Successful online stores usually generate huge amounts of traffic in order to boost their sales and revenue. There are various ways of achieving this, including
- Digital or pay-per-click ads
- Social media marketing
However, if you want to increase your site’s organic traffic, it is imperative that you implement search engine optimization (SEO).
Why is organic traffic important?
Studies have shown that, on average, paid ads will generate around 2% of the traffic to your online store. By contrast, organic traffic accounts for almost 40% of your total traffic. This means that your potential customers are people who found your store via a Google search. With this in mind, optimizing your site makes good marketing and business sense.
Here are three online marketing tips that will enable you to develop an SEO strategy for your store.
1. Optimize your website content with suitable keywords
As people will use specific search terms to find your products, you need to use these keywords on your website, including the product pages. For this reason, keyword research should be your first priority. These terms are essential guides to your online content creation and search rankings.
Identifying the right keywords for your online store can be difficult, but there are tools available that can help in this regard, such as Ahrefs and Ubersuggest. Once you have found your keywords, you can divide them into two types: those that can attract links from high authority sites and those with high purchase intent. Then, you should incorporate them into your website and pages.
Optimize your product pages
As keywords can improve your product page rankings in organic searches, it is important that you include them in the following sections:
- Product description main content
- Title and heading tags
- Product image alt text
- Meta descriptions
However, you should never carelessly add keywords to every area of your website as Google may flag your site for keyword stuffing. Only use them in the essential areas of the product page. Furthermore, when adding keywords, make sure the content appears natural and conversational. This will enable both search engines and visitors to understand your product descriptions.
2. Create and publish authoritative articles with strong CTAs
Authoritative articles tend to rank higher on Google’s search results pages, and most are long content forms with more than 2,000 words. Nevertheless, a long article won’t rank highly if it doesn’t have substance. You need to back up your content with original research or case studies. You should also include images that readers can share.
Here are the most popular types of authoritative content you can create for your website.
Product guides
When writing a product guide, you should begin by carefully selecting the keywords. Then, create an outline similar to this:
- Definition of terms
- Brief history of the product
- Its importance
- Who should use it
- Steps needed to accomplish a certain task using the product
- Illustration of each step
- Images of the essential parts
Once you have written the article, you should optimize it with keywords while making it authoritative.
Listicle
A listicle is a long-form article that usually contains a list of ideas or solutions. A typical listicle will contain 20 or more items, but you need to create one with 50 or more to rank well on the search engines.
Ebooks
Writing electronic books requires more time and effort as you will need to write lengthy chapters rather than a single blog post. Nevertheless, this format can help ensure that people will have a thorough understanding of your products. As Ebooks can come in various forms, you should first identify which ones are ranking highly for your keyword. From there, you can decide which format is best suited to your readers.
High-purchase-intent articles are another type of content your online store should incorporate. People who read these articles are almost ready to buy but they just want to be certain that they are choosing the best product available. Here are two of the formats you can use:
- Your brands vs other brands – the purpose of the article is not to belittle your competitors but to present important information to your customers.
- Review articles – this content will be written by your customers. Positive comments from actual users can add credibility to your products.
Call-to-action
At the bottom of your articles, you can start convincing people to purchase your products. You can even entice them with free samples, trials, and discounts.
3. Implement a link-building strategy
Link-building is an essential SEO strategy. It involves identifying and reaching out to authoritative websites that cover topics related to your products. You can ask them whether they would like to include a link back to a particular page on your website (e.g., a product page or article).
What are authoritative sites?
These are the websites that Google considers trustworthy, such as CNN and Forbes. With SEO, sites with high domain ratings (DR) and URL ratings (UR) are regarded as authoritative.
Linking content to high-authority websites requires patience and effort, but it can improve your ranking on the search engine results pages.
If you need any help finding authoritative websites, you should use Google or an SEO tool such as Ahrefs. You could also check to see which authoritative sites are linking to your competitors’ pages and then reach out to similar sites that may be open to backlinking.
You should also ensure that your website and pages have a simple internal linking architecture. A “flat site” architecture is recommended as visitors will be able to reach a page within four clicks of a mouse.
However, what happens if your site expands and the number of pages increases? Well, you can use category pages to organize all your content.
- If you have created a new page, add it to an existing category page and then add a link to it.
- You can create and add pages in a new category. Each of these pages will have links to the category page.
As a rule of thumb, your internal linking structure should have a hierarchy similar to this:
Navigation menu -> Category pages -> -> Subcategories -> Individual pages
Conclusion
Paid ads and social media marketing can help direct more traffic to your online store. However, organic traffic is still the best way of generating sales and revenue. To achieve this goal, you will need to implement SEO. Although this is an effective marketing tool, it is not as expensive as online ads. In order to rank highly on the search engine results pages, you will need to optimize your website content, including the product pages. With the increased visibility, your online store will have a steady stream of customers ready to purchase your products.
