Many people rely on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to look for relevant content for things, places and information that they need. For most users, little attention is paid to the pages ranking after the first results page, which means that if your site is not showing here, you are unlikely to see much organic traffic, if any.
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the entire group of techniques which sites implement in order to gain high rankings. Through a series of simple steps, you can improve the placement of your e-commerce website in search engine results pages over time, which can make the difference between attracting lots of organic traffic and hence closing sales, and getting none at all.
Improve your content
The only thing that search engines love is high quality and distinctive content. This is what they’ll serve up to a searching user, and therefore they must be sure that they do not compromise the user’s experience by serving up half-baked information.
There are a few aspects to improving content for SEO:
- Catchy, unique and effective product titles – along the likes of the keywords for your target market, create catchy titles unique to search product or service that you offer. Include one of the main keywords in the title. You can carry out A/B testing to find out how effective different versions of a title are, and settle for the best.
- Build your descriptions – especially if you have an e-commerce site, ensure that your product descriptions have all the necessary information to enable a user make his/her final purchasing decision. Use less obvious and unique terms, don’t over-embellish and include user reviews as well as all other relevant information, including price.
- Build the About Us Page – include information that is relevant to who you are and what you do. Also have your contact information to help reinforce the legitimacy of your business for search engines.
Get more links
Search engines use links to determine ranking order. Special attention is paid to the quality of the links, and each link has its own unique quality depending on the site that it comes from. Getting one link from a very high authority site e.g. CNN could mean more for your site than 10 links from small blogs in your industry. Use a vibrant social media strategy to grow and improve the numbers and quality of links.
Be patient
The results of properly done SEO will not show up overnight, so you need to be patient and give it time to show results. Keep track of your metrics once you start noticing differences, as they will guide you on what aspects of your site you need to tweak to see better results in future. SEO is an on-going process for as long as you have a website.
