Ready to level up your brand? Whether you’re a young start-up or established business, understanding the importance of modern marketing strategies can help you find and connect with the right audience and help build your brand.
If you’ve been deep diving into the array of digital marketing strategies on the market for some time and don’t know where to spend your resources to get the best ROI, consider search engine optimisation. A fantastic way to organically find and drive new traffic to your website, a well optimised eCommerce website can help:
- Build brand awareness
- Re-engage cold leads
- Support your market positioning as an authority leader
- Convert warm leads to sales
Sounds good? Like we said–there’s something to be best for a well optimised website when you’re interested in a great return on investment.
If you’re new to the world of SEO, we’ve summarised the top level good-to-know information that will help give you a lay of the land. From there, we’ve identified the must-do strategies to get started before detailing a few more detailed strategies that you can advance to when you’re ready to drill down.
Read on to learn more about search engine optimisation for eCommerce sites and how this modern digital marketing tool can help elevate your brand.
eCommerce SEO 101
Worried that SEO sounds too foreign for you to take action? Not to worry. At its simplest, search engine optimisation is all about:
- Optimising your website to help potential customers more easily find and connect with your brand online.
Straightforward enough? While the specific tricks, tools, and algorithms that are good to understand to support a great SEO strategy are important, we think that step one should be understanding why your eCommerce site should consider optimising for the web to begin with.
If we break down this simple concept into a few more detailed ideas, SEO includes:
- Defining what your website represents and offers to customers.
This includes the topic pillars (or information clusters) that most accurately represent your products, brand, or business. This is important–customers flow through to specific websites to search for information or solutions to their problems based on their understanding of what that website is an expert in.
A great example would be HubSpot–one of the world’s industry authorities on Customer Relationship Management and digital marketing. Google users can often rely on HubSpot to find more information about a topic they’re interested in relating to CRM and digital marketing. The World Health Organisation is another–traditionally, readers, consumers, Google, and other search engines know that WHO represents and shares leading information into health sciences.
- Search for and understand what relevant keywords will drive, or are most likely to drive, users to your website. This is called keyword research.
While the tools used in finding and defining your keywords that will drive users to your website can seem a bit daunting, they don’t have to be. In short, the process of selecting keywords that define your brand and what information or content it represents and what keywords your customers are most likely to use is called keyword research. There are a number of online platforms that can help you find how many times search engine users search for potential keywords each month–which is important, because the higher the search volume, the more opportunities your eCommerce site has to be found by a new user.
The downside? Highly popular keyword terms can be hard to compete for with more established brands. For now, start considering what keywords represent your site’s information or solution offer and what your customers–who you can get to know deeply through market segmentation–are likely to type into Google.
- Decide on a keyword map and update your site to get it live.
Search engine optimisation efforts can become easier in time. How so? Because each week, month, and quarter represents a new host of data that has been collected about your website users and helps define future keyword terms and SEO strategies.
That’s one of the beautiful things about SEO: what can, at first, feel like a shot in the dark becomes more easily and well defined over time based on the information Google is able to collect about your eCommerce site.
A good example of the type of data Google Analytics can help produce for your site includes the most commonly searched keywords that result in your website showing up on a search engine page and which keywords resulted in new website clicks. Complicated? It doesn’t have to be. We’ll detail this further below.
- Watch the traffic flow in.
We’re oversimplifying this step–but that’s the (ideal) end result! Search engine optimisation is all about optimising your website for search engines–be it Google or otherwise. This means, recognising what you want your brand and website to be a market leader in (what information and solutions you offer to your community) and then finding and connecting with more customers interested in those topics, solutions, or brands.
Sounds good? Read on to learn more about the basic steps behind drafting your first SEO initiatives to boost your eCommerce site and starting pulling in more traffic today.
Drafting an SEO Plan to Boost Search Results
The above top level overview of the why’s and how’s of SEO projects is meant to be simple. Why? Because we appreciate that SEO seems wildly out of reach for everyday small business owners and eCommerce sites that don’t yet have a full in-house marketing team.
While some brands will opt to outsource their digital marketing strategies, you can kickstart your own SEO project to get a head start. The end result can mean finding more warm leads who are interested in what your website has to offer–an ROI on the few hours spent organising your SEO plan that we think is well worth your time.
Follow this quick step-by-step guide to get your eCommerce SEO strategy designed, up, and running in no time. We’ll later show you how to link your website to SEO tracking tools so you can follow the success of your efforts and learn how to make tweaks and changes.
Set Up Your First eCommerce Website SEO Plan
- Review your audience. (Market segmentation)
In an ideal world, you’ll have already clearly defined your target audience and deeply understand their likes, dislikes, wants, and needs. Further still, understanding the platforms they use, how they interact with each other and brands, and what other brands they follow or are inspired by can tell you a great deal about your consumer. How so? One of the key factors to a successful eCommerce SEO strategy is finding the topics your ideal consumers are interested in, products they want to know more about, and the online language they use.
Because your website will (ideally) become an online pillar that represents a topic, product, or service your customers are deeply interested in, they’ll be more likely to find and connect with your site if you position yourself as market authority and can speak on their terms.
In short: dial back to your customer personas and market segmentation to start brainstorming the topics, terms, ideas, and words that are familiar to your consumers.
- Brainstorm keywords:
Here’s the fun part–once you have a refreshed awareness of the common language used by your ideal customers online, you’ll likely start to see common threads about the topics they search for online. (These are often referred to as ‘search queries’ in the digital marketing world.)
A good example of this would be a women’s fashion retailer. Common search engine words typed in by their users may include: “women’s leggings”, “women’s maxi dresses”, or “maternity clothing”. By brainstorming a huge list of potential search terms or topics your customers will be interested in, you’ll start to see the common threads and relevant keywords that drive audiences to your website.
- Keyword research:
Taking the above exhaustive list of potentially relevant keyword ideas that would resonate with your audience, it’s time to do some quantitative research.
What this means is using an online SEO keyword research tool. Some of the top factors that will influence which keywords you want to start to integrate into your eCommerce website will include:
- High Search Volume: You’ll want there to be enough monthly searches for the chosen keywords that will actually bring potential customers to your website. While some more intuitive, popular keywords might have upwards of 100,000+ searches on Google every month, more niche terms that are less likely to be typed into Google could be less than 100 Australia-wide. (Think “women’s leggings”, for example. That generic keyword would likely result in significant searches every month whereas glow-in-the-dark leggings may not.)
- Middle-level (achievable) competitiveness: The level of difficulty associated with any one keyword will be your next area of focus. While some more popular keywords may have thousands of online searches every month, if a keyword is ranked as ‘Extremely Difficult’ your site could be dead in the water. How so?
Keyword difficulty indicates how challenging it will be to rank number one on any search engine results pages. (Like Google.) Why is this important? Because the chances of potential traffic clicking through to your website to gain information or find a solution to their problem is much higher the higher your website shows in the search results.
- Consider the Cost. Considering setting up Google Ads in the future? Paid digital marketing campaigns can be a great way to position your brand in front of interested customers–however, there is a cost associated with paid advertising efforts. One of these costs is directly associated with the ‘price’ of each keyword. Chances are, a keyword that is ranked ‘Extremely Difficult’ and has plenty of search volume to support its worthwhileness will be more expensive than some others.
Why? Pay-per-click (PPC) digital marketing comes into play. Anytime a business allocates funds to a paid marketing effort, they have the opportunity of being positioned on the first page, or top of the first page, as a ‘Sponsored Post’. This means that potential customers will likely see their website as one of the first search results–meaning more customers are likely to click on it. How do they get to this top spot? One, excellent online marketing initiatives and two, money. Pay-per-click means that the organisation is charged the cost of the keyword every time one of the search engine users clicks on their Sponsored search engine result. While the company will spend some more money attracting these new leads, they also gain a higher chance of converting that lead.
It should be noted that the basic SEO steps detailed above can help drive organic traffic to your online store. While some eCommerce websites will be prepared to spend money on paid advertising and long tail keywords with a higher PPC cost, you can still benefit from using the basic SEO steps to drive increased google searches and organic traffic.
Get Started Building Brand Awareness with Google Search Console
Finding the right words that will resonate with your customer, best reflect your brand, and have enough search engine data to support it is no easy task. What at first can sound like a fun brainstorm can be a fun, creative endeavour, you also want to make sure that you’re finding the sweet spot between best representing our solution to the world and what will actually make customers click. (Even more so if you’ll be paying for those clicks!)
If you’ve made it through the above three steps and are ready to put some of your basic SEO details into action on your eCommerce website, we’ve now summarised how to go about it and how Google’s best eCommerce SEO tools can help.
With your list of final keywords, it’s time to start inputting some basic SEO information. On your eCommerce website, this will include:
- Identifying which keyword you’ll use per page (one, primary keyword) from your keyword research. More on this later but choose one unique keyword for each page of your website. Stuck with a number of products and pages? Focus on the top-level pages first. Also called Adult Pages, these traditionally include Home, About, Contact, Blog, Product Category Pages, and the like.
- Integrating that keyword into your H1s and H2s (Heading Tags), Meta Page Title, Meta Description, and alt-image text. (Where possible–this backend detail is often referred to as off-page SEO.)
- From there, we recommend using a free, online SEO tool (like Yoast!) to check the overall SEO score of your page. Most of these online tools will both review your page and identify areas for improvement that increase your overall search engine rankings.
- Interested in more optimisation? While most marketing support teams will wait to optimise pages further down the track (after your SEO data has been live for some-time and the collected analytics can inform the best areas for improvement) you can plug secondary keywords into the page. This means selecting a second (third and fourth!) keyword that ‘supports’ the primary keyword and integrating it into the body copy of the page for extra on-page SEO.
Gone through your full website setup? Now that the basics are included and you’ve checked each page for a great SEO score, you’ll want a means to track and measure the success of your efforts. This is where two key Google eCommerce SEO tools can come into play.
- Google Search Console: Once set up, this Google platform can help measure your site’s performance and traffic and better define future SEO efforts. From showing you which search engine terms are driving most of your website traffic to helping Google and other search engines best index your page, once set up, this SEO powerhouse can help reduce the guesswork out of future SEO. The key feature here is that the Search Console analyses search engine traffic, your SEO rankings, and organic traffic is finding your eCommerce website.
- Google Analytics: For those interested in deep diving into their website analytics, Google Analytics will be the next step for you. Once users navigate to your site, you can look into detailed information about user behaviour, what page they were on directly before navigating to your site, follow on pages, and the like. These features are especially important for learning more about your consumer and how much time they spend interacting with your online store.
Thinking of using one or the other? We recommend setting up both. As Google Workspace users, most eCommerce hosts can easily set up both accounts and start to get useful information about their customers before, during, and after they interact with their site. For those interested in further defining their SEO efforts to continually hit the mark with their marketing efforts, both platforms will help you further define and refine your search engine optimisation strategy.
Optimising Your eCommerce Brand for Search Engine Results
Even small start-ups who don’t yet have an in-house marketing team can take advantage of search engine optimisation efforts for their brands. From finding new leads and driving increased traffic to your site to better understanding your existing customers, SEO tools are just one of the many that can help boost your bottom line and brand.
Interested in digital marketing strategies, email campaigns, and more information about SEO? Follow along with Edge Marketing as we up-skill and inform our community about the best online marketing practices.
