A surefire way to increase your ecommerce traffic is to maintain good search engine rankings. There is always room for improvement when it comes to certain aspects of a website, and it’s in your best interests to review them from time to time. After all, high web traffic can also impact sales.
Taking all of this into consideration, here are a few things to consider in optimizing your online business for SEO purposes:
Strong Social Media Presence
In today’s digital landscape, it’s necessary for businesses to have a strong social media presence. If you don’t, then you’re lagging way behind. In a previous article, Reaching the Finish Line recognized that social media is a great platform for businesses to optimize engagement. This is because you can hold online contests and promote your products at the same time.
Of course, having active social media channels not only builds brand awareness, but also improves SEO rankings. This is because of the inbound links that are created from social shares or mentions. Analysts have noticed that when content from a website gets many social shares, search engines send more organic traffic. This impacts the ranking of that particular content in search results for a considerable amount of time.
Right Keywords
Appropriating keywords is a must if you want to increase the presence of your website in organic searches. In selecting keywords for each product, keep in mind their relevancy, search volume, and ranking difficulty. It helps to identify what specific keywords people are looking for, so that you can adjust your keyword list and refine it to reflect their searches. Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to rank for, assign them to the right pages on your website. Remember to avoid using the same keywords for multiple pages because it can negatively impact your SEO rankings.
A well-constructed keyword list can definitely boost your presence in search results. More importantly, it could prove useful for people using voice search for their queries. Ayima states that SEO in 2018 will be all about voice search, especially with the rise of devices like the Apple Homepod, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa. These aren’t just a passing trend either, because consumers are now becoming more confident in talking to devices. Considering the increasing demand for these “assistants”, there will be more focus on populating results to voice-based searches. If your keywords register in voice search results, your business is already prepared for this trend.
Fast Site Speed
You may think that site speed is more of an IT concern, but your page load times can have an impact on sales conversions. Consider people who have short attention spans and are checking your website out in a hurry. If it takes more three or four seconds to load, they are more likely to leave and look elsewhere.
A slow site speed is also detrimental to your website’s SEO rankings. Forbes writer Jia Wertz explained that Google is committed to quality search results, hence it would never rank slow loading websites high. If it did, people will not only be dissatisfied with the website’s user experience, but also with Google’s results.
There are many techniques to improve site speed. You can look at reducing the size of your images and graphics or check your web hosting. The bottom line is that you should keep site speed maintenance in your marketing priorities.
Relevant Blog Content
Does your ecommerce platform have a blog section? If not, you may need to reconsider having one. Mark Growth claim that frequent blog posting can improve SEO, because it tells search engines that your website is active and relevant.
Blogs also allow more content for search engines to crawl, considering ecommerce platforms mostly feature technical specifications and product descriptions. If you don’t want to rely on keyword searches alone, a blog section would be a worthy addition. Well-ranked and indexed blog content can make your products or services the top search option.