Online shopping cart or an e-commerce website is essential for any business. This is the age of Amazon and Shopify and online presence is a must if you have a retail store. Whether you are selling hardwood, or carpets or even printer parts, selling online will help you reach out to a wider client base but also stay competitive. Although a number of retailers are going the Amazon way or simply call it the marketplace method, selling products on your own website can make a big difference. With your own website, you have the liberty to market your products with any kind of price and do not have to pay hefty commissions to marketplace platforms. Moreover, you have full control of your website for any kind of marketing campaigns and not reliant on any kind of obligations our terms and conditions by the marketplace websites.
The trick to a successful e-commerce website lies in the SEO. Search engine marketing and optimization are two top factors for a successful e-commerce business. If you do the things right, there is no doubt that your online business will flourish. Let us discuss here are some of the important elements with regards to the search engine optimization which can help you optimize your business in a better way.
If you are just starting your online presence, here are some of the points that you need to consider/
- choose a good domain: find a good domain that resonates or is associated with your business. For example, if you are selling carpets, try to add the keyword carpets in the domain. Although Google has stopped the practice of favoring the keyword domain, I still firmly believe this has a direct impact on the search results. The domain name should be the shortest possible and precise.
- After you have selected a domain, find a good hosting company. Do not go with the cheap solutions as they may not get you the speed and functionalities to launch a website. If you are going with a hosted e-commerce solution, you don’t have to worry about the hosting. However, if you want to use your own e-commerce platform, you will have to be very particular about the hosting service provider. If you are going with an open source e-commerce platform such as a Magento or Prestashop, you might want to explore the following hosting companies as they have good reviews from their customers. Always your due diligence in finding the right hosting company.
- The next step is choosing the right e-commerce solution company who can help you design the website and integrate your products into the website. While choosing the company, make sure they have good knowledge about the search engine optimization processes. This is very important to ensure that the web design company is following the best practices as laid down by Google and other search engine companies. You need to make sure that all the website designs are mobile optimized or in other words responsive web designs. The website coding standards should also be well optimized and structured.
- Once your e-commerce website is ready, you can start the E-commerce SEO process. Make sure all the pages including the product pages have well-optimized page title tags and meta-descriptions. Each product page should have a good amount of unique content along with pictures. All the pages should be mobile optimized for all types of screens and resolutions. PDF Datasheets are very important in promoting any product. Make sure all your content is unique and provide a good user experience to the customer. The product page should also have cross-selling and up-selling features. This not only helps the customer to choose multiple products but also helps your website with regards to the search engines as they can crawl to the cross-selling product page is easy.
- All Your Product categories and subcategories should be well structured. Use of breadcrumbs and pagination is recommended.
- Sitemaps are a must for any e-commerce site as they help search engines to easily crawl all the available pages in your website. HTML and XML sitemaps should be added in your e-commerce website for the easy index by the search engine bots.
- Your e-commerce site should have social media pages to promote your products back into your customers. You need to create business pages for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other popular social media to sell your products. You need to constantly update your products, offerings via social media platforms.
- Website backlinks: high-quality backlinks is one of the key elements for any website to rank higher in search engines. You need to make sure your website has a good number of quality backlinks. Link building is a very critical strategy and should be thoroughly started on Webmaster tools before the initiation. Links can be secured by a number of factors including local citations, video shipping sites, affiliates, high-quality guest posts, social bookmarking and more. There are a number of sources online on how to build quality links for your business. Never take shortcuts on paid links for your business as this is against the policy of Google and other search engines.
Search engine marketing is a slow and fruitful process which if properly implemented can do wonders for your website.
