Making some tweaks in the content of your website can increase your site’s search engine visibility.
You may have casually seen the term SEO (search engine optimization) over the Internet or heard it from your friends. But, do you know what it is and how it leverages your e-commerce venture? Here is a quick run-through of what SEO is and how applying it to your business can jack up your branding and profit.
SEO is a digital marketing strategy to boost the visibility of your website’s URL in non-paid (organic) search engine (particularly Google) results. The websites with the best SEO campaign are placed on top of the Google’s list of URLs for a certain keyword. (see Figure 1)
Figure 1
Why launch an SEO campaign?
Seating at the top of the list on Google is a big boost to your brand’s web presence. Why? Here are the reasons:
- SEO makes your presence felt by your customers.
Being on a top spot on Google is like being posted on a billboard where your product can be seen globally. Depending on the popularity of the keyword, virtually, billions of people can visit your e-commerce site. More than that, you can tap online consumers, 89% of whom use search engines to make informed buying decisions.
- SEO is cost-effective.
An effective SEO campaign will boost your brand’s visibility with less cost. Sometimes, all you need to pay for is a competent SEO professional to orchestrate your SEO campaign. In fact, organic SEO trumps pay-per-click ads. With a spending that’s just 1/8 of pay-per-click, organic results generate 8.5 clicks for every one click on a paid search result.
- SEO provides long-term effects.
SEO’s effects can last for a long time. Unlike other marketing endeavors that require you to reboot your campaign every year, your SEO campaign can grow stronger year after year. While the life of other marketing forms is dependent on the paid exposure of your brands, SEO is based on how important and efficient your website is to the search engines.
Ways to improve your site’s SEO
Google has published its guidelines on how a website can leverage its SEO. For the world’s most famous search engine, the quality of your article, its structure, and its compilation in a website is important. As such, they expect blogs, web articles, and other content to reach their expectations. As an e-commerce player, you should also observe this business practice to make your article stand on top of Google and reap more profits.
SEO is a complicated practice that is now a full-fledged profession. To make the most money out of your SEO campaign, you can outsource SEO experts, especially for SEO technicalities. But, on the level of content production, you can leverage your campaign by producing quality content with SEO in mind.
Want to expand your e-commerce site’s visibility on the web? Here are some simple steps to get you started:
- Research for popular and specific keywords.
Every Google user types in keywords to locate what they are finding on the web. To find the site that they are searching for, they type keywords. That’s why, your keywords should be popular and specific to make sure Google and your prospective customers will recognize your site. Say you are selling cheese. Instead of just “cheese”, use “blue cheese in Florida”. Big brands and keywords whose popularity has been established for years often dominate the generic keywords. Being more specific increases the chances of getting found in a very crowded web space.
To get the most popular and most specific keywords, use keyword research tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Planner, Google Trends, Wordtracker’s Free Basic Keyword Demand, or Microsoft Bing Ads Intelligence. Be sure to include these keywords on your site’s homepage and other relevant pages.
- Compose unique and accurate page titles.
Consider the titles as the individual names of each of your web pages. Aside from giving the main description of what your article is all about, they also represent your entire content in any search engine. To stand out among the competition, write the titles of your websites well by:
- Accurately describing the page’s content by picking a title that is closely related to the content on the page and by not using default or vague titles such as “Untitled” or “Page;
- Creating unique title tags for each page by using different title tags across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages; and
- Using brief, yet descriptive titles by using keywords helpful to users in your title tags.
- Provide quality content and services
As an e-commerce professional, the quality of your content and services is a big contributor on how others view your products. So SEO aside, quality content and services are in themselves paramount in your online business. This practice is encouraged by Google through running procedures (also known as algorithms) to check the quality of your content. To get a passing mark in these algorithms, make sure to do the following:
- Write easy to read articles without spelling and grammatical mistakes. Also, cut them into small chunks separated by subheadings to be read smoothly.
- Don’t embed text in images so that search engines can read it.
- Publish fresh and unique content by refraining from copying or even rehashing existing articles on the web.
- Don’t pepper your article with keywords on the assumption that this practice encourages search engines to notice your site. Google has an algorithm that discourages and even penalizes content writers who do this.
- Give your website the right promotion
As a marketer of e-commerce sites, you have to promote your website to increase its traffic. But, you need to choose the best promotional method and the right channels to course your promotional materials. Just like in traditional marketing, digital marketers should know the right balance in their promotional mix—what kinds of content to publish and the specific channels to publish them.
You can also reach out to the related community where your target market is. Being immersed in the community allows you to reach out in a more casual way. The more your prospective customers click the link directing to your website, the more it is likely to be positioned at the top of the Google list.
SEO is a complicated marketing skill to master. It requires volumes of books and articles to be read to fully understand its technical aspects. As you have read above, it is advisable to delegate your SEO campaign to companies that specialize on this. The tips above aim to make it easier for search engines to locate your website among millions of competitors.
