Ranking on the first page of Google search engine and taking one of the ten places is quite a challenge. The success of your ecommerce store largely depends on this phenomenon. Sometimes, even ranking on the first page is not enough. You need to be on the number 1 position. In an article title “Google Results Position: How Much Is First Place Really Worth?” by Gabe Donnini, it was mentioned that “The share of clicks that come from the first position are double than that of second position.” This clearly shows the importance of first position.
If you are start-up willing to establish your presence on the first page of search engines and fetch traffic, you must be aware of the SEO tactics and strategies that can help your ecommerce webstore to get to the top. Take a look at some of these SEO tips given below:
1. Conduct keyword research
The first step to undertake before commencing upon any kind of SEO work is to begin with keyword research. You need to do this because if you target the wrong keywords, you will never be able to draw traffic on your website which will clearly affect your business in a long run.
a. Search relevant keywords
While conducting the keyword research, take search volume, relevancy as well as ranking complexity into consideration. Choose keywords that are most relevant with your products and services and have a good search volume in Google’s free AdWords Keyword tool. Do not go for keywords that are very detailed, complicated or competitive. Highly competitive keywords might take long to get ranked.
b. Make the most out of long-tailed keywords
Your business might have additional and specific keywords that need to be targeted. These keywords contain more than one word and are known as long-tailed keywords. Now the question is, how would you target them? In order to capitalize on these keywords, you need to create a blog content which includes these keywords. Moz revealed in one of their articles that although long tail contains millions of unique searches that are conducted a few times in a day; when taken together they, comprise majority of the world’s search volume. Needless to say, it is better not to stuff your content with lot of keywords and write with the intent to reach people and not rank on search engines.
c. Don’t cannibalize keywords
When several pages of the same website try to rank for the same keyword, it is known as keyword cannibalization. Sean Work from KISSmetrics revealed that “Keyword cannibalization confuses search engines as they need to choose which web page is more important for a particular keyword out of the many web pages. This means that should also avoid writing a blog post using a keyword which has been majorly targeted on your other web pages.
2. Perform competitor research
After you’ve done keyword research, you need to conduct competitor research. As a part of competitor research, you need to know the keywords that your competitors have targeted. Read the content on their web pages and gather the keywords they have used as a part of their SEO strategy.
You can check if your competitors have a higher Domain Authority and higher Page Authority as compared to you. This can be done with the help of Moz’s toolbar. In case your competitors higher DA’s and PA’s compared to you, you might want to target other keywords as it might be difficult competing against them.
Also try to know where your competitors are getting their inbound links from. Use Open Site Explorer to fetch this information. Get a link from these websites through press outreach and global outreach. But before getting in touch with these websites, get rid of a website having a low DA score. Try to inspect the site architecture of your competitors. Know about their navigation and deep-linking tactics. Magento ecommerce stores should consider aspects like:
- Products in different categories
- Highly sold products in a particular category
- Recently viewed products
- Top rated products
- Related products
Once you get to know about the architectures of these ecommerce stores, you can create the architecture of your store based on it.
3. Use a Good SEO Extension for Magento
Using a good Magento SEO extension to take care of all your on-page seo activities is one of the smartest things you can do to enhance your store’s presence in search. A good extension will enable store owners to edit and manage URL meta data and automates the process of template application. But while choosing a Magento based Seo Plugin, make sure that it is offers some value added features apart from the common features that such plugins provide. You should also consider the functionalities that it can add to your Magento Store.
A superior quality SEO plugin for Magento is the one that allows you to set the products for which you can apply the templates, set limits for Metadata, provides you with notifications about SEO execution errors and much more. You can find cost-effective Magento based SEO plugins in the market.
4. Make the most out of customer reviews
Customer reviews are the first thing that is noticed by the people who visit an ecommerce store to buy a particular product. Shopify revealed that it is possible to boost the conversion rate of your ecommerce store by 14-76% if you add product reviews on your online store. Apart from increasing conversions, frequent customer reviews offer fresh content that Google search engines always support. This has a positive effect on your SEO activities.
If you have sold a particular product to your customer and they have been using it, you can also send them an email requesting them to provide ratings and reviews for the plugin they have been using.
5. Integrate your store with social media
Social Media stands of utmost importance in today’s times. Integrating social media channels with your ecommerce store helps you to engage with your customers, grow your community and share the content related to your products. In order to amplify your traffic through social media, you should create your brand pages on social media pages and add buttons on your homepage, product pages, blog posts and other pages.
According to Forbes Magazine, “Google has clearly said that social signals play a significant role in its algorithm. Although Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are important, several search results from these networks are restricted. Hence, you also need to set up your presence on Google+ and get engaged to your customers.
6. Test your website speed
Nobody likes to shop from a store that takes years to load. If your website doesn’t load in few seconds, your customers are likely to visit the website of your customer. So if you do not want to lose customers due to the speed of your website, consider using a speed testing tool. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you can boost its speed by purchasing some server space, reducing file and image sizes and using a different CMS.
If it takes more than 3 seconds for your website to load, you can increase the speed by buying more server space, using a different CMS (for example, Magento is notoriously slow, whereas WooCommerce is known for being fast), or reducing image and file sizes.
7. Track the traffic on your estore
You need to keep checking the traffic on your your ecommerce store and track your online sales from time to time. In order to conduct these activities successfully, you can use Google Analytics UA tag. It will also help you to know about the usage data of your website, traffic sources, bounce rate and much more.
As soon as you have incorporated the Google Analytics code, you should also set up ecommerce tracking in order to know about the transactions that happen on your website. By knowing that which products get sold and which do not, you will be able to work towards enhancing the features and functionalities of your products.
Above mentioned tips will definitely boost the ranking of your Magento store on search engines. If you do not know how to execute SEO techniques, you should consider hiring SEO development professionals who can help your websites to rank high.
