The internet is growing and becomes more complicated every single day. It takes an effort to be up to date. Now, what if the internet is our primary source of income? The difficulty bar is set very high, to promote our business on the web, we need some specific SEO knowledge.
Today at TimeCamp we are presenting five effective SEO tips characteristic for online stores.
Backlinks to your domain
When it comes to links, it is important that they have proper quality. Only, what is the “quality” of links? What matters is the place where they are and what they look like. To simplify it – the more credible, substantive and widely-read is the site linking to your website, the better. If the link is in a place visited by people representing your target group, that’s great. And if it is located in such a place, that these people are willing to click on it and be directed to your store, it’s even better! You achieve not only the SEO effects but also gain an additional source of potential customers!
If your links are stuffed among other things – links to pages that no one visits, which were created only regarding positioning, it is not a good location in the long run.
#TIP 1:
- Gain your clients by participating in forums’ discussions, posting on blogs, and linking to your site in such a way that users will be interested in checking your link.
- Content is the king:
- SEO can be done not only for phrases related to specific products and services. Creating valuable content – e.g. in the form of a blog with tips for customers of the shop – can attract a lot of traffic thanks to the keyword phrases related to the theme of the store and interests of its target group. It can lead to a transaction at the next visit, which will take place because the user will remember the page (or the remarketing message will reach him.)
- Usually, a purchase does not occur at the user’s first contact with the store. Therefore, reaching only the users who submit a query like “product XYZ” is not a sufficient strategy. It is also beneficial to reach those who ask questions, seek opinions, or want to find out how something works, or what is the best solution to their problem. The well-thought content which was created not for sale, but informative purposes will be helpful here.
#TIP 2:
- The Long Tail – To obtain the movement from the so-called long tail and advanced queries, you might want to create additional content for the users within the site.
- A very important element in e-commerce optimizing is the right choice of title tags. Each sub-page (e.g. the category and products pages) should have unique titles. These titles should inform the user (and search engine crawlers, if you want to the products’ sites to be in high positions), what this sub-page is about.
- The subpage title is defined in the tag <title>, section <head> of HTML code. The content of the <title> appears later in the search results as a blue link. Most of the popular store systems allow you to define the titles using the appropriate field in the product view which is in the store management panel.
#TIP 3:
- It is essential to create appropriate rules of generating titles for categories, subcategories, and products so that the most important keywords appear first.
- XML Sitemap – Suitable sitemap in XML format reported in the Google Search Console panel is going to ease the work of robots (visiting and analyzing the structure of the page and indexing the individual resources.) In the case of small corporate websites it does not matter, but in the case of online stores, which contain thousands of pages, it is very important. Keep in mind that the resources of your store may change over time – XML map should take this into account and be frequently updated.
#TIP 4:
- Make sure that you are registered with Google and update XML map.
- Use the rich snippets – To draw the users’ attention in the search engine, we must use elements that increase the informational value of the results – the so-called rich snippets. They will make a link to your site more attractive and even if it is not in the first position, it will attract attention and clicks.
# TIP 5:
- The use of rich snippets can raise the attractiveness of the search results and contribute to a higher number of clicks at links leading to the store.
- The click on a search result may be provoked by e.g. boasting about an attractive price and information that the product is in stock.
- With the help of rich snippets, we can also inform about the product assessment (e.g. the number of stars it has), some reviews and other aspects relevant from the user’s perspective.
Summary:
The promotion of online stores is entirely different than the promotion of simple HTML pages. Modern shop engines like Magento, Shopify, and Prestashop, have settings and modules supporting SEO. These are mostly the ability to set their our title tags, and description for categories and products, but it can also be a support for generating the XML sitemap, which is sent to Google Webmaster Tools, or a simple way to add Google Analytics. Familiarize yourself with the documentation of your shopping software, or ask about it a company that has prepared your shop, so you can turn these features on and use them for the maximum potential of the internal optimization