Do you have an online store and you hardly receive visits? Whether it is a custom online store or well developed website that you want to promote, it is possible to receive qualified traffic through paid advertising, social networks, forums or certain web pages. However, if we improve our rankings in Google we will get many more visits that will become customers and that, combined with a good Social Media and Email Marketing strategy, will multiply sales exponentially in your ecommerce. 2021 will mark a bigger change in the world of marketing; the digital world is expanding quickly.
Keyword study
This point is crucial when developing a good web positioning strategy and more especially in an online store, where each category, section or product should be optimized for a specific search criteria and several related ones. We can take advantage of the products (and in some cases certain sections) to introduce long tail words with low competition and the main categories and the main page to attack the keywords with the most searches. You must perform this task carefully, so we recommend that you read our complete article on how to search for keywords and apply all the tips. Spend as much time as necessary on this task because everything else will depend on it.
Competitor analysis
This will be of great help to us to know how they are carrying out their SEO strategy in their online store. Pay special attention to how they structure their website and what type of words they select for each section of their store. What your competition does does not have to be the most optimal option, but if they really are positioned in Google for the terms that interest you, it is because they are doing it well. Browse your website several times and analyze everything with a tool that allows you to clearly see the structure of your ecommerce. Also observe the off-page SEO they are doing, that is, what links they are getting and how they do it.
Structure of the online store
It is very important, before starting with the development of the web, to propose from the beginning the structure that the store will have based on the keywords that we have determined and taking into account the pages of the competition, but always respecting the principles of usability, which will allow the user to easily navigate through the store and find what they are looking for. The store should be divided into the main categories (which start from the main page) and, from there, into subcategories or directly into products, depending on each specific case.
Depending on the number of sections that our store covers, we may consider including more or fewer categories linked from the home, but always bear in mind that the juice will be divided more between the sections and less will reach each of them.
Friendly programming
Whether your ecommerce is custom-designed or from a content manager such as Prestashop or Magento, you must make sure that it presents a clean code that is easy to understand by search engines, as well as friendly and descriptive URLs . Let's see some examples of URLs:
✗ http://www.eexample.com/category.php?id_category=31
✓ http://www.eexample.com/shoes-man/
✓ http://www.eexample.com/man/shoes/
The first URL is not descriptive at all and it is impossible to know what we will find inside, however the opposite happens in the other two examples. In the second case we clearly see that we will find men's shoes, and in the third case that we will find shoes within the men's category. A descriptive URL related to the content of the page is a factor of web positioning, and it will also stand out more in search engines. The programming of the page includes other important aspects for SEO such as loading speed, the structure of the content of the pages, the names of the files, etc.
Mobile optimization
More and more people make online purchases through their smartphone, anticipating that 50% of sales in 2018 will be made through these devices . This means a great opportunity and that is why it is essential that you adapt your online store so that it can be displayed correctly on mobile devices. Google strives to determine the best results for those searches carried out from mobile, improving the rankings for those websites that have a responsive design or a mobile version that adapts correctly to the size of mobile devices.
Category optimization
The content of each page of your online store must be excellent to be liked by both search engines and users. Make sure your main page, your categories and all your products have an organized and descriptive content. The study of words that we saw in the first step was crucial to create the structure of the web and now it is also crucial to include the right keywords in each section. The main page and the categories are, in principle, the pages that will compete for the criteria with the most searches and competition, that is why we must optimize them taking care of every detail.
Make sure to include your keywords in the title as well as in headings, page text, and image alt tags. Don't over-optimize the pages; instead it uses variants and semantically related words. Many online stores make the mistake of leaving the categories without any text, when in fact they would improve their results significantly by including a brief description of the category that can be useful for search engines and of course for visitors.
Product sheets
Each product must be optimized so that it can appear in the results when someone searches for it. You can take advantage of certain products for long tail searches that you had not been able to use in the categories. In the optimization process, you must find a balance between what search engines like and what potential customers like. Make sure to include good content within the product sheet and of course never use the manufacturer's description because it will almost certainly be used by dozens of online stores and you will be generating duplicate content and therefore of poor quality, which can mean a penalty for Panda. You should never use copied text, instead you should strive to write unique and original content that correctly describes the product and its characteristics. On the other hand, allowing user comments and ratings can help content to update more often, something search engines welcome. Depending on the competition of each product you can allow yourself to include more or less text, but it must always be original.
Avoid duplicate content
We have already insisted that you should never copy content, not even that provided by the manufacturer, but there are other aspects that can generate duplicate content within your own website. Although it is true that the internal duplicate content is not so serious with the external one, it can cause penalties when the volume is large and in turn can cause the cannibalization of keywords.
SEO off-page
Having a well-structured ecommerce, with good background programming, with well-defined keywords and with good content will make us have a very well-optimized store internally, but we need to make ourselves known so that other websites link us naturally. We propose some ideas so that you can achieve it.
Corporate blog
Include a blog in your store and create original and exceptional content on a regular basis. Study your target audience and publish articles that can help them. Come up with a content marketing strategy (including their promotion) and make yourself known in your sector. In addition to making yourself known, it will help other people link your content and improve the general authority of your website.
Social media
A Social Media strategy, combined with your content marketing strategy, can get hundreds or thousands of people to know you. Make everyone see your strengths and how you differ from the competition, always trying to generate an emotional bond with your audience, but do not use social networks to sell directly. Communicate openly with your community and you will build trust, something very important for online purchases. For Social Media management, please take a look at my company Dragonfly Creatives for further information on how you can utilise your brand’s social media pages in a more effective way.
Possible SEO Blocks
So what to do if your website does not appear in Google or you experience a decrease in positioning? The good news is that in SEO, it is very rare for a problem to be irrecoverable. In general, if you can identify the problem, there will always be a solution that allows you to reverse the situation.
Search query
This tool gives us a lot of information about the visibility of our website in Google searches. It allows us to have a clear idea of the keywords for which we are positioned and their evolution. The impressions of our website in the search results, the clicks that have been made in the searches where our website has appeared and the relationship between impressions and clicks (CTR). We can also know the pages of our site to which the visits from Google searches arrive, as well as the device and the countries from where the searches are carried out. If we focus on the position of the keywords, the data of the "Search query" functionality allows us to know which keywords are less optimized and act on them to achieve a better position in the search results. If we focus on the CTR data it will help us to improve the meta title and description of the pages that we want to position to achieve a greater number of clicks in the search results. We must write the goals of the page with texts that invite you to click.
Crawl errors
In the "Tracking errors" functionality, errors detected by Google bots when passing through our site appear. Fundamental to improve our SEO Onpage. This section shows the 404 errors detected on the website, the blocked pages and the 500 errors, if any. You can access the errors detected both on a computer, on a smartphone or on low-end phones. The errors shown in this section should be 0. We must solve all the problems found by Search Console, this will help us not only with the positioning but also to make a much friendlier website. Once the errors found have been solved on our site, we must mark them as solved in the tool. Remember that this section of Search Console should be reviewed frequently and correct errors as soon as they appear. Some of the errors can come back even if you have fixed them on your site, many times it is normal, but just in case, check them again.
Sitemaps
The "sitemaps" functionality allows us to inform Google of our site's sitemaps by adding them to Search Console. The sitemap is an xml file that shows the link structure of our website. Although it is not something that improves the positioning directly, it helps Google when it comes to crawling all the URLs of your website. After adding your sitemap file to Search Console, Google will check if the file is correct and if it is not, it will show you the errors it has detected. Solve all the errors that you mark and upload the sitemap again. After Search Console has processed the sitemap file, both the submitted and indexed pages appear. At first there may be some difference between the two but little by little they must be equalized. If there is a lot of difference between the submitted and indexed pages, you will have to look for any indexing problems on your website. The Search Console functionality itself, if there is any indexability problem, will alert you to solve it. If you find errors, check if the robots.txt is blocking important parts of your website.
Don’t fall behind with the new digital expansions. It’s time to be in control of your business’ destiny.