12 PROCESSES TO ESTABLISH A BETTER AND SUCCESSFUL E-COMMERCE SEO

25 Aug 12 PROCESSES TO ESTABLISH A BETTER AND SUCCESSFUL E-COMMERCE SEO

12 ways to establish and implement successful SEO for an E-commerce website

Since the e-commerce revolution began some years ago, there’s been an increasing competition for online users by businesses that have online platforms. Search Engine Optimization has been identified as the major factor that can clearly lead to a successful online business. Evidently, there is a continuous effort to boost SEO for successful e-commerce and increased profits. However, many people don’t get the results they desire.

There’s a need to understand the current online business landscape and identify the processes that have pushed SEO in 2017 and will continue to do so in 2018. By detailing 12 processes to establish a better and successful e-commerce SEO, this guide provides you with the best SEO practices for 2017 and 2018. If you want to increase your website’s visibility and transform visitors into buyers, you should understand these 12 processes for successful SEO that I have explained here;

1. Link Building

Link building as a major SEO activity has been with us for a while. In 2017, it became even more prominent as a major technique that can help boost ecommerce. I do not see any reason why this would stop in 2018. I expect more online businesses to take advantage of links as an effective way to build traffic in the coming months and so should you. The strategy is not to merely look for new links, but to identify quality links that will really add value to your site.

Furthermore, you should look out for authority sites and trusted blogs if you truly want to be seen and ranked high by search engines, especially Google. But to do this, you need to identify other sites that your potential customers like to visit. This is done through intensive customer research. Once identified, you can reach out to them with quality contents that are sellable. 

2. User Experience

Google has made it clear that it is placing more focus on users in carrying out its ranking classifications. I believe this will continue to be a major focus for SEO ranking. As a business owner, having a successful SEO would also be determined by the satisfaction users derive from your site. How fast was it? Did they get the answers they needed? Did you solve their problems? How long did they stay on your site? Did they find the site generally useful?

These are the questions bordering on user experience. If you want your site to rank high, you must build on your SEO by making your site relevant to searchers. Ensure you monitor your site’s readability, speed, and navigation structure, and then know how you can improve on these components to increase your conversions and, consequently, your ranking.

3. Featured Snippets

Companies who wish to claim position 0 in search engine result pages have long embraced featured snippets as the best way to catch the attention of searchers. Because snippets appear at the very top of SERPs, businesses are continually struggling to have relevant enough results to people’s queries. Google looks out for very precise snippets that clearly answer questions that searchers have.

This has opened up the conventional SEO struggle to be at the top. Snippets are referred to as Position 0 because they are the first thing you see on a search page. A recent survey of over 1.4 million Google queries has shown that almost 30% now display featured snippets. You must determine what Google looks out for in online contents to consider them fit enough to be featured snippets. 

4. Reaching out to Communities

This is what some experts may call hijacking communities. Online communities continue to be a major way to establish a better and successful eCommerce SEO. You need to be able to identify those communities that cater to your line of business and play host to your target audience. It works in two ways. The community can be made up of your potential customers or people who can help you get to them.

Once a relationship is established with such communities, you can then get them to help you promote your products, services and brands in their communities, by providing links that direct them to your page. This is a great way to build links and generate traffic to your site. And because you already know that they’re target customers, it is an intentional marketing activity and can lead to great conversions. 

5. Existing Websites Acquisition

This is one SEO activity that a lot of businesses shy away from. While some people think it is too expensive, others don’t even see the need. Even in the real world, companies acquire competitors to expand and to reduce the competition for customers. You can look out for sites who offer similar services to yours and buy them over, especially if they have good traffic. What this translates into is more traffic for you, less competition, and more customers for your products or services.

This SEO technique truly works and will prove very profitable in the future. I have bought over sites for $1,500 before. That is not so much, considering the immense impact the move will have on my ROI. I had taken over the traffic of the previous owner, links of the website, and an influx of new contents. Everything that the website has been able to achieve over the years will now become yours through this acquisition. 

6. Competitor Analysis

Here, I will focus on competitive link analysis as a major SEO technique. You need to be able to monitor and analyze your competitor’s links; the pages that provide them, how related they are to their content, and so on. By looking at their websites and pages that link to them, you can work towards developing similar links. But just be sure it is working for them. This is a crucial part of the general competitor analysis and is an effective way to boost your SEO activities.

You would require a link analysis tool though. Something like moz’s Opensiteexplorer.org could work. It will help you get the backlinks data of your competitors. Another good tool you can use is Site Explorer. Visit the websites and see what your competitor does there. If she writes for them, nothing stops you from doing the same, because you most definitely cover the same subject matters. Otherwise, you won’t be competitors.

7. Pay Attention to Video Content

The visual world is fast becoming the searcher’s choice in modern times. Demand for video content production is currently over the roof. In fact, Facebook alone recently released a report that its users now watch more than 100 million hours of video every day. By the time you consider other social networks and then webpages, you may have a clue of this revolution. However, search engines only have a little problem understanding the video content yet, except for those uploaded via YouTube.

What this means is that the audio does not yet count for keywords. It is for this reason that it is not just enough to have captions for your videos but to also have a full transcription. It is this written words that will reveal the keywords in the video and make it more visible to searchers. You can even go ahead to add some extra details not mentioned in the video, add relevant links and make it very engaging too. 

8. Mobile-First Index

I am very sure you must’ve seen this somewhere else already, but it is becoming clearer that mobile devices are becoming the future of the Internet. Already, about 60% of all online searches are done on mobile devices. My projection is that the number will rise by another 10% before the end of 2018. Searchers are ordinary people like you and I who probably do not also have the time to just sit in front of the computer. They search on the move.

Mobile phones give them the freedom to do so. If you want to build a better and successful ecommerce SEO, this is one area you should prioritize. Yes, that’s the word. It is no longer enough to simply make your site mobile friendly. It should now be mobile first. It should no longer be something extra you do after you must’ve set up the website. It should be a major part of the initial plan. It is something you should think about first. Accelerated mobile pages are also a good thing to consider. 

9. Keyword Research

The relevance of keywords to SEO isn’t fazing out yet. For a long time to come, keywords will remain a major way to make your website rank high. But most of the time, we neglect research, probably due to laziness or a mere oversight. We assume that we know what searchers type when they need answers. You may come close if you think about what you will be searching for if you needed your product or service. However, coming close isn’t enough.

Many experts believe your SEO should begin here. How do you boost traffic and sales if you don’t even know what your niche searchers are actually searching for? This is why research is important. Keyword research will help you target and optimize for the right keywords. The mistake many people make is that they try to focus on too many keywords at the same time. Try and focus one keyword on one article. Apart from seeking a friend’s opinion, you should Google the keyword you have chosen to compare the results with what you have written. This illustration by Ahrefs should explain it better.