You have your online store all set up. It’s easy to use. It looks professional. Your products are added, and they’re all well described. You’re guaranteed to make money, right?
Wrong.
You can have the best website in the world in your given niche, but if you never get any traffic to it, you won’t ever make a sale. That’s why search engine optimization or SEO is vital to the success of your e commerce store. Search engine optimization is the process of adding elements to a website to help it appear high up in the results of search engines.
Each time someone searches for a keyword, Google’s algorithm determines which websites are the best and most relevant ones for the result. It evaluates this in two ways:
- Through Elements On the Site. Google looks at certain things on websites to find pages that are relevant and useful to people who are searching. You can use on-page SEO to help Google see your site in the best way possible.
- Through Links to Your Site. Google also examines how many websites link to web pages and what kind of sites are referring traffic to particular pages. A page that has a lot of incoming links from high quality sites will rank higher than one that has few or no incoming links or links only from low quality sites. You can use off-page SEO to improve your standing in terms of link placement.
On-page SEO is much easier for online store owners to control and should be your focus when you’re beginning your e commerce store. This tutorial will teach you what you need to know to complete it.
- Use Keywords.
I have developed guides specifically related to keywords in the past, but if you’re unfamiliar with the term, a keyword is the word or words that people enter into a search engine when they want to find something on the Internet. You want the best keywords related to your niche to appear throughout your site.
- Use Header Tags.
Header tags are the headlines that appear on your website. The most important one is the H1 tag that appears at the top of the page. On a product page, the product title would typically be the H1 tag. You want to make sure that it’s a clear description of what the item is and that it includes the most important keyword. You can also put other important keywords in H2 tags on the page.
- Write Your Own Meta Title and Description.
Most e commerce platforms will automatically create meta titles and descriptions for every page, but it’s better to write these for yourself from an SEO standpoint. The meta title and description are what people will see when your product shows up on the search rankings. You want to use keywords that will tell Google what’s on the page but that will also advertise your product and encourage customers to click your site instead of another.
- Make your images SEO friendly.
Google has yet to refine their technology enough so that the search engine can actually see pictures and know what they are with ease. Instead, the search algorithm uses information that you provide to determine what the pictures on the page are. There are a few things that you can do to help Google see your images. First, include the most important keyword in the image file name. Second, include a keyword in the image title on your e-commerce site. Most platforms will also allow you to add a tag to the image. You can put another keyword on the tag to help Google identify the image.
- Structure your website properly.
Make sure that all of the URLs for your website have keywords in them. You also want to ensure that you have everything broken into categories that are both easy for customers to see and for Google to navigate. Having multiple internal links to important pages can also improve your SEO ranking.