Do you have products for sale on Shopify or Amazon?
Curious as to how we put our SEO talents to work to make sure that your customers can find you? In this article, we’ll discuss the best practices for getting your Shopify store found and products sold. Keep in mind that none of these should be one-time activities. Running and online business is a lot like putting in the work to have a thriving, healthy garden. It’s lots of little things, done correctly, over time, and repeated that yield the best results.
- You can’t rely on PPC as your only advertising
While many online stores go back to a pay per click strategy to ensure they are visible, oftentimes PPC costs continue to rise (as you likely not the only seller in a particular market) and if you stop paying then your presence disappears. Not everyone responds to links, banners, and other online ads. Be sure to have white-hat organic SEO practices in place as your top strategy.
- Duplicate Content: the enemy of the search engines
One of the biggest downfalls companies make when trying to boost their visibility and ranking is to put content on a site for the sake of content. And when doing so, many companies make the fatal mistake of copy & pasting content or worse yet, duplicating the same content across multiple places in their own website. Search engines are quite sophisticated now, and have the ability to recognize – and penalize – a site that has duplicate content. Make sure your content is original, unique, and relevant to your product, brand or service.
- Speaking of Content…have a Content Strategy
When you take the time to create relevant, unique, and high-quality content on your site, not only does it add real value for your customers, it will help with search engine rankings. If you’ve been tracking changes in the online industry in the last few years, you’ll notice how much more often companies are putting out content, sending newsletters, or keeping their blog posts up to date. There’s a solid business reason that companies are putting this effort in; one, it helps to find, attract and keep customers, and two, it’s giving the search engines what they want. And when you provide what Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others want, they will reward you with rankings.
- Never use the manufacturer’s product description
While it can be a very time-consuming process to build out your own product database, many businesses take a short-cut (or so they think), and simply copy and paste the manufacturer’s product descriptions onto their website. This is an SEO rule-breaker, don’t do it! Rewrite the product description so that it’s unique and search engine friendly. Be sure to use several works that people might be entering into search engines when they are looking for your product, brand or service.
- Optimize Product Images
In addition to word search, image search has risen in popularity, especially when customers are looking for products online. Your site should add keywords that are related to the images by use of the ALT tag on every image. And yes, we mean every image. You’d be surprised how many website owners miss this. If you get it right, you’ll be rewarded with rankings and sales. And when you create wording, keep it short, relevant and descriptive.
- Have Unique Meta Descriptions for Every Webpage
Don’t commit this SEO faux pas! Each and every web page within your site should have a correctly formatted meta description. The meta description needs to be written for humans, by humans, and the goal is to help people find your site and click on it when it appears in the search engines. Some themes will auto-generate the meta-descriptions – don’t be tempted to take a short-cut with this important item on your site either.
- Include Product Reviews
Obviously, having unique content is quite important when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Be sure to have a section of your site where customers can leave reviews. It’s an excellent way to
passively generate unique content for your site. There are a variety of applications made for this task, or ask us what we recommend within the WordPress platform.
- Link to your Products from the Home Page
A common error made by many e-commerce sites is burying their product pages deep within their link structure. This will not only make it more difficult for users to find products, it will also impact the product pages PageRank score, making those pages less likely to appear high in search. If your product content is a link away from your home page, it will be easier for both the search engines and customers to find you.
- Optimizing Anchor Text
While adding keywords to internal links on your website can only help to enhance a site’s visibility, adding specific keywords on your website will aid the search engines in getting your site found. Instead of using the same old “click here” link information that everyone else is using, customize your text to reach a broader audience. For example, if you are selling purple potatoes on though the ABC website, saying something along the lines of “buy the world’s best purple potatoes on the world’s most popular site, ABC.
- Organize your site for Search Engine Optimization
How you structure items in your store can impact its visibility. Construct your site such that it includes a number of landing pages; these can go to a specific product, brand, or product type. If you’re selling sandpaper, you might break it out into soft, medium and hard grits, or perhaps organize products by grit number, or maybe where it would be used: indoors, outdoors, bathrooms, on furniture, etc.
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Tips for selling on Amazon.