Running an e-commerce store is a daunting task these days.
The main reason is that the online market is highly competitive and oversaturated. Aside from that, online consumers grow savvier by the day and they have expectations and needs that e-commerce stores must meet, in order to become relevant enough to piqué interest.
However, it’s possible to cut through all the noise in the online world and effectively not only reach your target audience but also encourage them to purchase at your store. Simple answer, search engine optimization, or SEO for short.
SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy designed to help you improve web traffic to your store and build awareness for your business.
Not only that, but SEO also helps you boost online presence, visibility and credibility for your e-commerce store.
Through thorough optimization, your business can rank top on search engines, such as Google, and become capable of delivering exceptional customer experience to your audience.
Choosing Shopify as your e-commerce platform is a good way to start, but it requires a bit of tweaking and performing various activities before you can boost your ranks or sales.
That being said, here’s how the right SEO strategy can boost your Shopify sales.
Keywords
Keywords are an integral part of any SEO strategy. Keywords are phrases or words you rank to help match content on your pages with user intent. Keyword research is crucial for your SEO and you must determine which keywords to rank for, in order to get the most viable results.
For example, keywords are also called search queries because consumers type them into search engines to find something specific online. Determining which keywords to rank for is based on which phrases your target audience most commonly uses to find products related to what you have in offers, such as smartphone cases or cat food for instance. You must also determine which keywords your competitors are ranking for as well.
You can use various tools, such as SEMrush to run a competitive keyword analysis. These activities help you identify the best keywords for your e-commerce store. In other words, keywords that will best describe your products and content on your website. Keywords are used in content, URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, and other on-site SEO activities. Their purpose is to help individual pages rank well on search engines and drive traffic to your website. More traffic means a greater likelihood of scoring a sale.
Website hierarchy
A seamless browsing experience on your e-commerce website is essential for customer satisfaction. That being said, customer satisfaction is considered a ranking factor by search engines. If you’re able to provide consumers with an exceptional experience on your website, you’ll be able to convert them into customers more easily. In essence, it revolves around user experience and website design. That’s why it’s important to focus on the hierarchy and architecture of your eCommerce store to ensure your website is user-friendly.
That includes page categories, product organization, website navigation and, most importantly, simplicity. A simple yet effective design can help consumers easily browse products on your store while maintaining a seamless experience. A reliable Shopify developer can easily empower an e-commerce platform with apps and tools that will boost customer experience, should you ever need to do so. In addition, you must focus on on-site SEO, such as title tags, URLs, content and descriptions to make your pages both search engine and user-friendly.
Technical SEO
As mentioned before, customer satisfaction is a crucial ranking factor. However, site hierarchy and architecture aren’t the only factors that influence satisfaction. As a matter of fact, your website performance also plays a vital role in determining customer satisfaction. In addition, factors concerning website performance are also considered ranking factors for search engines. To boost sales on your Shopify platform, you’ll have to ensure that it performs well, i.e. focus on technical SEO. Otherwise, your customers will abandon your store for good.
As an example, your website must be fast and you must improve the page loading time. Speed is an important ranking factor and lack of speed can drive customers away. In fact, a single second delay in page load time can result in a 16% decrease in user satisfaction, 11% decrease in page views and 7% decrease in conversion rate. If you profit a $100.000 from your e-commerce store daily, that’s $2.5 million in lost sales annually. Aside from speed, you must ensure that your e-commerce website is mobile friendly or have a responsive design, it must also be secure or your customers will abandon their shopping carts.
Off-site SEO
Sales happen on your e-commerce store, but in order to get there, you must build visibility and credibility for your business to encourage consumers to make purchases at your store. That’s where off-site SEO comes into play. Off-site SEO, as the name suggests, are activities not directly involved with your website. These activities serve a purpose of building your reputation online and helping you extend your reach on the market.
Activities, such as link building and guest posting help with your content marketing and everyone knows content is king in the marketing world. Guest posting is sharing and publishing your content and articles on other reputable sources, such as websites or blogs. However, you must ensure that both the content and the sources you guest post on are relevant to your audience so that your campaign doesn’t fail. In addition, link building goes hand in hand with guest posting and content marketing. It helps you build high-quality backlinks that lead to your website.
Off-site SEO helps build credibility, domain authority and visibility for your store. It generates interest and web traffic to help you boost conversions on your website. You can also share your content on social media. Although not directly tied to SEO, social media can still help boost your visibility and presence. Search engines are more likely to display content that’s viral on social media, as well as boost rankings for e-commerce stores with favorable social media presence.
SEO has become more mandatory rather than optional these days. With the right strategy in place, you can generate more organic traffic to your e-commerce store and build enough reputation to convince leads to convert to customers. After all, the ultimate goal of every e-commerce store is to boost sales and SEO can help you achieve that.
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Bio:
Victor T. Miller, a Sydney-based business and marketing specialist who expands businesses over 5 years. I am a person who loves to inform people about the latest news in the industry also as sharing tips and advice based on my professional experience and knowledge.
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