By James Murphy
Making a profit is one of the aims of every business. Today a lot of businesses operate virtually without any physical store and they still make a profit. If you have ever wondered how they drive sales, then you need to understand the major role of SEO in every business.
SEO meaning search engine optimization is the process of ranking a website higher in search engines for specific keywords. It’s a means of driving traffic to a website naturally. An effective SEO strategy results in the prompt appearance of the site on the search engine result pages (SERPs). In more simple terms, SEO makes any search engine algorithm filter your website as one of its first results to any searcher.
SEO is essential to all businesses, especially startups. For your first online store, when you apply SEO rules, your website is put ahead of the competition. Engaging SEO differently can create a magic boost for your product sales. In this article, you will learn the essential SEO tips to help you get your first online store sales.
1. Conduct Keyword and Topic Research
A crucial tip in SEO is an adequate and thorough research of the keywords and topics that you must publish on your website. Keyword research is an important step to knowing your customers’ intent. Your potential customers will type raw and direct descriptions of their needs on the search engine page. So, you need to know what words are usually used for describing a product.
Topic and keyword research will save you from making the wrong assumption about what your target customers are searching for. Among the pool of competitors online, keyword input and engagement are some of the best ways to help you stand out.
For effective keyword and topic research, you will need to engage tools that are specifically built for keyword research. Some of the tools you can use include SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz Keyword Explorer, and Google keyword tool. To know the exact topics that interest your customers, you can do an online survey where you prepare questions and you evaluate the answers to get likely keywords and topics. This is better than the old tactics of surfing for keywords online.
The major parts of your website that should include keywords are the title page, page description, body of the text, heading tags, especially H1 tag, URL and Alt tag. To research keywords and topics, make a list of the relevant topics that are related to your product, combine the keywords to form a topic, check competitor ranking for the keyword and research other related terms.
2. Engage On-Site Optimization
For your first online store, one of the easiest ways to get traffic is by using an on-site optimization method. On-site optimization is the process of optimizing web pages to increase their ranking in search engines. The on-site factors that demand attention for optimization are the HTML source code and content. A due assessment and enhancement of on-site SEO will determine the success of the off-site SEO strategy.
For you to record an excellent on-site optimization, your code must be of high quality. The content must be interesting, easy to read and highly informative. The users should easily understand your website and find it very easy to navigate. You should optimize your URL to includes the keywords, headings and title should incorporate your selected keyword and your meta description. Also, don’t forget to name images correctly.
3. Write Optimized Product Descriptions
You should know that buying and selling do not involve emotions; no customer will buy from you for pity of being a new online store. You must write detailed product descriptions on your website. Take time to craft product descriptions that match frequent searches.
Excellent and informative product description will allow the search engine algorithms to pick your product and display first. Your product description is terrible when you repeat the manufacturers’ descriptions.
An SEO-friendly product description should include how the product can be used, who the product is suitable for, and what you can do with the product. This means that the product description should highlight the key features of the product, be unique and be audience-specific. It is also important for you to have a good understanding of the product and this will be demonstrated using simple language descriptions. For it to be relevant, it must be informative and realistic. You should try to avoid stuffing keywords and use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords instead.
4. Write Relevant and Standard Content
SEO content is any content written to attract search engine traffic. Search engines like Google read your text, so your content must be easy to read and informative.
SEO contents include Product pages, articles, blog posts, videos, slideshows, infographics, and directories. To refine your content, you should first make plans by defining the goals your page should achieve, consider the audience, have an editorial calendar and analyze your SEO content intermittently. Good content must be linkable and must provide answers to specific questions.
The main reason why you should publish content regularly is that new content updates the search engine. SEO content writing requires a lot of planning. You should give priority to content management strategy for your brand in such a way that your content directly solves your audience’s problems.
5. Promote Your Content
When you finish writing your content, you need to promote it. This is a kind of advertisement that pushes your content visibility. This means you should work on getting your content right in front of people. For the first time online sales, this is very important because we have a large pool of competitors in the market already. You can do content promotion by sharing the content on social media or through email marketing. Content promotion is essential because it gets your content to the audience directly and improves your ranking. Also, it increases conversations around your website.
6. Maintain a Well-Structured Website
One major tip that will help your visibility on the search engine is the structure of your website. Your website should be organized and well-arranged. It should be simple enough to navigate. You can achieve a good website structure by categorizing the product you sell for ease of identification. You should also add structured data to your website. Such structured data include reviews, ratings, price, and availability of stock.
7. Build and Engage Internal links
The final tip on this topic is for you to build and engage internal links. Building links involve having relevant links on another website that will lead back to your page. Internal links help to improve SEO. It increases online sales and profit because as it boosts navigation, the users get familiar with the website. Strategies to building links include guest posting, PR pitching and taking advantage of broken links.
SEO requires patience, consistency, and long-term commitment. There is no end to learning about the concept of SEO, you should take classes and study the trend. More importantly, you should apply whatever you have learned. If you apply these tips correctly to your new online store, you will get not only sustainable traffic flow but also wonderful sales.
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