Introducing your business to the web can be a challenging task depending on how competitive the business niche is and how savvy that niche is in terms of e-commerce, but there are a few things you can do to increase your chance of surpassing your competition and growing into the leader of your niche.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of informing search engines what your website is all about — regardless if you have an e-commerce website, a blog, or an entire community.
To get started with the search engine optimization of your own project online, whether it’s an ecommerce store, a blog, or a community, consider the single most powerful aspect of search engine optimization … content and content development. Analysts have studied and researched time and time again to discover that one of the most constant signals search engines factor in with their results is the quality of content published by any given source online. While blogs focus on content more than traditional websites and communities, it’s not to say they don’t have the opportunity to publish content just as regularly if not more.
In essence, you need to focus on how you can publish content to the web.
Search Engines and eCommerce Content
The content you publish to the web should relate directly to your products and niche of business, because the more relevant your content is to your community of potential customers, the more exposure you will receive from the search engines. Search engines are p[providing their users with a service — they index the web and provide the best possible results whenever someone searches for information. The way search engines generally build their index, which is ever-changing and growing, is by analyzing the content of a website, including content both in and out of the body. The content that appears within the body is the content visible to the actual visitor of your website, whereas the content outside is usually invisible to the visitor, unless it’s within the footer or header.
Search Engine Optimization for the eCommerce Site
When approaching e-commerce search engine optimization, remember that you need to pay close attention to your entire site, including every page — not just the domain itself, — because search engines treat each page of a website separately from the next.
It helps to think about your e-commerce website just like any other brick and mortar business — think of each page on your website like an individual retail store throughout your city. The goal is to optimize each one to make as many sales as possible, not just your flagship store — or front page.
One of the leading reasons why we rank number one for several terms throughout Google’s index is due to the fact that we place a heavy focus on content development and publication.
Types of Content for your eCommerce Site
Whether you’re optimizing a product page, an article, or a category page, you need to consider how much content is live on the page and how you might be able to enhance it. Check out the following pieces of content that might appear on your e-commerce website:
Product Pages
As an ecommerce business owner, you’re likely to have a few dozen product pages on your ecommerce site, because this is where you will be offering your visitors the products you’re selling. To optimize these pages, focus not on providing content about the product, such as manufacturer information, dimensions, and styles — that’s important, but that’s not going to increase your search engine optimization much — instead, focus on the actual benefits the product provides owners and why the visitor should buy it from your ecommerce store.
This takes the focus off of the obvious content and instead focuses on providing the visitors with information regarding why they’ll enjoy it. In essence, it’s the time to make your pitch … again, think about a brick and mortar store and how they pitch their products in effort to sell. Most employers often provide employees with training and seminars all about the company, the products, and other helpful information in order to aid the employee during the pitch.
The key is to stand out from the other product pages providing the same product across the web — provide something your customer won’t find anywhere else.
Articles
In addition to your product pages, you’re going to need to create a massive amount of content designed to target your potential customers whenever they search the web for related content. To do this, you’ll need to perform basic keyword research and discover what customers are entering the search engine to find content related to your products — once you have this information, you’ll be able to create relevant articles and outrank the competition that merely focuses on their product pages.
Similar to providing helpful information other than the manufacturer’s information when pitching a product, the article section of your website provides the opportunity to help your customer before he or she purchases something from your website, which is usually what people require before they spend their money anywhere. As consumers, we want to be sure we’re spending our money in a good place and that we get the most value out of our buck. One way to do this online is to provide helpful content upfront. The nice thing about providing articles to your customers is that in addition to helping them while they’re on your ecommerce website, they may also stumble upon it while searching, and become more interested in what you have to offer as a professional retailer.
Community Content
While it may seem like there’s nothing better than community generated content, such as reviews, articles, and what not, it might actually derail your content optimization approach a bit depending on what content you allow. For example, if you’re focusing on providing your community with articles all about flowers, yet you open up the option to submit articles about whatever the visitor wants, you risk optimizing your content to whatever he or she submits, which in turn might result in ranking well for cement blocks but not flowers.
That said, community content can really enhance a website if properly set up for it.
eCommerce Search Engine Optimization
Whether you’re just starting your website or you’re revamping the search engine optimization layer of it in order to reach more people via search engines, you’ll need to start with the keyword research in order to discover what language people are using to find relevant content in your niche. Once you have a list of both long tail and head keywords — long tail keywords tend to be more specific and less searched, while head keywords tend to be broad and searched more — you’ll be able to approach your niche with a powerful sense of what to use when creating and optimizing your content.
A few things to think about when creating and optimizing your content:
- URL structure
- URL keyword density
- Permalink URLs
- Keyword density
- Opening keyword relevance
- Text styling (bold, italics, underline)
- Headlines
- Anchor text of inbound links (though it’s difficult to control)
- Anchor text of outbound links
- Image alt tags
- Meta Information
- Quality of the content
The quality of the content is perhaps the most important aspect to focus your attention on because of its impact on search engines.
Search Engine Optimization Is An Ongoing Effort
While some aspects of starting a business online, such as market research and building your website, may be temporary, search engine optimization is an ongoing process in which you need to track your metrics and adjust as necessary.