Five Easy Online Store SEO Techniques To Boost Your Ranking

Getting people - and search engines - to take notice of your online store is quite a challenge, especially if SEO is not your first language.

But it's not as daunting as you may think, take a look at this blog for 5 simple techniques that you can use to fire your store up the rankings....

1. Create unique content

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 5 years, you'll know that content is king. Ecommerce pros don't just create content because it's the 'in' thing to do, they create it because it's proven to drive more traffic and improve SEO.

The simple science behind is that Google likes to see new content regularly, it helps to drive more links to your store, and can set you apart as a leader in the product you sell.

But if you're struggling to see these awesome results then it can be frustrating...

Put it in action:

Content can be great, so long as you have the right strategy. Your first step should be to put together a content plan that outlines your goals so that you know how to measure your campaigns.

Next, you need to consider the type of content you want to create, depending on who you are targeting. Sure, you'll have your overall target audience, but it's important to create content that targets people at different stages of the sales funnel.

For example, blog posts or infographics are highly shareable and great for those customers who don't know who you are yet. Where-as an e-book is an educational piece and is ideal for encouraging lead generation.

It's a methodology that takes time and effort, but so long as you follow these steps and create valuable unique content then it will help to improve the visibility of your store.

2. Build authoritative links

Unfortunately link building has a bad rep because a few people tried to ruin it for the rest of us and spam the web with bad links. But we're not interested in spamming people, we're interested in gaining authoritative links – and you should be too.

When we say 'authoritative' what we mean is basically gaining links from high value, well established sites. The problem is, it's easy to link to these sites, but how do you get these authoritative sites to link to you?

Put it in action:

So it involves a combination of content creation and outreach...

Let's say you create a blog post that you want people to link back to. First step is you need to come up with an idea that loads of people will like. And to do this, you need to adopt the ' Skyscraper Technique ' – made popular by Brian Dean.

The idea is basically you go and find a popular blog post that a lot of people have linked to and shared. You can check out tools such as BuzzSumo to find the most popular content in your niche. Next, you take that awesome content and you make it better, by putting your own view point on it.

Once you've started to create unique content that adds value, you then need to outreach it to people who own well-established sites and ask them to link to your post.

By building relationships with thought leaders and sending them content that backs up what they stand for, you'll be able to encourage authoritative links to your online store.

3. Encourage product reviews

Did you know that 20% of online stores see an increase of click-throughs by featuring product reviews? The great thing about a review is that not only does it encourage other customers to buy your products, but it also provides new content on your page.

And, when a customer searches for your product in Google, it's not uncommon for them to search for reviews as well. That's why it's so valuable for you to feature them because it terms of SEO, it can help you move up the rankings.

Put it in action:

What you need to do is encourage people to leave product reviews. The aim is of course to make sure the reviews people leave are all positive, but don't be disheartened if you do get some bad reviews. This only gives you a chance to improve your customer service.

Related reading: Check out our previous post ' How to encourage, reward and showcase user reviews ' for more help on this topic!

4. Optimize every page

Yes it's true, every page on your website should be fully optimized to ensure that have the best SEO techniques in place even if pages are all similar like this casino night event planner. Whether it's keywords for your product descriptions, tagging your product images or personalizing your page titles, everything needs to be considered so that you can set your store up for success!

Put it in action:

What you need to do is get your meta data in order across your whole site. It's important to optimize meta titles and descriptions because this is the snippet that shows up on the search engines.

For example if you wanted to optimize a product page, use relevant keywords within the meta title and description, as this provides clarity to the reader as well as impacts your SEO.

You should also create unique product descriptions. Even if your eCommerce website sells products that are not unique, it is very important to ensure you are writing unique and compelling descriptions for your products.

Not only will this help your SEO efforts, but by creating content that answers questions that customers might ask, you are creating product pages that are more likely to convert sales.

It's also important to tag the images on your website as this will help search engines understand what your images are about. Be sure to use relevant keywords to tag your images, but do not stuff alt tags or image titles with lengthy keyphrases, as this is still considered a spammy technique.

When optimizing your website, make sure you do plenty of keyword research to find out what your customers are searching for, so you can improve your SEO and your conversion rate!

5. Measure and Analyze

The last technique we'd suggest is to use analytics so you can gain real insights into what is working on your website and what isn’t. A good analytics tool will give you a breakdown of activity including who is visiting your site, the pages they are landing on, the amount of organic traffic you receive, and the impact of your marketing campaigns.

Once you have this data in hand, you can then seek to improve your store for the better. You can tweak your landing pages, start creating content that is targeted to the right audience – and run better campaigns.

Put it in action:

Choose your analytics platform that works for your store. It really depends on what is most important for you, so you could use Google Analytics, but it's not the only option out there...

For example, KISSmetrics is heavily focused on targeting your audience, where-as Mint lets you identify the exact page on your site that generates the most interest. Shop around for the right tool for you and use it to improve the SEO across your entire store.

You can also run small Google adwords campaigns to test keywords to find out which keywords convert best on the 1 st page of Google paid results. The results will help you to determine which keywords might convert best in organic results as well. This information can save you from making mistakes in the direction of your SEO when you start working on optimizing your website.

Closing thoughts

As you can see, there is a lot to take into account when improving the SEO on your online store! These are just a few of the techniques that can really help, so put them into practice - and keep tuning into our blog to find out more!

Are you looking for an Ecommerce solution? Then speak to us today and find out more about our pro-grade ecommerce tools!