Search Engine Optimization has come a long way over the years, with changes taking place at every turn. Search engines constantly review their algorithms to enhance website visibility and improve user experience.
Ecommerce websites continue to make a big difference in the way people interact online and generally live their lives. Ecommerce website owners will use every trick in the book to make their websites user friendly, attract traffic, and ultimately more profitable. When SEO is done in the right way, ecommerce websites can break even within a short time.
Here are a few tips to help you scale your ecommerce website.
Keywords are Still Key
Visitors to your site search for products, ask queries, and generally interact with the website through keywords. Regardless of the approach you take, Joel House recommends that you make sure that the keyword strategy for your ecommerce site is well thought out, properly utilized and incorporates insights gained through research and data. Take some time to study the search behavior and trends of your web visitors. If you have a variety of products, you’ll need to find out how consumers respond to each product and adjust the keywords accordingly.
There are two different types of keywords, short-tail and long-tail. Short-tail keywords (head terms) generally refer to terms that have broader usage and are intent on appealing to users in multiple ways. For example, “Football fields” is a short-tail keyword whereas “Football fields in Europe” is a long-tail keyword that is much more specific. Long-tail keywords direct the web visitor to a particular page and therefore becomes a better lead.
Page Load time
How fast does your website respond to visitor’s queries?
Despite all your other website optimization efforts, if your website responds too slowly to queries, you will lose potential clients to the competition. Experienced website owners and managers know that website visitors are impatient and any delay in response will potentially send them to your competitors. From the start, and even as you continue to improve on your pages and products, ensure that your pages load and maintain optimal response speeds.
Allow Easy Crawling and Indexing
Search engines use behind-the-scene crawlers and indexing matrices to rank the content of your websites. Once you’ve put your content together, following the appropriate guidelines, it will be easy for your content to rank high and in the right priority on search engines.
In addition, as you work to optimize the functionality of your website, make sure that the plugins you install do not hamper crawling.
Improve on Thin Content
The easiest way to define thin content is as content that has little or no value to the site visitor. This includes pages with unhelpful web descriptions, lack appropriate images and blank pages with no content.
Thin content simply weighs down your website, creating a bad user experience and can brand your website as unreliable. Thin content offers no solution and no value to the website user.
As search engines improve their ability to crawl and index websites, they are also getting better at highlighting weaknesses and strengths. To help you rank appropriately, continuously improve on pages with thin content which can seriously impact your digital marketing strategy.
Go Mobile First
It is 2020 and if your website is not mobile responsive then you are headed in the wrong direction! Mobile penetration all over the world is at an all-time high. As a result, smartphones have become the primary point of data consumption. As an ecommerce website owner, you have got to make your website mobile friendly.
Testing various templates and plugins to see how they help to improve the performance of your website can ensure that user-experience, both desktop and mobile, is at its absolute best.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
What are your competitors doing for profitability?
You must keep an eye on the various strategies being used by other ecommerce websites, especially those operating in the same space as you. To beat the competition, pick strategies that work and elevate your site above theirs.
Link Building
Inbound and outbound linking is still a winning strategy for ecommerce websites. As you work build your webpages, use links to direct traffic to various other pages within and outside your website.
Affiliate marketing has also become a good way of growing ecommerce websites. There are several ways of going about it, like taking advantage of affordable copyrighting services to build links that help your website ranking.
Keep Learning. Keep improving
This is ultimately the best way to grow. As trends continue to change, you must keep an eye on what’s new to the market and what trends are emerging and align your site accordingly.
Conclusion
There are several ways to approach SEO for ecommerce websites. While some methods retain a consistent position in terms of usability, continuous innovation is the key to growth, development and ultimately, profitability. Keep learning and experimenting with what works.
