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SEO for eCommerce: The First Truly Step by Step Guide

SEO for eCommerce: The First Truly Step by Step Guide

Who Needs to Know About SEO for eCommerce?

The better question is who doesn’t need to know SEO for eCommerce.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is an essential part of every online store’s success. By utilizing search engine optimization for eCommerce store business, you can boost both the quantity and quality of organic traffic to your website. This is done by optimizing your site to work better with search engines, so when someone searches for something relevant to your business, services, or products, you appear at the top of the search results.

It’s all about beating out the competition and being the go-to in your field, and SEO is the way to do it.

Why Is SEO So Important

Think about it. How often are you in a hurry to search for something, let’s say a cupcake, and quickly pull out your phone and type into Google, “best cupcake in Chicago”? Probably pretty often. Well, with SEO for eCommerce, you can ensure your business is at the top of those results when your ideal clientele is in sudden need of your services. Sounds pretty essential, right?

It is. In fact, it’s reported that over 1 billion people use Google and its products.

This search engine is pretty powerful and ultimately serves as the main source and driver of clientele to your business. But it’s not a randomized tool. Instead, it’s one you can learn and maneuver, using best practices to get your business in those coveted first few spots of a search.

What’s the Hardest Part of SEO

While SEO is a calculated process that many professionals have down-pat, businesses that are new to SEO for eCommerce often run into the same issues. Let’s break it down.

Curious why SEO doesn’t work for your company? Well, did you have a plan? One of the most common issues we come across is a business looking to prioritize SEO without a solid vision, goal, and strategy. While SEO is a commonly used marketing strategy, it does take a degree of expertise and planning to get it right. This involves everything from optimizing your website, to understanding your business, selecting the best keywords, and taking a look at what your ideal audience is looking for most. It’s a lot, so you need to know where to start.

Additionally, we also see businesses run into issues when they focus on just one or two components of SEO. For example, did you only find out your best keywords and begin implementing them in descriptions? Sure, this will boost your website, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle. You also need your website to run well and fast, links to and from your site, as well as wonderful content to really see your business thrive. There’s no one hero answer here – search engine optimization for eCommerce store success requires a holistic approach.

Okay, we don’t mean to make it sound intimidating. To help you through the process of SEO for eCommerce, we are sharing a step-by-step guide — the solution you’ve been looking for as you finally get the most out of your SEO efforts. Our experts at Catapult Revenue know just how it’s done, and it’s not just jibber-jabber. This July, Catapult Revenue has been ranked one of the Best eCommerce Experts to Hire in 2021 by DesignRush, one of the world’s most authoritative agency ranking platforms.

Alright, let’s get started.

Your SEO Step-by-Step Guide

With SEO having so many elements and intricacies, it’s no surprise that our guide takes a bit of reading. To simplify our SEO guide so you know just what we are talking about later, here are the topics we are explaining below.

Our SEO for eCommerce approach includes:

  • Keyword research to find the right keywords for your website and audience
  • Web store structure optimization to incorporate relevant keywords
  • Metadata and content to drive organic traffic to your site
  • Technical optimization so that search engines effectively crawl your website
  • Setting up SEO tools to optimize results on the website
  • Local SEO optimization to help target local clientele for brick and mortar locations
  • Link building to boost the credibility of your site
  • Progressive content marketing strategies for continued, updated content that drives traffic
  • SEO results measuring to track progress and success of your strategy

Ready to learn more? Let’s dive right in!

SEO for eCommerce Step 1: Keyword Research

Keyword Research

The first step to every successful SEO campaign is keyword research for eCommerce.

There are a lot of keywords to choose from – some that everyone’s using making them highly competitive, and others that may not get a lot of traffic or don’t typically come from customers looking to buy. But the right ones for you? Those are the keys to success.

However, to find the right keywords for you, you have to prioritize keyword research for eCommerce, taking a deep dive into what works for competitors and what makes the most sense for you, pulling on high traffic-promoting keywords to boost your site. And once you’ve mastered this, ranking higher on search engines to accelerate search volume and conversion rates will be inevitable.

Let’s go back to that cupcake example. Sure, “best cupcake in Chicago” is true and relevant, but how many other businesses use this? With this in mind, you can rely on more specifics, such as “best cupcake in Logan Square” or more details to your offerings like, “gluten-free vanilla cupcake near me.” This is only a start, and with the right process, you can get pretty specific and granular with keywords, while still ensuring they are ones that really come from those looking to buy.

There’s a lot to explain on the topic of keywords, and we are breaking it all down.

Create a List of Synonyms

A great place to start when researching keywords is creating a list of synonyms for some of the most relevant keywords to your business. We want to ensure your site encompasses the breadth of possible searches, incorporating an array of related keywords to capture all the possible clientele and their verbiage.

Think about it. Say you sell clothes for young children. Your ideal clientele could search “baby clothes,” “children’s clothes,” “newborn clothes” and so on. Get the gist? There are a lot of ways to word various things, and taking into account potential searches will do a lot to boost your site.

Eliminate Branding Keywords

Branded keywords are phrases and words that directly correlate with a brand, product, or service. Often, branded keywords are used in tandem with non-branded ones, however, there’s a limit to what we suggest when relying on these branded phrases.

Some businesses think it’s a good idea when developing their SEO strategy to utilize branded keywords of competitors. Our suggestion? Just don’t.

Using rival keywords on your site won’t do a whole lot for your own success and ranking. Let’s face it, the rival’s branding is something they have perfected, and in utilizing those, you’re sure to rank below them on search engines. And isn’t the whole point of SEO to rank above competitors? Trust us – you don’t want to waste your time here.

Finding More Precise Keywords for Each Page

Not every page on your site serves the same purpose or discusses the same product or service. This is why it’s important to customize each page with precise, relevant keywords so that the traffic driven to each page is intentional.

Sure, it’s great to use general keywords that are beneficial to your business, but don’t you want the traffic driven to each page to be relevant? Let’s say you’re a women’s clothing store, and you have a page dedicated entirely to hats. By using keywords like “women’s hats” on the hats page, you’re guaranteeing that those searching for hats are driven right to where they need to go – boosting conversions with relevant, targeted, organic traffic.

Choose Competitive Keywords According to Your Store

We want to choose keywords that people are actually searching for and drive traffic, right?

This is where keyword difficulty comes into play. This refers to the measure that shares the amount and quality of backlinks of the top 10 pages within the Search Engine Results Page, or SERP, for any given keyword. Additionally, it gives insight into how competitive each of those top 10 pages is based on the strength of their backlinks. The competitiveness is determined by domain ratings and URL ratings of indexed pages and can give a lot of insight into what keywords will serve you best.

Additionally, if you’re a new store, you aren’t going to benefit much from keywords that promote popular retailers like Amazon, eBay, or other prominent eCommerce sites. Why? Well, everyone’s doing it. Those top 10 pages are sure to be doing this, and as a newer store, you won’t be as competitive with these keywords.

SEO Tools for Keyword Research

You’re not on your own when it comes to keyword research. In fact, there’s a whole host of tools you can tap into to do your research and find the best keywords for your SEO for eCommerce strategy.

Our top keyword research tools include:

  1. Soovle
  2. Jaaxy
  3. Google Search Console
  4. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
  5. Google Keyword Planner
  6. Mox Keyword Explorer
  7. Google Trends
  8. SEMrush

There are many more options to choose from online, and all of them will provide the insight you need to better understand your most useful keywords.

Right Keyword List Example

SEO for eCommerce Step 2: Website Structure Optimization

Now that you have your keywords, it’s time to build your site structure.

When we talk about website structure, we are talking all about the process of setting up your navigation pages, as well as category and product pages. The process focuses on the goal of making it simple and clear for customers to navigate your site, only clicking in a few spots to get where they need to go. All of this is backed by your list of keywords, which help understand the architecture of your site and where you’re driving traffic.

When it comes to site structure, be sure to:

  • Make the structure simple and understandable
  • Keep number of clicks to get from one page to another minimal (max three)
  • Use your keyword research to develop relevant URLs

Simple Rules to Create the Right Site Structure

When developing your website, we have three rules to ensure success. These include planning out your website’s hierarchy, creating a URL structure, and focusing on simple and logical navigation. Not sure what this means? Let’s explain.

Plan Our Your Website’s Hierarchy

We want to deliver information to clientele in a clear, logical manner, and this relies on a strategic website hierarchy.

To begin, think about the main pages you’ll have, and go down from there with relevant topics for each. Think of this as an outline of your website – showing all the paths and how to get to each subtopic or category in a logical way. However, be sure you keep it simple. With a simple approach, you’ll help make the navigation and URL process a breeze.

Create Your Website’s URL Structure

To explain URL structure, let’s start with the basics.

Every website, in its most basic form, will have a homepage, services, about us, blog, and contact page. From here, you can create your URL structure in a really precise manner. For instance:

catapultrevenue.com/services

catapultrevenue.com/aboutus

catapultrevenue.com/blog

Pretty clear, right? Your website might not automatically create these clear, concise URLs, but they are key for users as they are more visually appealing and make it clear what page they are on, as opposed to a long URL with dates and long phrases. Keep this concise, simple URL approach in mind when tackling your blogpost URLs, too!

Create a Simple and Logical Navigation

If you’ve taken the time to plan your website from the start, creating logical navigation should be pretty simple. This means clearly laying out the subpages and categories under each main one, using concise words and phrases that make it clear and obvious to navigate. We don’t want potential clients to have to click around a lot to find what they are looking for, so simple navigation is key to keeping them on your website.

SEO for eCommerce Step 3: Set Up Meta Data and Content

meta data and content

In its most simple definition, metadata is data about data. Search engines don’t actually read your content and website, but instead, they index it. This is done with the information gathered from metadata fields, making it important to include relevant metadata to boost your search engine ranking. This includes everything from your titles, descriptions, keywords, and dates, as well as taggings to make everything very clear when your site is indexed.

There are a lot of elements with this step, and you won’t want to miss a single one.

SEO Meta Data for eCommerce Store Sorting by Importance

Meta tags are essential to your SEO strategy, and there are a few that every website must incorporate. These tags are all about communicating with search engines, making it clear what your page is about, how to read it, and who it’s relevant for.

So, what are the most important meta tags? Check it out.

  • Title: a clickable headline in the SERPs that shares exactly what a page is all about
  • Descriptions: a short snippet describing what a page is about that drives clicks
  • H Headlines: HTML tags that share headings and subheadings to make it clear what’s within your content for a more digestible page
  • Robots Meta Tags: a tag that indicates to a search engine not to index a page
  • Canonical Attribute: a tag that helps tell search engines what page is considered the main one and should be indexed for easy finding
  • Image Alt Attributes: for images, this is a tag that describes what’s shown
  • Schema Org: a way to organize data on each page so it’s understandable to search engines

Don’t worry, we are explaining each below!

How to Write Titles and Descriptions

First up is the title. The <title> tag often appears as a clickable headline in the SERPs, and will also be visible on social media and browsers. This tag is in the <head> of a webpage and shares exactly what the page is about.

But why is it important? A page’s title is often the first thing a person will see, viewing your selected title to decide if it’s the page they want to click on. Pretty important for driving organic traffic, right? For this reason, it’s important to give each page a unique and concise title, incorporating important keywords to boost rankings.

Similar to your title, descriptions are at the head of your webpage and displayed with a snippet beside the title and page URL. This description actually has the largest part of a SERP snippet and helps promote a searcher’s click by making it clear what they will find at your site.

For this reason, it’s important to provide each page with a meta description that shares exactly what the page is about. However, keep in mind, these can only be about 150-160 characters, so being clear and concise is key. Boost your descriptions even more by incorporating keywords!

Write Content Structure Using Headlines H Tags

Heading tags refer to HTML tags that help share headings and subheadings within content, differentiating from the rest of the text on the page. This is important for content organization, making it easier for search engines to crawl your website due to the understandable structure, while simultaneously making it more user-friendly as readers can better navigate and digest a page.

For best results, make sure your headings are super relevant to the text they are describing, and don’t overuse keywords – this can diminish readability.

What are Robots Meta Tags?

Robots Meta Tags, also referred to as robots meta directives, are codes that tell crawlers how to index and crawl the content on your pages. With this tag, you can even tell a search engine not to index any given page. This is useful when influencing how your overall site appears to search engines, ensuring that anything, such as “thin content,” doesn’t impact your ranking.

Simple Rules to Set Up Robots Meta Tags

As mentioned above, the robots meta tag helps you create page-specific controls for how it should be indexed, but there are a few rules that go along with setting the robots meta tags up that will help you with your SEO success.

First, you’ll want to be sure your important pages are open for search engines. Your most important pages are essential to properly index your site, providing search engines and ultimately searchers with exactly what they need to know in order to click on your website.

Next, you should use the robots meta tags to close pages using the content=”noindex” attribute. This is a simple way to make sure that any unfinished pages, or pages with thin content, aren’t indexed by search engines, which can hurt your ranking.

Lastly, unite any duplicate content using the canonical tag. Duplicate content is a no-no for SEO, but with the robots meta tags, you can help avoid any duplicates hurting your ranking.

How to Optimize Alt for Images

Image alt attribute is used to describe what an image is showing. This is important in cases where an image isn’t loading, as well as for helping search engines “see” what an image is as they can’t actually analyze it.

With a great image alt attribute, you can actually boost your Google Images ranking, further driving traffic to your website. To best optimize your image alt attribute, we recommend:

  • Being very specific with descriptions of images
  • Keep your text to less than 125 characters for a concise description
  • Don’t start with “image of…”, just begin describing exactly what it is
  • Utilize your main keywords, but don’t overdo it

It’s all about being clear and concise, and with that approach, you will nail your image alt attributes.

What is Schema Org and How to Use It

Schema organization, or schema markup, is the method of organizing the data on your pages so that they are more easily recognizable to search engines. This not only helps boost your UX, but improves your SEO value, too. Your structured data makeup is what assists search engines in reading your content and understanding what it relates to.

With schema markup, you can make it more clear on search results what the words on your page mean. For example, say “Gluten-Free Vanilla Cupcake” appears on your page. When the search engine sees this, it creates a SERP for “Gluten-Free Vanilla Cupcake.” But what does this really mean, and why is this phrase on your website? With schema markup, you can tell search engines that this is a flavor of cupcake you offer, providing more insight to searchers looking for an answer quickly.

Rich Results for Product Pages

We mentioned the importance of schema makeup, but there’s another element to this – rich results.

Rich results provide more information about your product pages, essentially creating a short list of what it’s all about. With rich results, you can incorporate everything form an image, to your ratings (hopefully 5 stars!), the price range, if it’s in stock, and any other useful information that’s quickly digestible. This will help catch a searcher’s eyes and make all the information clear and available within the search page, reassuring them to click on your website.

SEO for eCommerce Step 4: Fix Technical Issues

technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the process of boosting the technical elements of a website to improve your ranking in search engines. With a faster site, search engines can better crawl and understand your pages, helping them so you ultimately see a better ranking. Search engines are all about giving searchers the best possible results, and this includes a premium, fast, and concise website.

When we talk about the technical elements to prioritize, we recommend:

Creating a fast site

People are impatient and will only wait a maximum of three seconds for a website to load – and you don’t want to lose them! To keep searchers from turning to a competitor, make sure your site loads quickly so they can efficiently find what they are looking for. This not only will help keep your audience with you, but improve your rankings, as well as search engines like Google, prefer (and thus give priority to) faster pages.

Be crawlable

Crawlable sites are all about making your content clear to search engines. With a good internal link structure, you can ensure that search engines crawling your website understand the content to boost your ranking.

And it’s not just about helping them understand the content on your site, but blocking them from crawling certain areas, too. This will ensure no unfinished or unwanted pages appear on search results.

Work with Robots.txt files

Give robots some direction! With the robots.txt file, you can help them better crawl your site. This is important because minor errors can keep search engines from crawling a page, like if you accidentally blocked a page. Thankfully, with the robot.txt file, you can see exactly what’s blocked and what’s not to avoid this issue.

Use the meta robots tag

For when you want to avoid certain pages from appearing on search results – whether because they are undone or feature lower-quality content – you can simply use the robots meta tag to let search engines know.

No duplicate content

Duplicate content confuses search engines and negatively impacts your ranking as it makes it unclear what page actually should rank highest when it has the same content as another. When this happens, search engines actually rank all pages with the same content lower.

To solve this, use the canonical link element to share what the main page is that you would like to rank higher.

Prioritizing Security

Guaranteeing that your site is secure is essential to ensuring users’ privacy – a must in this day and age.

A big part of this is HTTPS. This is what prevents someone from intercepting data that goes between the browser and the website, ensuring elements like a person’s login are safe. In fact, this is so important to search engines like Google that they rank secure websites higher.

Be mobile-friendly

We all rely on our mobile devices for our day-to-day searches, so make sure your site is designed and equipped to be viewed on phones. A website designed for desktop viewing doesn’t always translate to smaller devices, so you want to be sure it’s still easy to navigate and read from our handheld electronics.

Bonus! Be sure your site has structured data and an XML sitemap

As we mentioned earlier, structured data helps search engines better understand your website, letting them know exactly what you’re offering.

Additionally, we recommend using an XML sitemap. This is basically a list of all of the pages on your website, providing search engines with a roadmap of your site.

SEO for eCommerce Step 5: Set Up SEO Tools

SEO tools

SEO for eCommerce is so important, there are even tools to assist you as you optimize your website.

Using SEO tools, you can see everything from what keywords your competitors are relying on (or have used in the past), identify related keywords, and locate new ones that will boost your business. SEO tools can even help generate thousands of keyword ideas in an instant – bringing you an array of new ideas to incorporate.

There are a lot of different tools to choose from, but we are expanding on two of our go-to’s that we recommend every business relies on for their search engine optimization for eCommerce store success.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is one of the most effective (and free!) SEO tools you can use. Ideal for checking out metrics for things like impressions and clicks, Google Search Console can provide some key insight into how your site is performing.

Primarily, Google Search Console provides insights and measurements for your site’s traffic and performance. This is great to use to identify and fix any issues your website may have and boost your search results based on what elements are performing best, such as with keywords.

Google Analytics

Another tool provided by Google, Google Analytics provides insights to help you modify your website to improve your ranking, as well as the user experience. Google Analytics can do everything from find keyword opportunities, to automatically tracking organic traffic, as well as determining high-converting pages so that you can improve their SEO further. Trust us – this is one you’ll want to check out.

SEO for eCommerce Step 6: Optimize for Local SEO

Local SEO

Are you a smaller business that operates in a specific location, versus nationally? If yes, it’s time to dive into your local SEO strategy. Local SEO is all about marketing your brand, services, or product to local customers, and we are here to tell you how it’s done.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your website for more local-focused searches. Often used for eCommerce stores that also have a brick-and-mortar location or service, local SEO boosts traffic and brand awareness with a more local focus. For instance, if you’re a local dry cleaners in the Lincoln Park neighborhood in Chicago, you can specialize keywords to read “dry cleaner in Lincoln Park,” as opposed to the more broad “best dry cleaners” or “dry cleaners in Chicago.” This way, your more targeted, specific audience can find your business in a cinch.

Tips to Improve Local SEO for eCommerce

Local SEO is an important part of driving organic traffic in your area, and we have quite a few tips to help you do so. Check them out!

Create a Google My Business Account

To boost your ranking on Google Maps and local search results, you’ll need to optimize your Google listing. To do this, you’ll need a Google My Business account, where you can then add all the necessary information that will seamlessly appear on your search results for searchers to quickly digest. This will make it clear what your business offeers, while simultaneously boosting your ranking.

Get Reviews From Customers

When looking for a new product or service, we all want to be assured that others have already vetted and loved it. This is where reviews come into play. Receiving reviews for your business from previous customers does a lot to encourage customers to come to you, as well as boosting your Google My Business presence.

Sure, not every customer is going to review your business, but there are a few ways to secure them. You can ask for a review in person once you’ve closed a sale, send an email or text after asking them to write a review, as well as respond to reviews that have already been posted in order to address any concerns or thank them for their time. All of this will do a lot to cement your brand’s presence online.

Consider Voice Search

When considering voice search, it’s important to think about the way people speak to their devices versus typing. You’ll want to change your SEO accordingly for a more conversational voice search, ensuring you still capture potential clients that prefer voice searches over typing.

Create Local-Focused Content

If you operate your business locally, reference local news and events in your content to further draw in that audience. You can do this in multiple ways, whether it be writing specific blogs about local news and activities, creating content surrounding local causes you support, or creating location-specific pages that better serve unique service areas. The more specific, the better!

Optimize for a Mobile-Friendly Site

We’ve mentioned this a few times, but as we rely more heavily on our mobile devices, more searches are happening from our phones, and your website needs to be equipped for these smaller devices. This is not just about if your site is readable on a phone, but also loading quickly (under 3 seconds!), all with more sparing copy and images since there’s less room on a mobile screen. There are a few changes to make, but they are well worth the effort.

Focus on Local Keywords

To find local, relevant customers, you’ll want to incorporate local keywords, too. This is important for finding your ideal clientele right in your location as they search for products and services near them. A great place to start is with Google’s Keyword Planner, which can help find keyword searches that are popular based on location. Then, incorporate these across your website for best results.

Create Location-Specific Pages

Another great strategy is to create location-specific pages for every area you serve. These pages can incorporate an array of information – from store hours, to contact information, descriptions based on more specific locations, testimonials and reviews, promos, and Google Maps to help find your business. All of this will help cement you as a local expert.

Utilize Online Business Directories

Online business directories, such as Yelp, YellowPages, and Foursquare, are essential to sharing the basics of your business’s information with interested customers. This makes your business more accessible, clearly sharing the name, address, and contact information, which all work together to boost your local SEO.

High-Quality Backlinks

When it comes to local SEO, link signals are wonderful for boosting localized results. Link signals are backlinks that direct to your site, and they help drive further traffic to your site. And who doesn’t want that?

Create Webpages for Each Product and Service

By dedicating a webpage to each individual product and service, you avoid jumbling all of your offerings together – something that can hurt your search ranking. By separating your options, you become more of an authority on each offering, as opposed to one jumbled shop.

SEO for eCommerce Step 7: Link Building Opportunities

SEO linkbuilding

Want to further drive traffic to your website? Link building is another element you can incorporate, using inbound links to boost the amount (and quality) of traffic to your pages.

This isn’t just about boosting traffic, but search engine rankings, too. Links are actually one of the main ways search engine algorithms understand the importance of a page, and with links directing to a page, you signal to Google and other search engines that it’s valuable content. However, to be successful, you’ll need high-quality links.

To help, we are sharing the different types of links used, and also why this shouldn’t be your number one priority.

Types of Links in SEO

There are many different ways to incorporate links both to and from your website. To get you started, we are sharing a few of the go-to’s!

<a> links

<a> links make up a majority of the internal and external linking, as they create a hyperlink that shares the destination plus an anchor text. This is important as it helps search engines understand the relevancy of a link. To help boost your rankings, make sure that you use relevant, clear anchor texts to share the subject of a page with search engines.

Image Links

Image links are important for sharing the relevancy of an image, helping search engines understand its context.

Rel Links

One of the most commonly used rel links is the canonical tag, which helps tell search engines what URLs should be indexed and which should not. This is wonderful for avoiding being penalized for duplicate pages and content.

Another rel link is the hreflang tag, which helps deliver versions of your pages in other languages – ensuring everyone that visits your site understands.

Nofollow Links

To help improve the search engine’s crawling of your website, you’ll want to use nofollow links on pages with content that’s not relevant or not complete. By reducing the low-quality pages that search engines are crawling, your content will be viewed as higher quality, ultimately boosting your ranking.

Why Link Building Isn’t Your First Step

Link building only happens after pages have been created, so for this reason, link building should never be the first step in your strategy. Obviously, you can’t optimize pages that haven’t been created, so link building should be viewed as a secondary step once your pages are up and running. This way, once you’ve created and finalized your content, you can begin linking to and from your website as a way to further promote your search engine rankings.

SEO for eCommerce Step 8: Create a Content Marketing Strategy

SEO Content Marketing Strategy

There’s a wide range of perks of keywords, but beyond the most basic benefit of boosting SEO for eCommerce, keywords can also be used to identify new avenues for relevant and needed content.

By analyzing popular keywords and phrases for your business, you’ll likely identify more specifics of what customers want to know about when searching for products and services like your own. With this in mind, you can create content that your unique customer will find useful, interesting, and valuable – further creating a relationship with them while boosting your brand’s credibility in the field.

You want to be the go-to for your specific products and services, and with a content marketing strategy as part of your SEO for eCommerce plan, you’ll get one step closer to being the leader in your industry.

How Content Marketing Helps SEO

Content marketing and SEO work hand in hand, merging the technicalities of SEO with the connection content can provide with customers.

With content that utilized your targeted keywords, you can garner more organic traffic to your site, improving your visibility while giving your customers added value and information they are looking for. Like we said before, this useful, relevant content builds a relationship with your customer, making you the go-to as they look to understand and gain more insight into a product, service, or field.

Content marketing not only builds a relationship with customers but a brand reputation, too. With more content, you can share your brand voice as well as expertise, making your presence and unique insights clear to potential customers. Plus, this relevant content does a lot to drive traffic to your site, further promoting conversions with content that provides extra value.

Content Marketing Ideas for eCommerce

There’s not just one way to incorporate content marketing into your search engine optimization for eCommerce store strategies. To help get you started and thinking about ideas for your business, here are a few places to begin.

How-to Articles and Videos

How-tos are a great way to go above and beyond, showing just how to use your products so your customers don’t have to go searching elsewhere for this information. This takes the guesswork out of products, while simultaneously showing your expertise. How-tos are also a great place to share some added tips and tricks – providing even more value to your customer.

Lifestyle

When discussing lifestyle content, we are talking about content that brings your buyer to life – sharing content that’s aligned with your shopper’s interests beyond your own offerings.

For instance, say you’re a health supplements brand that primarily sells collagen supplements. Not all of your content should be about the benefits and uses of collagen. Instead, take a look at your buyer persona. Likely, they are a health-focused shopper – so what other wellness content can you provide? Surely the list is long, and it will take your business from a seller of a product to an industry go-to.

News

What’s the latest in your field? Show that you’re on the pulse of the latest news relevant to your products or services with content sharing the news, as well as your take on it. This will show that you’re up to date, while also keeping your customers in the know on what’s happening in the industry.

Guides

Guides are a great way to provide more information to your customers. One great option is with product guides, sharing all of your offerings in one place and making it clear the uses of each. This will not only help customers shop your assortment but create links between products to boost their cart.

SEO for eCommerce Step 9: Measure Results and Update Your Strategy

seo strategy

Once you’ve found your keywords, optimized your website, and created stellar content, it’s time to take a look at the results.

Thankfully, with SEO strategies, it’s ever-evolving. With a digital approach, you can quickly change, adjust, and optimize your strategy based on the results you see. This is great to not only lean into aspects that are doing well but reevaluate those that are not. Is a keyword absolutely crushing it, while a certain page is getting no views? By keeping an eye on results, you can make sure your SEO for eCommerce strategy is always top-notch, no matter how much things change. It’s about being adaptable, and SEO tactics make that more possible than ever before.

How to Measure SEO Results

To be sure that you’re on the right track with your SEO strategy, there are a few ways to measure results to better understand your performance.

Keep in mind – SEO takes a bit of time to gather accurate measurements. Taking a look too soon may not be the most accurate analysis, and you want to make sure you’re measuring the right KPI to truly understand performance.

So, how do we measure our performance? Let’s break it down.

Scanning and Indexing Reports

With tools like Google Search Console, you can monitor and receive reports of your presence in Google SERP. With this tool, you can share your sitemap for indexing, controlling what gets indexed. Additionally, you can gain insights into how your website is being viewed and for what purpose so you can better optimize your site.

Keyword Reports

Another way to understand your success is with keyword reporting. Tools that track your keyword ranking and performance will show what keywords are driving the most organic traffic to your site, revealing your most valuable keywords. This is great for tracking the continual performance of your keywords and helping you adjust their use based on what’s working best for you.

Traffic Keywords

Keyword traffic is about analyzing where your most valuable traffic comes from. By understanding your keyword traffic, you can adjust your SEO efforts as well as your other campaigns, gaining more insight into what is really driving people to your site.

ROI of SEO

We all want to know our return on investment, and this is totally possible with SEO strategies.

For this, you can use the formula (Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment. Then, multiply by 100 to get your ROI in percentage. This will help you understand how the overall strategy performed so you can adjust moving forward.

Conclusion

As an eCommerce store, there are few things as important to your marketing strategy as SEO. At the end of the day, searchers trust search engines and their rankings, and getting in one of the coveted top spots can not only boost business but cement you as a credible leader in your field. With more traffic driven to your site and the backing of a high ranking on Google and other search engines, your business’s success will skyrocket.

However, as you may have gathered from our guide, SEO for eCommerce takes a lot of work. To recap, the best step-by-step approach to search engine optimization for eCommerce store success includes:

  1. Keyword research
  2. Website structure optimization
  3. Setting up meta data and content
  4. Fixing technical issues
  5. Setting up SEO tools
  6. Optimizing for local SEO
  7. Finding link building opportunities
  8. Creating a content marketing strategy
  9. Measuring results and updating your strategy

Phew, that sounds like a lot, right? A great SEO strategy is intricate, but when done right, the results are incredible.

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    If you need more guidance on how to boost your SEO for eCommerce or want a team of experts to lead the way, ensuring the success of your strategy, Catapult Revenue is here to help. With years of experience growing eCommerce businesses, our experts know just how to optimize your SEO strategy to drive traffic and shoot you to the top of the rankings.

    If you’re ready to hand over the reins to your SEO efforts, contact us today at 312-625-0447.

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