Best SEO Services and Advice For Online Stores

Ecommerce is a big deal all around the world. The desire to sell things online is a strong one, with the payoff being just as sweet. Of course, since the appeal of eCommerce is so big, so too will be your competition. Amazon will likely be a competitor, as well as smaller stores. Some of the best SEO services are the simplest.

Being good at business helps, and so does having a business consultant, but that won’t be enough on its own. You need to be able to get discovered on the first page of Google, and that’s where SEO comes into play. You need the best SEO advice at your fingertips if you’re going to succeed. Let’s get started!

“Selling” Keywords

To come up with keyword ideas, think about the product you are selling and the categories it belongs to. There are two requirements that a keyword must fulfill:

1. Act as a magnet to pull in potential customers
2. Improve your chances to outrank your competitors

Not every keyword will be suitable, of course. Some of them will be too short and too vague to attract the right buyers to your website. Smart SEO means using keywords that are not too short, are specific enough, and are searched plenty of times in Google, to attract the largest number of possible visitors. A keyword that fulfills all of these criteria is called a long-tail keyword.

Once you have your list of keywords, its time to optimize your website. To make your pages rank high on Google, you should add the keywords to the following places:

• Product descriptions
• H1-H4 header tags
• Title tags
• URLs
• Image titles and ALT tags
• Meta description tags

Your product descriptions should all be unique; otherwise, Google will filter them out. They should include words and terms that someone would use to describe the products that you sell. And finally, write descriptions in a compelling way that will make someone want to purchase it after reading.

Linking And Navigation

Saying that eCommerce sites have a lot of pages is an understatement. Amazon’s product selection is counted in the hundreds of millions! This is why your site needs to be easy to navigate. Does your website at least compare to Amazon in terms of usability? In order to make your visitors’ browsing experience as easy as possible, you need an effective and efficient linking strategy between all of your site pages.

The structure for most eCommerce sites goes like this: homepage – product category – subcategory – product page. Removing subcategories will make your website even more comfortable to navigate. You can also follow the tips below:

• Link to your main page on every other page. The most accessible place to include this link is in your company logo at the top of the page.
• Add a navigation bar. The best type of navigation bar for an eCommerce site is one where the user searches for something. The bar will collapse into different menus providing users easy access to your product categories.
• Add breadcrumbs to your site. They don’t take much space, and they help users avoid getting lost on your website.
• Don’t use pagination. This often comes with many different online platforms used to create your store. However, they aren’t the most user-friendly option because they increase loading times for users. The solution is to create a “load more items” button instead that, when pressed, will allow users to view more products. That way, they don’t have to deal with paginations or infinite amounts of scrolling.

Security And Safety

You might question how much you should invest in the security of your website. Well, remember what happened with the Facebook data leaks? Both Facebook and its users were hurt by these leaks. Facebook’s reputation was damaged, and its users’ personal information was at risk. If Facebook weren’t such a big company, its stock and reputation would have been damaged beyond recovery. That is why you should take online security seriously.

Customers should feel safe when browsing your website. You’ll want to make it as safe for them as possible.

Indexing Your Pages

You don’t want to make the embarrassing mistake of forgetting to make sure that your pages are indexed by Google! If your pages aren’t indexed, then they won’t get found by Google. Your customers won’t be able to find you online, and all that work you did on your website will be wasted. To ensure that this doesn’t happen just generate a sitemap of your online store and submit it to Google.

Google’s Mobile-First Index

As you probably know, mobile search gets more search queries than desktop now, and this has had a direct impact on why Google created its mobile-first index. This can affect your online store. If you don’t design your website with mobile users in mind, then you’ll lose out on all of those customers who search Google using mobile phones.

Blog Posts

The role of a good eCommerce site is to close sales quickly. If your page doesn’t convince visitors right away to make a purchase, then you won’t make much money. That is why you should save your long-winded product descriptions for blog posts, which is why you should have a blog for your website. A blog can help gain extra traffic for your site as well as help your site rank higher overall. Remember to enable sharing on your posts to increase these effects even further.

Check Your Site For Errors

Ecommerce is one niche where you can’t afford to have any errors on your website. You can’t let your users down because it might freeze your own business or hurt your customers’ wallets. That’s a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. You must fix technical errors on your website as soon as you notice them.

Finally, don’t forget to monitor your rankings and traffic! You’ll want to see how well you did to keep yourself motivated. However, even if your rankings do drop, this isn’t necessarily a sign of doom. Ups and downs are normal and should signal to you that you have to work extra hard on your SEO. A big drop in traffic could mean that you got a penalty from Google though. So you should scan your website at least once a week.