We all know that ranking higher than other websites on search engine results is crucial to your eCommerce site becoming a success.
Here are two clever SEO tactics that will get your website to the top spot. Not practicing these SEO tips could result in your page getting bumped back to Page 2, 3, or even further. The further back your site lands, the less sales you’re likely to complete.
It doesn’t matter if you are starting a new site or if you are improving an existing one. There are SEO tips that you do not usually hear about, but are surprisingly effective in getting your website to the coveted top spot.
Remember, in today’s tough competition, it is not enough to get to the first page of search engine results. You have to be at the number one spot.
Tip Number One: Two-pronged Research
Researching for SEO is akin to a two-pronged fork. On one side, you need to do keyword research. On the other, you have to research your competition.
While keyword research is a common tip for SEO beginners, researching competitors is not always mentioned. Nevertheless, these two are integral toward reaching your SEO ranking goals.
Why do research? The answer is, simply because using the wrong keywords is a waste of your SEO efforts. It does not matter if you write unique, earth-shattering content. If you are targeting the wrong keywords, you will generate low traffic and zero conversions. You own a business and you have to make money, so start researching!
Research Your Keywords
Doing keyword research means you need to pay attention to three major areas.
First, you need to find the right keywords to use on your product pages and homepage. These two are the most important pages of your website. This means you have to search for keywords that are relevant to the products you offer. This makes it easy to promote products on your website.
Be careful, though, about choosing keywords that are too broad. This would result in people clicking on your site for a good five minutes and not finding what they need. The result is a low conversion and increased bounce rate.
Also, highly competitive keywords may make it even more difficult for you to get higher rankings later on.
Research Your Competitors
After identifying the best keywords to use for your website, the next thing you should do is learn more about your competitors. Research them and find out what they are doing to increase their website’s rankings.
What Keywords Are Your Competitors Using?
Come up with a list of keywords that your direct competitors are using. You can also check if they have higher domain authorities than you, and if their web pages have more page authorities than yours. There are free online tools that make it easy to gather this information, such as installing a free Moz toolbar.
How is Their Website’s Architecture Set?
Visit your direct competitors’ websites. Find out how far their links go by clicking on them.
Navigate their sites and see how easy it is to do so. Pay attention to how they set and write content for products in specific categories. You also need to take note how they set up their recently viewed and top-rated products.
Learning how popular e-commerce sites organize their websites helps you to decide how you would go about organizing your own. Most beginners mirror the site architecture of prominent websites, for the obvious reason of making it more appealing for customers.
Determine How Your Website is Different From Competitors
After checking what your competitors have to offer, the next thing you need to do is to determine how you can improve the navigation of your own website. How can you make it better than your competitor’s site?
Should you add a blog because your competitors do not have one? Take note of things that you can do to make your site better and more appealing to your customers.
Tip Number Two: Auditing Your E-Commerce Site
You have done your keyword research and know exactly how to use them to maximize content for SEO. You have also learned a lot about what keywords your competitors are using and in what ways their website is better than yours.
The next tip is to start evaluating your site for issues that need to be addressed. The sooner you do this, the better.
Find Site Errors, and Find Them Fast
There are free online tools, such as Screaming Frog, that allow you to find site errors in a short time. This tool will run all over your website’s photos, scripts, content, and apps and determine how each of them affects your SEO performance.
Screaming Frog will then provide you with a summary of your website’s SEO performance. This summary will include the number of duplicate pages, redirects, duplicated content, and other site errors that you can fix to improve your site’s rankings.
Find Out How Fast Your Site Is
Your website speed largely affects your SEO performance. A very important thing to understand about online shoppers is that they will not spend an hour waiting for your website to load. Keep in mind, there are millions of e-commerce sites today, and it is very easy for your customers to click on the back button and go to the next website on their Google search results.
If your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you can say goodbye to almost half of online shoppers today.
Why should you risk losing sales just because your website is too slow? There are free online tools that help you determine the amount of time it takes your website to load. Use them.
If your site takes between three and five seconds to load, you can buy more server space to make the site faster. If you’re trying to minimize expenses, you can reduce the file sizes of the images you are using on the site. Keeping page designs simple significantly reduces load time, and your site’s abandon rate.
If you want to increase sales, you have to optimize your e-commerce site properly. It needs to be fast, and it needs to use the right keyword so search engines can find you. Remember though, that optimizing a site takes work and it typically takes months to see results. Keep at it, and you will find the results worth the effort.
Google Search Photo via Shutterstock
I have to agree about keyword research. You really cannot do SEO if you don’t know the keywords that you are targeting. Also, always run a test on your sites to find some errors.
The suggestions are very good. Can you provide me any free tools to check the errors in my website? The tools you mentioned in the article are all paid tool.
For me the number one is only visitor.. I don’t care about google, just make my visitor happy.
Always good information from you Ronald. I have to admit, I do sometimes research my competitors but not nearly often enough. One method to find bits of information is to use the page source when right clicking on the page. Of course not all are using keyword meta tags but there are often times descriptions that tend to give up that info.
I think we all need to go back to basics, some good points in your post.
As far as free tools to check for website errors, make frinds with Webmaster Tools. It tells you what you need to fix… Plus, this is Google telling you.. So you know its true.
Also check for 404 errors in Analytics or if you use WordPress there are some cool plugins that will alert you.
Check your website server logs too.. They reveal a lot.
What is the ball park figure for getting help with these SEO tactics on a regular basis?
Hey Martin.. Generally a good agency would ask for at least around $1,000 a month retainer on the lower end. It just depends on the scope of work. Larger projects can go well into $5,000+ a month.
KEYWORD is the keyword for today. As said above in the article, make it too broad and you get a high bounce rate. Make it too complicated and well, you don’t get that much traffic. I like the fact that someone finally mentioned researching about your competitors as a tip to counter their strategies. You don’t see that in other sites. Might be because a lot of people thinks it’s already a given. But then again not all people think the same way. Great read! Thumbs up to Sir Ronald Dod.
I do not agree with your seo tactics. maybe it is true if the goal is to conquer the search engines. But it can not be done to win the hearts of readers
Great blog post.
I’ve been looking at citations today. You can actually use Google to do some pretty cool competitor analysis. Google search for “<> -site:<>” to see references to them on the web but excluding their own website.
Thanks,
Laurence