Owning a business is hard enough. Your to-do list includes operations, staffing, product development, process implementation, customer service, and compliance, and that list is far from exhaustive. eCommerce and SEO may be on your back burner, but they are critical to getting traffic and boosting your conversion rate online and in person.
Join Romain Berg for a leg-up tutorial on how to build your eCommerce and SEO foundation. Every business owner should develop her eCommerce and SEO savvy. However, if you’re not a search-engine nerd like us, we suggest outsourcing your digital marketing and SEO as soon as you can.
Whether you have just launched, or you run a large team and typically keep several plates spinning in the air, hiring an experienced and reliable digital marketing partner you trust will be the best decision you make this month.
You don’t need to add “write a regular blog post” to your task list. While posting regularly is crucial for establishing an authoritative brand voice and link building, today’s entrepreneurs have enough irons in the fire.
Please fill out our contact form, and let’s start building and implementing the digital marketing strategy that gets you more sales online and at your physical doorstep. We deliver results, not hype.
eCommerce and SEO: What to do First, Second, and Third
Building a business presence online requires an artful combination of proven conventional practices and brand-relevant innovation. Here’s what we mean:
- Choose the right keywords. Keywords (the words and phrases that Google recognizes to rank your website) make or break your eCommerce and SEO. Take a good look at your products and services. Though you’ll likely come up with a few broad categories that describe your wares (“Cat Food,” “Shoes,” or “Bicycles,” for example), it’s essential to drill down into the details of what your online store offers.
Why? Because you’ll never compete with enormous companies for general keywords. If you Google any of our three example keywords just mentioned, you’ll get companies like Purina, Nike, and Amazon holding the top spots in the search results.
We bet you probably don’t have the marketing budget (yet!) to compete with those brands. So, you’ll need to get a lot more strategic about the keyword use on your website.
Instead, use your product and service details to find keyword options relevant to your brand and the problems you solve for your customers.
These keywords are way less competitive and have a better chance of attracting your “soulmate” audience who know more about what they want when they search.
- Audit your site for keyword use. Once you know what keywords to avoid, (the big, general, competitive keywords), and the phrases that will help you rank better (specific, long-tail keywords like the questions your customers may ask about your type of product), you can visit a site like Ahrefs.com for a site audit.
This tool will crawl your site for “bad” keywords and other gremlins (like page loading speed) that can negatively impact your search rank. If want your site to rank higher, this type of audit is essential.
2. Use keywords in your meta tags. What is a meta tag, you ask? It is a description of each page on your website. You can follow a simple template for creating meta tags. Meta descriptions should list the product category, product name, brand, and shop name.
This template comes in handy if you have truckloads of unique products that all require individual pages with product descriptions.
If you have a service-based online business, your meta tags may provide more page description detail, depending on the number of website pages you’ll maintain.
A meta tag differs from a title tag, which is the clickable webpage title people will see in their search engine rankings.
URLs and Website Security
Though we recommend all sites use a secure URL, safety and security become doubly crucial when you sell online or gather customer data. When creating your site architecture, be sure to use HTTPS over HTTP.
If you use a DIY website building platform like Wix or Squarespace, your hosting package includes this feature. When using other site-builders, be sure to put security at the top of your list and check the “secure URL” box before you launch your site.
Google likes the aspect of trust and user experience the most as it ranks your site. Overlooking your URL security could cost you a higher rank.
Text-up the Overview Pages On Your Site
Content is key for improved Google search rank. Many eCommerce sites make the mistake of excluding relevant text from their overview pages.
Even if you think an overview page isn’t the focus of your business, including relevant and descriptive text on-page will benefit your rank.
As a rule of thumb for your eCommerce store, use your keywords two or three times in your introductory text on each overview page.
For example, if you sell winter coats and have many separate product pages, your overview page might say something like:
“Our Fall line of weather-proof down parkas come in a variety of styles and colors. Weather-proof down parkas provide warmth without the weight and pack easily for vacation travel in various climates. Our weather-proof down parkas pack a strong punch of warmth and flare and are on sale this month. There’s no better time to buy a weather-proof down parka from Coats R Us.”
If you guessed the keyword was “weather-proof down parkas,” you get a gold star. Notice the conversational use of this keyword.
You’ll want to avoid “keyword stuffing.” Google has your number on most nefarious (blackhat) eCommerce and SEO practices, and can penalize you if you try to game the system, so don’t.
Additionally, avoid duplicate content. You may be understandably tempted to simply repeat language on pages with similar content or products. Google can penalize sites that do this in the search rankings, however.
Shrink Images for Optimal Loading Speed
eCommerce is typically an image-rich endeavor on most eCommerce websites. Ensuring fast page loading speed will help to elevate your user experience and search rank.
Shrinking file sizes as small as possible without compromising the picture quality is one more way to maximize your eCommerce and SEO. There are several free file-shrinking apps available. One we like is www.tinypng.com.
Call in the Best Help After you Master the eCommerce and SEO basics
It’s valuable (and necessary, we believe) for every business owner to have a basic understanding of eCommerce and SEO. However, SEO requires continual feeding and watering to be effective in the long run.
Most business owners would rather focus on customer acquisition, product development, service excellence, and other innovations.
At Romain Berg, we put our 40 years of combined SEO and digital marketing experience to work for you. That way, you can keep working on, with, and for your audience while you leave the technical SEO concerns to us. We create customized and comprehensive digital marketing strategies that result in run-away traffic and conversions for our customers.
Who doesn’t want more sales and visibility?
Fill out our contact form today and start getting seen online. Romain Berg delivers SEO strategy with results that get you paid. We look forward to working with you.
