Search engine optimization can be one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies to bring stable revenue to your business. By securing a spot on the front page of Google, you’re allowing your online store to maximize views and drive more traffic to your website. Yes, grabbing customers via pay-per-click ads can garner faster results, but this method also requires you to continually “pay to play.” Paid ad fees add up quickly and once you stop paying, you automatically lose traffic and conversions. Choosing to incorporate a solid SEO strategy, however, can greatly influence your brand’s awareness, trust and ROI without affecting your budget. Although it might take several months to start seeing results, you’re still setting up your business to succeed in the long run.
Why SEO Matters
SEO at its most basic level is the process of creating quality content and then promoting it to consumers who want to see it. The more your brand can optimize and promote your content across search engines, the greater the traffic that will funnel to your website and the more credibility your brand will build over time. Building strong, foundational SEO best practices is the one proven, budget-friendly way to increase your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) position, maximize views of your ecommerce store, and place your content in front of the eyes of consumers who are searching for the products your brand provides.
While growing your traffic through SEO may feel like choosing the slower growth path, the truth is that customers brought in through organic (unpaid) search are much more likely to convert than customers targeted with paid ads. In essence, SEO results in higher-quality traffic. If your brand needs an SEO revamp, check out (human)x’s top 3 SEO best practices to successfully grow your ecommerce traffic.
THE SEO Best Practices of A Digital Marketing Agency
At (human)x, we regularly generate high-quality SEO for our clients. Our team of experts understands the importance of keywords across web pages, how to use published content to establish yourself as an industry authority, and the relevancy of an effective backlinking strategy. These key tactics enable us to repeatedly create successful SEO strategies. Let’s dig in deeper into each of these SEO best practices so that you can apply them to your brand’s ecommerce model.
- Apply relevant keywords across your ecommerce website
One tried-and-true SEO best practice is the strategic use of keywords. Because each industry and audience has different search intentions, the first step is to research keywords that fit your target industry and audiences. Free keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Soovle, Jaaxy, and even Google Search Console are great jumping off points to find best-fit keywords for your brand. Once you’ve determined your relevant keywords, you can audit your existing website to determine how much of your content is already optimized. This will give you a better idea of your SEO starting point. Determining relevant keywords will also enable you to create new website content that includes these keywords to further improve your SEO as your business grows.
After this keyword audit, you can begin to strategically place keywords across your website. Saturating your website’s content with relevant, targeted keywords will improve visitor quality and increase conversions. Keywords should be placed within every meta title, every H1 headline, every meta description of each web page, and within collection or product description boxes. They can also be placed within image alt text and title tags, blog posts and URLs. These keywords are crawled by search engines and help your website rank higher in search engine results.
With all this focus on keywords to improve SEO, we do want to steer you away from a few potential keyword blunders. Specifically, we want to encourage you to avoid keyword stuffing, or overusing keywords in an unnatural way when creating content. You should also never hide keywords behind images or within web page backgrounds. Forcing keywords where they don’t belong or feel out of place will not only turn potential consumers away, but it can result in search engine penalties.
- Create an authoritative blog
Creating a blog is another integral component of ecommerce SEO best practices. Blogging has multiple short- and long-term benefits, including increased website traffic, improved keyword ranking, product and services promotion, and bolstering trust and credibility with new and existing customers. Google rewards websites that provide credible and authoritative blog content by ranking your pages higher in SERPs, so publishing content that answers common questions that people search for in your specific niche is very important. Successful blog content utilizes informational and transactional keywords, as well as internal links to other blog posts or product collections from your own website, to help establish your business as an industry authority. For example, (human)x has created short blog content to showcase our digital marketing agency expertise, including Why Google My Business Matters- And Where to Start, How to Prepare for Google Alternative Cookies, and Understanding Website Behavior by Persona.
Aside from driving traffic and building trust, blog content can also be repurposed as social media content across your brand’s social channels. Each time you create social media content with links to your blog, you are enabling users to share your brand far and wide, which gives your business free advertising across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or any other platform. Keep in mind that blog posts don’t need to be lengthy or overly detailed to connect with consumers. Providing them with short snippets of easily digestible, highly relevant information will encourage them to return to your website when they need help as well as share your blog posts when they find them particularly helpful. Blogging may also increase your SEO because other brands who deem your content relevant and helpful may link to your content on their websites, which also increases your credibility with potential customers and Google.
- Build a backlink strategy for different kinds of content
An effective backlinking strategy involves more than adding a few links to web pages. Link building is a continual process of internal linking, or the imbedding of multiple, relevant links to your own past content and other credible websites. It also means reaching out to online brands, organizations and publications within your industry to establish a relationship and ask them to link to your content on their own websites. And the best way to build a great backlinking relationship with other businesses is to consistently publish quality content across your own web pages and blogs.
Backlinking is an incredibly important tactic to boost SEO, and one key benefit of backlinking is increased domain authority. Because Google places greater credibility on websites that provide multiple high-quality backlinks, the search engine will reward these relevant, trusted web pages with higher SERP rankings. The Google algorithm currently considers 200 different factors when ranking sites on its search engine results pages, and SEO experts agree that after quality content creation and keyword optimization, backlinking could very well be the third most important factor that affects SEO.
(human)x knows that keeping up with ever-changing search algorithms is a gargantuan task, and it can cause frustration and overwhelm even the most seasoned internal marketing teams. That’s why we offer to take this task off our clients’ plates and let our team of experts research the best keywords, apply them across their ecommerce websites, social channels and blog posts, and then watch their organic traffic and conversions blossom within this SEO strategy. If your brand needs a more effective way to grow its ecommerce traffic, try our proven SEO best practices today!
