eCommerce sales keep going up but your eCommerce website isn’t seeing any action.
What can you do to get more paying customers to your website?
If your SEO strategy has failed, there are quite a few things you can do to help boost your sales with SEO magic.
Search marketing can be tricky when you don’t know how to make your eCommerce site appear more in the SERPs.
Every business thinks it should be on the first page of the search engine results page however the reality is many websites don’t deserve it.
The search engines want to show the best websites for a keyword therefore your website can boost eCommerce sales by using SEO
So, how can you boost sales with more organic traffic?
An SEO Strategy That Increases Sales for Your E-commerce Site or Small Business Website
What are some effective SEO strategies for increasing revenue?
It starts by searching keywords for what your potential customer users are searching for.
An SEO specialist can find and target the best long-tail keywords that will increase the traffic of websites. It is essential to write interesting and relevant articles for these purposes.
These keywords should be used across the entire page.
It creates relevancy and makes it easier for search engines to know about your website and why. Content marketing is important to optimize a site, but it doesn’t represent all the rest.
Target the entire conversion funnel with SEO
Many digital marketers target a couple of funnels — consideration, and decisions.
It is sometimes difficult to get through to deciding. SEO is effective at every stage. Make it a habit of segmenting the keyword research into each phase.
List the searches the client performed for a specific time. This is a fundamental part of the funnel marketing plan.
So, how can you boost sales with SEO?
1. Improve the look of your website
If you’ve got a basic website it might be worth investing a bit more to ensure it looks the part.
With the huge amount of competition, when users land on your website you’ve got around a few seconds to make an impression.
One of the best ways to get a website online is by using a CMS like WordPress, this allows you to make customisations to pages a lot easier vs a bespoke website where custom development is needed
2. Perform in-depth keyword research
It’s all about targeting relevant keywords Competitor websites are probably ranking for thousands of keywords whilst you are not.
This can be because your content just doesn’t pack a punch, you’ll be missing out on talking about vital keywords and losing traffic.
For smaller websites, the best keywords to go for are long tail keywords which are 3 words plus.
There are much easier to optimise for plus, ranking for them will help with your long-term goals of ranking for the one-word or two-word keywords.
Implementing relevant keywords strategically, for example using long-tail keywords can see your website get some quick wins and reach more potential customers.
3. Use software like SEM Rush & Ahrefs to find keywords
This is perhaps one of the fastest ways to find keywords, by seeing what your competitors are ranking for.
By identifying their keywords you’ll get some new ideas and be able to put a plan of action together to create a website that is better than your competitors
4. Create a content strategy
To be seen as an authority in your niche, you need to produce content that your audience will love and trust.
This only comes over time, you can’t build authority overnight, you need to produce high-quality content regularly plus interlink those pages together to show the search engines you know what you’re talking about.
5. Break up your keywords by type:
Keywords have search intent associated with them, navigational, and transactional, information so you don’t want to be going after informational keywords with your product pages or transactional keywords with informative blogs.
6. Add 1,000 words plus to the home page:
Most eCommerce stores will be content poor, there won’t be much content on the home page and that’s fine if you’re an established brand.
The problem is when you’re a newer website or your website has been online for a while and you’ve not been proactive, you’ll have a lower domain authority score and your website won’t rank as well.
7. Create content regularly
This is one of the hardest things to keep on top of. Creating content takes time and often some money especially if you need to get some graphics done too.
We’d suggest the minimum post frequency be around once every two weeks however ideally, you’d get a new piece of content out once a week.
8. Build an e-mail list:
if you’re getting people to your site, even if it’s just a few, you can start building an email list which can help you grow your business.
It’s all about satisfying the current customers and using them to help grow your business and bring similar people in
9. Use social media to share your content
Some people might feel a bit vulnerable doing this however you need to be sharing your content in as many ways as possible.
Sharing on social media gets more eyes on your content and can help you build relationships
10. Put thought and effort into category pages
Don’t leave your category pages bare. They need some content, either at the top or below the products that have keywords.
You don’t need to overdo it, you shouldn’t add 1,000 words at the top, people want to see your products, however, it can be beneficial to add around one to two hundred words with some internal links added too.
11. Write unique product descriptions of around 300-500 words
This is one of the biggest struggles for businesses with a lot of products. Sometimes, it’s impossible to add unique product descriptions especially if you’ve got a high product turnover where you’re selling different products all the time.
If you’re selling generic products everyone else is, you shouldn’t just use the same product description as everyone else.
This can lead to duplicate content issues plus it’s just much better to create a unique experience for your users
12. Build relationships with local businesses
Give your SEO efforts a boost by partnering up with local businesses.
This can be a great way to get more backlinks to your web pages and help grow your e-commerce site.
You don’t want to connect with direct competitors however, if you’ve got local businesses that are similar but different, this can be a great way to help boost sales.
13. Use external linking
Many website owners don’t like linking out to other websites but it’s a great way of showing the search engines that you’re interested in helping your audience find the best information online.
14. Use internal linking
Internal linking helps the search engines index pages, makes things easier for the user and helps with navigation.
A lot of websites don’t utilise the power of internal linking, but when it’s done right it can be extremely powerful.
15. Use clean, keyword-rich URLs
How many times do you see URLs which are crazy long and just filled with gibberish?
To improve SEO you want the URL of your pages to be clear and concise, with ideally a keyword added in.
16. Use the best images possible
If you’re selling products, it’s best not to use stock photos.
Ideally, you want to have your brand images, yes, this can be expensive, especially for smaller businesses but the benefits are huge.
Try to find a good student photographer or videographer who has a small portfolio you can judge them on.
You need someone who will capture the essence of a brand, all with imagery.
17. Use suitable dimensions for your images
If you’re uploading images to your website, you want to check their size of them first.
If you’re uploading images that are over 2500px or even over 1500px, you might want to think about using small dimensions, especially if the photos on your website are displayed small than this.
Larger dimensions mean bigger file sizes which mean slower loading times.
18. Make sure your image file sizes are optimised
Once you’ve got the right size, you might find that your images are still too large.
Many people upload images to websites which are like 3MB, this is crazy.
Ideally, you want to have it less than 200 GB, and in many cases under 100MB especially if a lot of images are used on the web pages.
If you’ve got an image that’s a bit too big, you can try optimising it.
There are two websites we like to use, pic Resize and tiny png, which help make the file sizes smaller.
19. Use keywords in image alt tags and file names
The image file alt tags are tags where you can insert keywords to tell the search engines what the image is about.
When uploading images, you want to use suitable file names eg. product-colour, so like black tv and perhaps
20. Be proactive in getting reviews
Reviews are so important for helping move a business forward.
Often, businesses want to know how they can make more sales, but the most important thing is maximising the sales you’ve already got.
Reach out to your current customers, ask how their experience was and if they’ll leave a review.
21. Offer referral deals for the giver and receiver
Using your current customers to help grow is how businesses like Airbnb got so popular so fast.
21. Optimise the speed of your website
The speed of your website is important. If your site is taking more than 2 seconds to load this can increase the bounce rate and lower your ranking in the search engine results pages.
22. Clean up any 404 or error pages
Whilst 404 error pages don’t directly affect SEO, they can affect the user experience.
For example, if you’ve got a page of content with internal links to pages that are no longer there, this will be bad for the user and could cause them to go back to the search results.
Your 404 error page should have a link back to the main page of your website and it could be wise to have a few more links pointing to your most important pages
23. Look at the technical SEO aspects
The technical SEO side is all about making sure that your web pages are easy to index and crawled by Google.
Did you know some people put websites live and they’ve not enabled the website to be shown in the search engines?
Technical SEO factors can cause havoc with a website. using a tool like Ahrefs or SEM Rush can help you identify these issues and perform fast fixes
24. Build more high-quality backlinks
If your website has a low domain authority rating, this means that it won’t be shown in the search engines as much as it should.
There’s a common misconception with backlinks, that any link is worth the same value, this is certainly not true.
You want other websites where it makes sense for them to have a link to your website.
25. Incorporate video
Everyone hates doing videos, but they can be a great way to bring authenticity to your website.
If you’ve got a page that’s not getting so much traffic but is getting a little, try adding a ten-minute video to your page.
Whilst this doesn’t directly affect your SEO ranking position, what it can do is keep people on your website for longer, showing Google people like it.
26. Create a sitemap
Creating a sitemap is a great way to make it as simple as possible for search engines to navigate your website.
27. Install Google Search Console & Analytics
Two tools are free and tell you everything you need to know about how your users are finding your website to how they are interacting with your website.
If you’re not using these two tools, you’re missing out. Google search console updates every 24 hours showing you which keywords you ranking for, what positions and a whole lot more.
28. Add an FAQ page
Everyone loves an FAQ page and they can be great resources and great for adding keywords.
If you’ve not got an FAQ page, try adding one with the ten to twenty most frequently asked questions you asked about your business
29. Add structured data
In 2020 over half of the search queries have zero clicks, meaning that searchers don’t leave Google’s search results and search for the information they want.
So the optimum SEO is primarily geared toward SEO optimisation for website traffic. You’ll be able to distinguish the data structure of your website in the search results.
Although structured data does not necessarily provide a ranking signal, structured data can improve visibility and helps people understand your website early on.
30. Target local keywords
Whilst local SEO is perhaps easier, there are fewer people to target, so things can be quite competitive.
However with strong content and utilising a google my business profile you can start getting more business from the local area.
31. On-page SEO and off-page SEO are incredibly important.
There’s too much to list here but you’re on-page SEO focuses on everything you have control over on the page, from the text to images to titles and page speed.
Off-page SEO is all about backlinks and reputation management for your website.
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