You might have the best ham-and-cheese-toastie maker out there, or maybe you’re specially designed 2 iron will add 64 yards to even the most novice of golfers, or perhaps your stunning collection of handcrafted ornaments are an absolute knock-out – none of this matters.
If someone goes into Google and types in “best 2 iron golf club” and instead of seeing your artfully designed, painstakingly crafted graphite shaft, brass handle, personalised offering (only to be found on page 7 of Google’s powerful search tool), they see a generic plastic toy club for kids – sorry, but you’re out of business. You see, and sorry to break this to you, but while quality naturally does matter, so do the SERPs (search engine results pages). This is why the best SEO services and general SEO know-how are so crucial to contemporary business. Without a solid, first-page placing in the SERPs for your major search terms, you’re done for.
But fortune is at hand – here are the top 5 SEO tips for ecommerce websites – ignore them at your peril!
1. Identify your target audience. Yes, this may seem like an all-round obvious point, applicable to all kinds of business. But the key here is that you need to identify your most valuable search terms. Will your target customer enter Google and search for ‘trainers’ or ‘sneakers’, ‘couches’ or ‘sofas’, ‘equipment’ or ‘gear’? What kind of tone of voice should your site have – formal, friendly, young, old? And how could this target audience influence the offering itself? Understand your audience and construct your site based on that understanding.
2. Google analytics. Utilise Google’s SEO tool to identify where and how you can strengthen your website, page by page. Google analytics will help you appreciate the value of homing in on a specific, targeted search term for each URL, and how to effectively use that search term throughout the content of that page. Soon you’ll have gained a solid understanding of the basics of digital marketing, and although it can seem a little daunting at first, you’ll be able to better create and modify content for your individual business objectives.
3. Use great photography. Nothing frustrates more than to see a fledgling website doing all the hard stuff well – great products, stunning animation overload, super-duper About Us section – and then utterly fail to properly capture the scented candles, handmade chocolates or pretty window boxes that are up for sale. And really, in today’s day and age of Instagram filters and 10-megapixel phone cameras, there’s simply no excuse. Great photography can be the difference between a conversion – get your customers onside at first glance with some beautiful imagery of your product at work, doing what it does best.
4. Know your meta title from your meta description. Those strange extra fields that get left blank when you’re uploading a blog to your WordPress website? Meta tags and descriptions are the information that your potential customers will see when your website suddenly appears in the SERPs. Not only that, but those tags influence how Goolge rank your pages. Know them, understand them, use them to your advantage. Pitch your offering, engage at a glance, and better your chances of people visiting and buying from your site.
5. Tinker. Before you unleash your beloved website upon the unsuspecting world, dot those ‘i’s, cross those ‘t’s. Better to go live late than go live bad. So make sure that all the meta info is in place, that you’re satisfied – from a data-driven perspective – with your keywords, and that you’ve employed an expert group to manage your backlink profile.
Now that you’ve got everything in place, it’s time to sit back and enjoy that toastie – because your ecommerce website is ready to top those SERPs and bring in the punters!