need. Improving your online business’s SEO enables it to rank high on SERPS, therefore giving you an advantage in the highly competitive landscape of eCommerce.
Increasing your SEO also provides you with a low-cost strategy to reach your target audience, since you do not have to pay for ads. Once you get people to your site, you can entice them with your high-quality products, intriguing copy, and motivating calls to action
How to Improve SEO for Your Online Business
In case you’re stuck right now, not knowing where to begin, or how to scale your small business to higher heights, here are some useful SEO tips.
1. Keyword Research
It is the first step in an online business SEO campaign. Before proceeding with the keyword research, you need to factor in buyer intent, which is a way of establishing how far along someone is in their decision to buy.
Afterward, you can conduct keyword research using various keyword research tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubbersuggest. As you proceed, you’ll want to focus on long-tail keywords, (terms composed of three or more words), which are a more specific option for your business.
By choosing the right keywords, you are likely to get better results from your campaign.
2. Content Marketing
On-page SEO efforts for online businesses deal with optimizing elements of individual web pages so that they can rank higher in the SERPs. For eCommerce websites, there are three main content categories that retailers will want to focus on optimizing. These include:
- Product pages: A wise place to start when optimizing product pages is to evaluate those of the competition. Retailers need to establish a plan for dealing with discontinued or out-of-stock product pages. Such destinations could potentially harm a seller’s SEO performance.
- Content pages: They are one of the most valuable yet woefully under-optimized destinations on online business sites across the web. When it comes to optimizing and ranking category pages, sellers can use various techniques such as implementing the right keywords, featuring content blocks, and linking to relevant content.
- Blog content: It not only allows sellers to communicate valuable information to consumers, but it also serves as a powerful tool in SEO optimization, since content tends to be rich in keywords. This can be implemented by using keywords in the title and other vital places, concisely answering common questions to land in Google’s answer box, including captivating visuals, and ensuring that copy is free from grammatical errors or misleading information.
3. Link Building
Internal linking is thought to be an outdated strategy, but it is still incredibly important. This can be achieved by placing relevant internal links throughout on-page copy and articles. While doing this, it is important to remember that people purchase a store’s product, not Google. Therefore, while creating inbound links, it is more pressing to satisfy buyer intent and create item listings that convert.
Internal links increase sales by increasing the user’s dwelling time (time spent on your site), thereby increasing the chances of conversion. They also take users to deeper pages that they may not have discovered from SERPs. Additionally, by linking to related products on item listings, consumers are incentivized to shop around and see what a store has to offer.
Thus, retailers need to create an internal linking structure that shows shoppers enticing items while simultaneously pulling them to the store.
4. Technical SEO
Although it can be argued that technical SEO has been pivotal, with recent algorithm changes, it is now more vital than ever to pay close attention to the technical health of online business websites. The most basic definition of technical SEO is any optimization of your website that doesn’t involve the content part.
Before creating an action plan, creating an SEO audit is necessary as it enables you to know what you should focus on. When prioritizing your strategy, refer to the Pareto Principle (80% of an output from a given situation is determined by 20% of the input), as well as the three main pillars of SEO: security, site speed, and crawlability.
Depending on your website’s technical status, you may discover a variety of issues to tackle. The following 6 are the most common:
- Apply Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) by migrating your website to HTTPS
- Reduce site load time for desktop and mobile
- Eliminate broken pages and links
- Remove mixed content issues
- Withdraw toxic backlinks
- Create an XML sitemap and submit it
It is important to remember that technical SEO, along with keyword SEO, works well when implemented hand in hand.
5. Split Testing
A/B testing or split testing presents 50% of users with an alternate version of a webpage to test the efficiency of a particular variable. A/B tests aim to get the most out of existing traffic by optimizing a webpage to promote conversion.
Virtually every aspect of a website can be split tested, and even the smallest changes can sometimes yield surprisingly beneficial results. Some website elements that are commonly tested include Call-to-actions, images, navigation structure, and check-out process.
In online businesses, split testing is commonly used to test prices, promotional offers, optimal trial-offer lengths, the effect of free delivery offers on sales and more. Whenever online stores want to gauge the effectiveness of a feature/marketing technique, an A/B test can help them assess it.
Final Thoughts
The SEO world is constantly changing, and your online business may have to adapt to these swings, so you can continue to grow over time. These eCommerce tips may take time to effect, so ensure you develop an SEO strategy that can sustain these changes and enhance business growth.
