Seven SEO Tips for your eCommerce Business
As eCommerce buzz-phrases go, there may not be a more misunderstood and overused phrase than SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires definition and context to be established to better define how an online business should understand and leverage it for improved traffic to their website (along with increasing revenue, brand awareness, and all the other goodies).
SEO might be best defined by what it is not. That is, SEO is not all about algorithms, keywords or rankings. Rather, it is about matching relevant results to specific needs using search engines. A business that understands that their site needs to be about content and users will clearly define a guiding principle as they chase the search holy grail.
Here are seven topics and tips that serve as a baseline for your SEO efforts.
- Internal Education – Because SEO is impacted by everything from your internal site content, external referrals, and on-page technical capabilities, multiple functions within your business needs to truly understand the nature of SEO. Education regarding SEO should be an on-going and sustained effort, and you should have at least one person that owns responsibility for this practice. If you don’t have someone responsible for SEO education, assign someone. If you don’t have the right internal person, find an outside agency to help you focus on SEO.
- Expect Customization – While there is no shortage of SEO information available on the internet, no one set of plans, guidelines, tip sheets or information is likely to be right for your business. SEO is situational and solutions are not one size fits all. Don’t take any advice at face value–spend the time and effort to align recommendations to your business goals.
- Dedicate Resources – Lack of implementation focus and resource investment–both human and financial–is the number one cause of SEO failure. Even if you hire someone to develop a custom plan, any recommendations not implemented are soon lost and forgotten. Be sure you have the people, time, and money allocated to SEO to implement the proper solutions.
- Create Advocates – Senior Leadership must not only understand SEO, but they also need to encourage the rest of your organization to understand its importance. Having support from the higher ups will make it a lot easier to stress the importance of a good SEO strategy. Therefore, spend the time with your senior leadership to ensure they’re on board with your strategy…and supporting it publicly.
- Stand Up and Prove ROI – If you talk about buzz, trends, or quick fixes when talking about SEO, you’re going to be in trouble. When you communicate with your senior management team, you need to use language that matches their mindset. That means you need to talk Return On Investment. Start by using existing data and technology to benchmark your starting point that helps prove business results (sales, traffic, conversion, new visitors, etc.) over vanity metrics.
- Change your philosophy – Stop distilling your SEO plan to a set of algorithms and instead focus on how well you’re delivering the information your customer needs, first, last, and always. Do not focus on keywords, but instead understand the market segment. Do not focus on rankings, but know which metrics matter.
- Content Strategy – Content management is not SEO, however content attracts buyers. Good content will attract the interest of influencers, and the more they link, share, and like your content, the more search engine interest (and inbound search traffic) you’ll attract. Therefore, make sure your content feeds into your SEO program. Use personas and architecture to drive content that aligns with customer segments and moves them toward a purchase.
Once these points are covered, you’ll be on your way to developing a successful SEO strategy. If you want to learn more about how LYONSCG can help you with this process, please contact us.
Related Reading
- Negative SEO: Would You Hire a Marketing Hit Man? – See what happened when WebMasterWorld conducted an experiment to see how many business owners would be interested in negative SEO services.
- 5 Free SEO Tools to Improve Your eCommerce Website – Discover five essential, and free, SEO tools that can help you assess and begin SEO for an eCommerce site.
- 3 SEO Myths That All Marketers Should Know – Whenever Google updates its algorithm, a flood of blog posts about SEO practices that are no longer relevant occurs. Find out why quality content, link building and keyword data are still useful tactics.
