What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of enhancing your website's visibility through better ranking on search results. The ranking is determined by a search engine's algorithm that matches your website's content to the customer's search query. Most product discovery on the web takes place through search. It's no surprise that almost half of product searches start on Google, making your search rank crucial. A higher-ranking lead to increased organic search traffic to your site and attracts potential customers. Unlike paid advertising, SEO doesn't require payment per click for better ranking, and provides cost-effective, long-term results. Google holds 92% of the search engine market share, making it valuable to optimize your site for better ranking on Google. Other popular search engines include Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. How to increase visibility of your online store with SEO Keyword research Keyword research involves identifying the spec
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of enhancing your website's visibility through better ranking on search results. The ranking is determined by a search engine's algorithm that matches your website's content to the customer's search query.
Most product discovery on the web takes place through search. It's no surprise that almost half of product searches start on Google, making your search rank crucial. A higher-ranking lead to increased organic search traffic to your site and attracts potential customers. Unlike paid advertising, SEO doesn't require payment per click for better ranking, and provides cost-effective, long-term results.
Google holds 92% of the search engine market share, making it valuable to optimize your site for better ranking on Google. Other popular search engines include Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo.
How to increase visibility of your online store with SEO
Keyword research
Keyword research involves identifying the specific terms that your target audience may use when searching for your products. For instance, coffee aficionados might search for terms such as "gourmet coffee beans," "flavored coffee," "instant coffee," "Arabica coffee," "espresso machine," or "milk frother."
To determine which keywords your target audience is searching for, you can utilize online tools like Ahref Rank Checker or Google Keyword Planner. Omnibus also offers meta tags for adding keywords to your individual product pages and homepage.
However, if your keywords are too broad, they may be challenging to rank due to intense competition from larger companies in that space. To overcome this challenge, you can use long-tail keywords, which are more specific and consist of 3-4 words. These keywords cater to target customers closer to the buying cycle and are easier to rank for. For example, someone searching for "birdhouse" is likely still in the research phase, while someone searching for "handcrafted bamboo decorative birdhouse" is more likely ready to make a purchase.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO, refers to optimizing individual web pages, such as product pages, to rank higher in search results.
To improve on-page SEO, you can follow best practices such as using only one H1 tag per product page and making sure it is descriptive and includes relevant keywords. You can also optimize your meta titles and descriptions by including keywords, long-tail keywords, and calls to action. An effective meta title for a catalog page displaying men's black running shoes could be: "Shop Men's Running Shoes Online at India's Best Prices" instead of just "Black Running Shoes." The title includes a call to action "Shop" and is descriptive "Men's Running Shoes."
With Omnibus, you can add unique keywords and descriptions for each product page and your online store's homepage.
Reduce Page Load Speed
Page load speed is the amount of time it takes for the content of a page to load on the screen. Since Google uses page load speed as a ranking factor, having a slow website can reduce your website’s rank.
Your page load speed must compete with the load speed of the top ten websites currently ranking on Google for your keywords. Having your page load faster captures the user’s attention and reduces bounce rate, indirectly boosting your SEO rank.
You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights or Think with Google to analyze your page speed and follow their suggestions to improve them.
It’s ideal to load a page in less than 3 seconds. Some quick ways to improve your page load speed are compressing and optimising your images, using a dedicated server, using active browser caching, asynchronously loading your css and javascript files, minifying your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code and eliminating unnecessary plugins and external libraries.
Mobile browsers perform better and load pages faster when the page makes few, organised requests, unlike a desktop browser that can handle many small requests. Reducing the number of RTRs, that is the number of elements that must be fetched from the server to load a page can improve your mobile page speed.
Use responsive design
Having responsive design allows your website to automatically adjust its components and their size with respect to the screen size it is being viewed on. This means, you don’t have a separate version of your website for mobile devices and another one for desktops. This reduces content duplication and boosts your rank.
Since mobile traffic accounts for nearly half of all web traffic globally, Google favors websites that are optimised for mobile. That aside, if your mobile site looks bad, broken and unorganised, users will leave your website within a few seconds and look for one that is more responsive. This increases your bounce rate and naturally reduces your rank.
You can use websites like Mobile Friendly test to check if your site is mobile friendly. Most sales platforms like Omnibus provide ready to use e-commerce website templates that are optimised for all screen sizes. Using CSS frameworks like Bootstrap or Bulma can ensure that your website is responsive.
Maintain Site Security
Secure websites tend to rank higher. A lack of website security measures can directly and indirectly harm your SEO rank since Google made HTTPS a ranking factor several years ago.
Ensure that your website does not redirect or link to any malicious website, as it can harm the credibility and rank of your website. If your website allows comments and reviews from customers on your product pages, it is strongly recommended to disable adding links in the comment section, or have an active moderator to ensure that the links being posted by reviewers are secure.
82% of users leave a website that is not secure. To secure data on your website you need to switch to the HTTPS domain distinction by purchasing an SSL certificate. A lack of security measures can also result in higher bounce rate leading to a negative impact on your rank.
Create backlinks
If other websites find your products relevant to their content, they may insert links to your products in their blogs or social media accounts. These links that trace back to your website are called backlinks. Backlinks to your website signify that other resources on the web find your content relevant, valuable and trustworthy enough to associate their own content with your products.
Backlinks are one of the three major ranking factors in google. The more that other websites link to your website, the higher it ranks on Google. However, all backlinks are not created equal. Backlinks from websites that already rank high, weigh more than links from lesser-known sites. Having a good network of backlinks decreases the amount of money you need to spend on pay per click marketing.
There are many ways in which you can create back links. You can manually add links to your website in social media, business directories and in comment sections of blogs. You can create unique content that will entice bloggers or other websites to promote your products. You can also pay to have websites and blogs link to your products.
Simplify your site’s architecture
Organizing your products well and simplifying your site’s architecture can go a long way not only with better product discoverability but also with sitelinks. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that all products on your site are discoverable within 3 clicks from the homepage.
A simple architecture lets Google map and analyze your site better and rewards you with sitelinks. Sitelinks are a list of the most visited web pages on your site. The presence of sitelinks has a positive influence on how customers perceive your brand. It increases your brand’s reputation and promotes trust among prospective customers.
Some best practices you can follow to achieve better organization of content is to use proper hierarchy of heading tags. Use H1 tags only for the main title, followed by H2 and H3 tags for subtitles. You can also use breadcrumbs as a form of navigation to allow users to explore your site.
Sales platforms like Omnibus provide eCommerce templates that support breadcrumbs and contain logically organised product and catalog pages for easy navigation.
Tracking success (SEO With CRO)
SEO takes time. You usually cannot see results in the first few months. It requires long-term thinking and constant improvements. Consistent efforts to improve your SEO can result in an increased percentage of visitors to your site from organic search results, which is highly beneficial in the long run. You can track user activity and correlate it with your SEO techniques by using sites like Google Analytics
However, SEO only increases the visibility of your site and attracts potential customers. It does not guarantee an increase in conversion rate. You can use conversion rate optimisation techniques to compel your visitors to eventually buy your products.
Image Attributions
Image by creativeart on Freepik Image by upklyak on Freepik
Comments
Post a Comment