Whether you are a small business owner looking to find scrappy ways to increase traffic to your e-commerce store or an SEO manager for a major online store, it’s imperative to understand e-commerce SEO. With a lot of buzz surrounding local SEO, online stores, and web directories, it is normal to wonder if they actually help. Ensuring that business listings exist on different online directories demands effort and hard work so it’s best to understand the role of local directories in local eCommerce SEO.
E-commerce SEO is a free method of improving your website ranking on SERPs of major search engines. It’s low-hanging fruit for business owners. customers making purchases a well-ranked page is destined to receive more traffic and hence there are more chances.
Here is a simple example to understand the importance of SEO in eCommerce. Let’s say you run an online clothing store. Everything about your products is perfectly fine and it can make a dent in the market. If you don’t invest your money in SEO. your website will not appear in the search results. No matter how good your product is, your customers will not be able to find your website.
So, if you want to generate traffic for your online store, attract more customers and earn profits from your e-commerce store, you have to focus on E-commerce local SEO. SEO for an online store is all about optimizing it for all the important ranking signals and getting in the top 10 positions. Let us have a look at some statistics from Backlinko to understand the importance of being ranked in the top position. Click through rate for the top 5 positions is as follows.
There was a time when being in the top results was enough and there were ten spots to compete for. It is hard to find a page where ten results are neatly laid out. Things such as Google Shopping ads, text ads, and featured snippets take up some positions making e-commerce SEO even more important.
E-commerce SEO plays a pivotal role in the success of any online store but what does it take to design an effective SEO strategy for an online store?
Here are a few useful tips.
Handling SEO for a website takes a lot of effort as you have to meet several specific requirements. The first and foremost step is to create a workflow. Analyze all of the pages of your website and see which of the pages get the most traffic. It’s best to start with them.
The most important step of planning an effective SEO strategy is to identify high-value search terms. There are several ways to find out the most important keywords. Know that e-commerce keyword research is different from other types of keyword research. While you have to rank for the informational words, you must also include commercial keywords to get higher ranks. Focus on the buying intent. Use autocomplete feature of major search engines such as Google to identify the most important keywords.
The organization and structure of your website pages impact eCommerce SEO like nothing else. That’s because it affects the user experience. Search engines are getting smarter every day and they show the most useful websites to the users. Make sure your eCommerce online store is easy to navigate, loads the fastest, and is compatible with different devices such as mobiles and tablets.
If you want to ace the game of local SEO, you need to outwit the competition. That requires you to conduct a competitor search. Look at the top sites and check out the SEO efforts they are making.
Note: Having a proper Off-page checklist can also come in handy.
Adding your business to the local business directory & reviewing the site can benefit you in several ways. The relevant and authentic business directories act as a catalyst for your local SEO campaign. That’s because the links from directories serve as natural backlinks and fuel for a successful eCommerce SEO campaign.
Although many links from directories are “no-follow,” and have less SEO value, they make your eCommerce site’s backlink profile look more natural thus increasing its authenticity. In addition to purely technical SEO aspects of link generation, a more important benefit of directories is that many of these sites rank highly for keywords associated with your eCommerce store. Resultantly, you can generate targeted traffic to your site directly from the local business directory & reviewing site.
Beyond local directories, there are industry-specific directories that can retain a fair amount of SEO value for eCommerce sites. Particularly if the directory is closely associated with your eCommerce brand and the types of products you sell, the potential for inbound traffic, as well as a relevant backlink, is significant
For local e-commerce stores, there may be numerous benefits against a small fee for a directory listing. For example, Yahoo! Local and Bing offer quality listings but at price. For eCommerce SEO, the cost is probably expensive and not worth the investment, but for local SEO, it is.
To get the most out of these listings, dish out niche-specific directories as they offer relevancy and value to both SEO and inbound marketing.
As you plan SEO for an online store after realizing the importance of SEO in eCommerce, search for the top free web directories. Google My Business, Yelp, BBB, Citylocal 101, Bing Place, and Topspot 101 are to name a few important web directories. And all of that for free!
