If you want to boost your online presence, build trust, and scale your brand, the first thing you need to do in 2024 is adopt ecommerce SEO.
The value of SEO for online business is massive. It lets you create a better user experience, enhance credibility, and drive lots of potential buyers to your website. And it can be very cost-effective too.
The only question is how to get it right.
Among the obvious advantages of search engine optimization, such as a better online presence and enhanced online traffic, SEO can offer many more perks to an ecommerce business:
Long story short, ecommerce SEO brings long-term value and sets you ahead of your competitors.
Now that you know the primary perks of SEO for online business, you must be wondering whether these benefits are actually backed up by facts and numbers. And the answer is definitely yes!
According to DataReportal's Digital 2023 report, the total number of Internet users last year accounted for 5.16 billion, indicating that the vast majority of the world's population is now online. And that number continues to grow.
Apart from the fact that a huge part of your potential buyers are out there on the web, there is one more thing you should recognize concerning the role of SEO for online business – modern consumers are independent and prefer to make well-informed decisions. It's no wonder researching products and brands is among the top 10 primary reasons why people aged 16-64 go online, with 43.4% of users reporting it.
These facts lead us to one of the most important mottos of today:
“Businesses don’t have to chase the customers now, we just have to be in front of the prospects when they need us.”
And the best way to get in front of customers is to implement search engine optimization!
Every successful ecommerce SEO strategy begins with gathering and analyzing information and making a well-informed plan.
Conducting a thorough competitor analysis should be your first step. Competitor analysis is the core of business intelligence. It enables you to understand the tactics, strengths, and weak points of your competitors, detect gaps in the market, conquer new markets, and make better business decisions faster. Most importantly, it lets you refine your own strategies for a competitive advantage.
Okay, so where do you start? If you are new to competitor analysis, first, equip yourself with the right tools. For example, try the website traffic estimator. With this tool, you can gain a complete overview of your competitors’ traffic and SEO tactics.
Use the data you gain to figure out what works well for other brands in your sector and identify any gaps they’ve missed that you can fill. For example, you can discover specific keywords, topics, page optimization insights, and other important elements that your competitors are neglecting or missing out on.
Once you have all the data at hand, you can build actionable plans to achieve your short-term and long-term goals.
Bonus tip: Target less competitive aspects of optimization for starters. For example, start by integrating less competitive keywords into your strategy; the ones that other brands aren’t using as much yet. This will let you fill the gap and gain that preliminary competitive advantage. Later, you can also target more competitive options.
Leverage cutting-edge keyword research tools to understand the queries people use when researching products similar to yours. Organize your findings in a list of keywords that you can use later in your optimization strategy.
For maximum impact, collect different types of keywords, such as:
Once you have a plan and a list of target keywords, you can start optimizing your site to appear higher in online search results. To get the most out of it, we recommend approaching optimization based on different page types:
Ecommerce category pages are used to organize and showcase groups of products with similar attributes or purposes. They are there to make it simpler to navigate through the products in your store.
Here's how you should optimize them:
Unlike category pages, product pages are your revenue generators. They provide prospects with in-depth information about each product and encourage them to make a purchase.
Here's how to optimize them:
Unlike your category and product pages, blog pages don't directly sell your products. Instead, they create opportunities to grow your website traffic, boost rankings, improve brand awareness, create better engagement, acquire backlinks, and build trust and customer loyalty. Here, your focus should be on delivering value rather than closing deals.
Here are several tips for optimizing blog pages:
Bonus tip: When handling on-page optimization, you want to integrate your target keywords into all website elements, including:
However, don’t overuse keywords. Search engines often penalize sites for keyword stuffing.
Technical optimization doesn’t only help you align with search engine algorithm requirements and appear higher in results. It also helps make your ecommerce store more user-friendly and convenient, improving customer satisfaction and retention.
Here are several core tips for enhancing your technical SEO for online business:
Bonus Tip: To maintain and improve your eCommerce store's search engine rankings, it's crucial to perform regular technical SEO audits. These audits help identify and rectify any emerging issues, from broken links and slow page speeds to crawl errors, ensuring your site remains optimized for both search engines and users.
A strong backlink portfolio is crucial for your online store to rank high in the SERPs. Yet, the benefits of link-building go way deeper:
How do you build an effective backlink profile to make the most out of your SEO for online business? Start with the basics:
Bonus tip: Focus on influencer marketing. The State of Influencer Marketing 2023 report reveals that 69% of consumers trust influencer recommendations. Moreover, 36% of brands claim that influencer content shows better performance than branded content. Hence, partnering with influencers who cover your target audience can help you gain even more trust, traffic, and potential conversions.
Results tracking and analytics are the last crucial elements of search engine optimization. When collecting and analyzing data from your ecommerce SEO efforts, you can learn from your performance and detect weak spots that can be improved to push your online business forward.
To measure the success of SEO for online business effectively, you need to determine your focus performance metrics. Some key metrics include:
Track these and other metrics that align with your goals using handy tools, such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SE Ranking, and so on. These tools will bring you valuable insights and help you refine your strategy with less effort.
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As you now know, the value of SEO for online business is massive these days. Apart from making you more visible and delivering more traffic, search engine optimization helps you improve your site, create a better user experience, empower other marketing efforts, and gain plenty of other benefits. All in all, it’s an investment worth making if your goal is to scale your brand.
After reading this guide, you have all the data and tools you need to get on the right track. So don’t postpone success any longer, and start your exciting optimization journey ASAP!