You don’t have to sacrifice the quality of your work to create an optimized site that will increase organic traffic. Here are some simple steps your business can take that will help drive customers to your site.
Do Research Before You Start Building
To improve your title tags and overall e-commerce SEO start with the free Google AdWords keyword tool. Enter the phrase you’re interested in to see the competition. For this example we are going to search the term “Used Triathlon Bikes”. The keyword tool reveals that this is a competitive keyword generating 3,600 searches a month. Our e-commerce business we are doing research for sells New and Used Triathlon Bikes, Cycling Equipment, and so much more. After going through multiple suggestions in the keyword tool we came across “Best Triathlon Bikes” which has low competition but over 4000 searches a month. This is a great keyword to start adding into our site. How can we add this to our store?
Offer Free Resources
By offering your customers free resources such as articles on cycling safety or industry news you are increasing your sites chances of being found by search engines. Article Marketing is an easy, free way to get additional backlinks to your site. If you haven’t tried article marketing before, start with ezinearticles.com.
Start a Blog to Keep Fresh Content on Your Site
In the same vein as offering free articles about cycling, you could also create a company blog in which you offer reviews, cycling maintenance tips, best places to cycle, and everything else related to cycling. A blog offers you an opportunity to write custom content on your targeted keywords, thus increasing traffic to your site.
Utilize Facebook, Twitter, & YouTube but really use them
Most businesses these days have Twitter & Facebook pages created. It’s easy to create a page on Facebook but maintaining it requires work and a lot of businesses forget to continue utilizing these very important tools. Websites like HootSuite give your business the option to create posts for Twitter and Facebook that will post at a later time. Using these tools keeps your products in customer’s minds. YouTube is the world’s largest search engine outside of Google. That’s right – more people run searches on YouTube each day than on Yahoo! or Bing. Create short product videos for YouTube, and then give the videos the title that includes your keyword phrases. From there, you can link your video to your product page.
Avoid Generic links like “See More Here” & Use Links in Product Descriptions
Search engines love keyword-rich links so when you’re writing your product description use words such as “See More of our Best Triathlon Bikes here”. Another way to increase keyword ranking through links is to take words in your product descriptions and turn them into links to similar products in your store.
Use H1 and H2 Tags
Including your keywords in heading and subheading tags is a must on each page of your site.
Optimize every product image for search
Add a keyword-rich phrase in the “alternate text” field of an image; the images can now draw additional traffic to your e-commerce site.
Start Using Google Analytics
You can’t improve your site if you don’t know how people are responding to it. Start using Google Analytics in order to track your progress.
Ultimately increasing ranking organically requires work but it is essential to any websites success. With a little bit of leg work your site will be showing up in search engines in no time.