8 SEO Tips Every eCommerce Business Should Know
If you run a website, you know the importance of having an effective SEO strategy. Here are 8 tips to consider when optimizing your site.
- The Golden Rule – The unwavering, undisputed, most important thing you can do for SEO is to make it look like you didn’t do any SEO. Optimize your site for your users, not the search engines. Sure, you are implementing these strategies to improve organic search performance, but anything you do to impress search bots should have equal justification for how it positively impacts your customer’s experience with you site.
- Stay informed – The SEO world sometimes feels vacuum sealed from the rest of the world. For example, if you work in the industry, all you’ve heard about for the last few months is “Mobilegeddon”, regarding Google’s algorithm update targeting mobile compatibility. Outside of the search marketing world, you may have missed it, and your business may have suffered. If you are a business owner, you can’t afford to be under informed. If you count on any traffic from organic search, make a point to check in with the search industry from time to time. Set up Google alerts, or follow trusted people on social media to get the latest news delivered to you.
- Do due diligence when hiring SEOs – If you own your own business, you probably just got off the phone from an unsolicited call from someone telling you about all of your website’s failures and potential. Maybe they even said they were from Google! (they weren’t). You have to find the right SEOs for your company. Make sure they have examples of success that you can verify, make sure their values match your own, and make sure you know exactly what to expect, and when, for the cost. Going off of point #2, the more informed you are, the easier it will be to determine the posers from the real deals.
- Not immediate, but lasting results – If you are just starting SEO for your business, you have to know that you can’t expect immediate results. If you want immediate traffic for your money, invest in Google AdWords or Yelp advertising. This goes along with point #3. If a company is offering services to improve your SEO, but you lose the positive impact immediately after you stop paying, then it’s not SEO, it’s renting. SEO takes time, but has lasting impact.
- Content is…. – I won’t say king because I’m so sick of that sentence, but it’s very, very important, and it is related to point #1. Create content that is for your customers, not the search engines. Look at trends in Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to see what your potential customers care about as it relates to your products and services, and write posts on the subjects. Even better if it’s content that isn’t already easily found somewhere on your site, once indexed, the page will be visible as a result of a wider variety of queries.
- Have a store? You need local optimization – If you have a physical location, or many locations, local SEO has to be a cornerstone of your SEO efforts. It doesn’t take much to improve these signals, and they are strong signals. Make sure your NAP (name, address, phone number) is accurate and uniform on your site, and across any sites that feature valuable local listings (Google Plus, Yelp, Foursquare).
- Think ahead – SEO is ever evolving. Strategies that worked wonders years ago can actually harm your site today. By staying informed and having good common sense, you ensure that your current efforts won’t come back to haunt you later.
- Don’t be evil – If this statement is good enough to be Google’s mantra, your business can learn from it as well. Your SEO efforts are meant to improve the experience for your customers. So leave your competitors alone. Don’t try to sabotage their successes, or even revel in their failures. Instead, monitor them carefully and do all you can to learn from them.
Read more entries about SEO:
7 SEO Tips for Your eCommerce Business
Negative SEO – Would You Hire a Marketing Hit Man?
5 Free SEO Tools to Improve Your eCommerce Website
The Most Important Goals of a Website Audit
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Taylor Brennan is an SEO Analyst for the LYONSCG Digital Services team. Taylor has over six years of digital marketing experience, specializing in search and local optimization.
