Did you know that search engines drive the lion’s share of profit producing traffic for many ecommerce stores? This is because a vast majority of people who make purchases online rely on search engines to find products. This traffic is key to organic growth.
However, if you ignore search engine optimization (SEO) for your online store, you are basically leaving cash on the table.
When you aren’t visible on search results, fewer customers will know about you, translating into less sales and slower growth.
You need SEO to maximize your ecommerce store’s profitability. Organic traffic is too important to give up.
We’ve created a list of powerful SEO strategies that you can use to optimize your online store for organic growth.
Ecommerce Strategies
Here are the strategies that you need to take your organic growth to the next level:
- Optimize Keywords
Keywords are super important when it comes to increasing relevant organic search traffic. Writing high quality content without incorporating target keywords would be a waste of effort.
Well-researched and optimized keywords can help your content rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
So, how do you optimize keywords for SEO?
First and foremost, you need to use keyword research tools to find the right keywords for your online store. Some popular keyword tools are Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and SEMrush.
A good keyword can be defined many different ways. However, a good rule of thumb is selecting keywords with a high search volume and low competition.
Weave the focus keywords into your web copy. For product pages, incorporate the keywords into product descriptions and titles.
The keywords should also be added to your meta titles, URLs and meta descriptions.
Pro tip:
Exercise good judgement when it comes to incorporating keywords and avoid keyword stuffing. If you overstuff your web pages with keywords, your website might get penalized by search engines.
- Improve Page Speed
Page speed affects SEO because it’s a direct ranking factor. This means that a slow loading page will hurt your rank position on SERPs.
And that’s not the only reason page speed is important.
Faster page speeds result in better conversions for ecommerce stores.
In fact, an 8.4% increase in conversion rates was observed for every 0.1 second improvement in speed. Optimizing page load times also leads to an increase in order value by 9.2%. These results are pretty remarkable and point towards the importance of page speed for organic growth.
So, how can you make your pages load faster?
The first step is to check your current load time. Popular sites that can help you check this are Google PageSpeed Insights and another recent site I came across from Experte, I prefer this tool as it seems more efficient. It allows you to test hundreds of URLs automatically. All you have to do is enter a URL, and the tool crawls the website and determines the page speed scores for each subpage. According to the developer the data yielded is identical to the data of Google PageSpeed Insights.
Not only do these sites show you the current loading speed of your website, they also recommend things you can do to improve page load speed.
Once you have an idea of where you stand, you can incorporate the recommendations to fix your website.
- Analyze Your Competitors
It is incredibly important to know what your competitors are doing if you want to boost the organic growth of your ecommerce store.
To research your competitors, use competitor analysis tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs. These tools can help you figure out how well your competitors are performing. You can then form guidelines on how to compete with them.
What can these tools help you do exactly?
The tools can help you figure out your competitor’s focus keywords. If you aren’t already using these keywords, you can add them to your content strategy. This can help you outrank your competitors.
What’s more?
You can also use the tools to find out which websites your competitors have approached for backlinks. This can help you get ideas for your own link building strategy.
You can even approach the same websites for content partnerships. This will help you optimize your backlink profile and boost your website’s authority.
- Optimize Site Architecture
A good website architecture is not only at the core of good SEO, it also makes visitors happy due to seamless navigation.
Both users and search engine crawlers can easily find what they are looking for on your ecommerce store if your size architecture is optimized.
A good site architecture is one where users require the least number of clicks to get where they want to go on your website.
A popular site architecture is flat architecture. In a flat architecture, users can reach any page they want to go to from your homepage in 4 clicks or less. This creates a better user experience.
But how can you optimize site architecture?
You can design a simple framework using website designing tools.
It’s also crucial to fix broken links on your website. These links negatively impact your rankings and user experience. Have you ever reached a dead-end 404 error after clicking on a link? You know how frustrating it can be for the user.
- Build Internal Links
A powerful internal linking strategy is essential to boost your rankings and impact organic growth.
An internal link is any link that connects one page of your website to another page on your website. Internal links are important because they help both users and search engine crawlers find content on your website.
They also give Google a good idea about your website structure.
The more tightly woven a website is because of internal linking, the better it will rank. This is because internal links help you pass link juice from one page to another.
You should use internal links to connect one product page to another and to connect product pages and blog posts. This will help you drive traffic from your blog to your ecommerce store product pages.
That’s not all.
Search engine crawlers can determine your website’s hierarchy thanks to internal links. They can also help search engines determine page importance. The more links a page receives, the more important it seems to Google.
Just remember to optimize anchor text whenever you create a new internal link. It’s a good idea to use different anchor text variations to link back to the same page. If you use the same anchor text every time you link to a specific page, Google might penalize you for spammy behavior.
Moreover, just like keywords, make sure that you don’t overstuff your website pages with internal links.
- Optimize for Mobile
Don’t want to miss out on a huge chunk of potential customers? Make your ecommerce store mobile friendly.
Mobile optimization is a powerful strategy to tap into organic growth.
This is because more than half of all website traffic comes from mobiles and this number is only expected to rise.
Retail ecommerce is especially going to benefit from a mobile responsive website. 54% of all retail ecommerce is expected to happen on mobiles in 2021.
What’s more?
Google will switch to a mobile-first indexing system in 2021. This will mean that Google will use the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking.
If you don’t have a response web design, you won’t rank well in search results.
So, how can you optimize for mobiles?
The first thing that you need to do is to make your ecommerce store responsive. This means that visitors who will access your website from mobile devices will have a good user experience regardless of the device they are using.
You should also optimize the speed of your mobile website. Page speed will be a ranking factor in Google’s mobile-first indexing.
An ecommerce technology trend that you should consider implementing is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). AMP makes your website as lightweight as possible which drastically improves page speed.
- Build a Blog
Any online marketing strategy is incomplete without a blog. 86% of marketers prefer to produce blog posts over all other content types.
Why are blogs such a popular choice?
Blog posts allow you to write on a variety of topics related to your niche.
Without a blog, ecommerce stores would only be able to create content for their product pages. That can be really limiting.
Blog posts also help with SEO. In fact, it’s difficult to keep your website fresh for SEO without maintaining a blog.
That’s not all.
You can incorporate your focus keywords into your blog posts which will help you rank for lots of new keywords. Websites that rank for a large number of keywords benefit from more organic traffic.
You can also direct the traffic from your blog to your store’s product pages to generate conversions.
Summary
Organic traffic is vital to the success of your ecommerce store. We at bizibi spend a lot of time and resources investing in SEO and content, in order for us to reap the benefit in the future, maybe a year or two from now, but organic traffic is critical to the long term success of any online store. Many in Trinidad and Tobago think that because we are small SERP does not matter, nothing could be further from the truth, localised searching is getting bigger and bigger and for the search engine traffic still remains key, regardless of the size of the market.
To optimize your ecommerce store for search engines, you should make keyword research a priority and use focus keywords to create quality content.
Other important aspects of SEO are website architecture, page speed and mobile responsiveness.
It’s also important to analyze the strategies of your competitors. Your goal should be to find out about and implement their most effective strategies to outrank them.
What’s more?
You need to build internal links with optimized anchor texts to boost the discoverability of your pages.
Lastly, you need to create blog posts as part of your content marketing strategy and use your focus keywords to get organic traffic.
Do you have any questions about the ecommerce strategies mentioned above? Let us know in the comment section.
bizibi is a full turnkey solution for an ecommerce platform purely focused to the Trinidad and Tobago market. A feature rich multivendor platform that includes delivery and payments as well as a fully powerful marketing engine that not only generates a whole portfolio of marketing material for you, but also with its integration with social media we can also deliver it to your audience.
If you would like to have an online store go to bizibi and signup here.