Owen Radford
There’s one simple fact in e-commerce. You need to be higher that your competitors on Google. Each step down receives considerably less hits. If you’re not implementing an SEO strategy, then you are missing out on a lot of clicks. This complete guide can help you with your SEO game and get you to the top.
After all, according to research from Optify, if you are number one on Google, you can expect a click through rate of 36.4%, with number two reaching 12.5% and number three seeing just 9.5%. Getting to the top is definitely worth it in the long run.
But how?
Step one: Research
Before you begin to make changes, you need to carry out keyword research and competitor research. If you don’t do this, and you start targeting the wrong keywords, all your hard work will be for nothing.
Keyword Research
There are three areas you should focus on when conducting research into keywords.
- Homepage and products – you want to pick keywords that are highly relevant, with a high exact match in your local area with a low difficulty score in Moz’s keyword tool. For example, if you are a teashop selling different types of tea, you want to focus on ‘loose leaf green tea’ instead of just ‘tea’.
- Keywords for blogs – you need to write blogs to stay at the top of Google, which likes fresh and relevant content on sites. Many people make ‘long tail’ queries when searching for things on the internet, so try to understand what full questions could bring them to your site and blog the answers. It’s good to create a content creation calendar for a few months ahead so that you never run out of things to blog about. However, just because you’ve found a keyword that you can rank for, doesn’t mean you need to use it like a mantra on the page. Keyword stuffing will get your content penalised, so remember to write for a real life person and not just for Google.
- Avoid keyword cannibalisation – don’t try to rank for keywords on multiple pages, you just end up getting Google confused. Keep a list of keywords and don’t use them over and over.
Competitor Research
You’re nearly there with your research. You just need to see where your competitors are getting their links from and what keywords they’re targeting. Moz and Open Site Explorer have some fantastic tools to help you with this. You can then utilise the keywords your competitors use, if appropriate, and build up a relationship with sites that could feature your content as well as your competitors. We’ll discuss outreach later on in our kickass SEO series.
Once you’ve got to grips with this, check out competitor’s sites. What do they look like? How are they laid out? Site architecture has an impact on SEO with deeply buried content not making much of a mark SEO wise. Consider doing something different to make your site stand out in the crowd.
We hope you enjoyed part one of our kickass SEO guide. Please keep your eye out for part two!
Post originally appeared Elementary Digital
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