With the massive range of platforms out there, it’s now easier than ever to set up a fully functioning ecommerce store and start selling your product online. Now, while it may be simple enough to get a business off the ground, that’s certainly not the only step you need to take towards commercial success. Your ecommerce store needs to be backed by a strong marketing campaign to ensure it expands and flourishes at a healthy rate.
One of the many essential facets to modern marketing is SEO. If you’re finding this hard to understand and apply, here are some of the most valuable tips:
Know the Causes of Duplicate Content, and Find Solutions.
Ask any SEO professional, and they’ll be able to tell you about countless clients who had serious duplicate content problems on their sites. Unless you’re planning to modify your ecommerce store’s entire design and code (unlikely), these issues can be pretty difficult to fix. For the most part, duplicate content is caused by poor planning, a non-intuitive website structure, and careless information architecture. More specifically, when it comes to ecommerce sites, session IDs, printer-friendly versions of content, and the use of URL parameters are the main culprits. The whole situation can become even more complicated when you have identical pieces of content spread out over several categories. These kinds of scenarios need to be recognised and then prevented in a proactive manner from the very outset of your SEO campaign.
Automation Can be a Good Thing.
Usually, when you mention “automation” and “SEO” in the same post, it immediately generates negative connotations. If this happens to you, then that’s a good sign – your head’s in the right place at least! While there are certainly parts of SEO which should never be touched by automation, there are certain conditions where it’s important to make room for automation. One of these exceptions is where you have developers on the team who can automate certain on-site features – title tags, for example. If your ecommerce store has thousands of products despite just starting out, then this kind of automation can certainly come in handy. Tools such as Posirank, with their “set and forget” functions, may also be very useful for certain businesses. Although automation can be pretty hard to set up in the first place, it will save a lot of people a lot of time in the long run, and as that old maxim goes – time is money!
Stop Wasting Link Authority on Poor Link Structure.
Good link structure for any SEO campaign all depends on the information architecture, URL structure, as well as the way in which your products are organized and categorized on your site. If you’re carrying on with a poor structure; with your products arranged in a chaotic, haphazard way, instead of being organized logically into sub-topics and categories, then your overall link architecture is going to be pretty poor from an SEO point of view. Though it may clash with your original plan for your store, conformist organization is one of the most important things to consider when you’re trying to make an ecommerce store as SEO friendly as possible.
Make sure that all of your products are organized logically by category and subcategory, in a way that’s reflected well in your URL hierarchy. By doing this, you’ll be sure to enhance your ecommerce site’s optimization in the eyes of crawlers, and make the entire site much more usable for your human visitors. Whenever you add new products to a given sub-category, your navigation trail will assure that there’s new links to every single tier in the URL hierarchy to go with it. By setting up sub-navigation menus in their respective categories, you’ll also be able to link through to other, relevant categories at higher points in the structure. While pinning down a great link structure in the first place can certainly be a challenge, it won’t stay like that forever. By carrying out thorough keyword analysis and making exact match anchor texts a part of your plan, you’ll more or less automate your internal link building. Every time you add a new product to your range, you’ll not only be boosting the level of the URL, but also pass juice up to the category it’s in as well.
Implement Dependable Tracking.
Possibly the most common rookie mistake in the ecommerce niche is seeing that you’re getting a lot of traffic, and taking this as a sign that you’re doing something really clever or effective in your marketing. Many people who make this mistake then go onto learn a very hard lesson: traffic is not the same as sales! To have a clear idea of what all your marketing efforts are really doing for your business, it’s essential that you implement at least some kind of dependable tracking. Most ecommerce store owners are already using Google analytics to see the kind of activity that’s happening on their store. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the tracking tools you can use.
Whatever resource you end up using, make sure you’re not going too far without some good tracking as part of your arsenal. This will show you clearly what kind of profit boosts you’re getting through your SEO efforts. When you see results in currency, rather than views, it’s much easier to determine ROI, and in turn where you should be spending more or less of your capital. Just because you’ve been throwing your money at different tactics and seeing some results doesn’t mean that you should carry on like this. It’s hugely important to know what’s working and what isn’t to make sure you’re getting the most from your SEO efforts.
If promoting your ecommerce store using SEO tactics was giving you nothing but headaches, try making these four tips a part of your strategy. Tackling all the different areas of modern SEO can be tough to start with, but a greater understanding will ultimately mean more leads.
