The world of SEO moves at a blistering pace, it can sometimes be hard to keep up. To help you out, we have compiled a list of our most essential SEO tips for e-commerce businesses in 2020.
Strive For Keyword Efficiency
In order for your SEO strategy to be successful, you need to be targeting the right keywords. It doesn’t matter how efficiently you hammer your SEO if you are targeting the wrong keywords. In fact, if you end up pouring your time and resources into optimizing for the wrong keywords then it will be detrimental to the rest of your SEO strategy. It’s never good to be wasting precious resources, especially if it is coming at the expense of your other marketing efforts.
The more efficient your keyword research process is, the more useful the results that it will yield for you. Once you are confident that you can reliably identify the most important keywords to target, you can then focus your efforts on how to best optimize for those keywords. Remember to vary the type of keywords that you are aiming for – don’t neglect your longtails.
Consider How Your Users Search
When you are selecting your keywords, try to think like a user and consider what kind of queries they might be searching for. While the conventional wisdom is that keywords are king when it comes to SEO, most of us don’t search for keywords, we tend to search for actual questions and queries. For example, someone who wants to know what the best electric scooter on the market is will likely search for “what’s the best electric scooter for beginners” than “best electric scooter beginner.” Even those of us who know that Google ignores most two and three-letter words still tend to include them in our searches out of habit. Targeting the most common user queries is just as important as targeting individual keywords and phrases.
It’s also worth remembering that a growing number of Google’s users are now searching using their voice. The rise of AI voice assistants means that people are growing accustomed to using their voice and vocalizing their queries. Of course, anyone who is searching in this way is going to, presumably, be speaking in proper sentences. You should take this into consideration when you are choosing which queries to target.
Use Keywords As Anchors
This is something that you should always be looking to do with your SEO. By using target keywords and phrases in your anchor text, you can give your SEO a boost. Once you get into the habit of doing this regularly, you will start to see some impressive results. However, while working keywords into anchors is generally a good idea, you should be cautious about creating unnatural anchor text. If it is obvious to a reader that you are forcing a keyword into a link, then it will reflect poorly on you and will make your entire store look less professional.
The anchor text that you choose for a link can even have an impact on how likely a user is to click on it. Anchor text like “click here” does actually encourage people to click here. If there are cases where you simply don’t have a suitable keyword to use and there is a better alternative, then don’t be afraid to use it.
Don’t Copy Content
Whether intentional or not, Google takes a very dim view of plagiarism. If duplicated content is detected on your e-commerce store, such as a product description that you have copied from elsewhere, for example, then it will treat it as plagiarism and penalize your SEO score accordingly. This is why you should avoid copying and pasting product descriptions from other websites.
If the manufacturer of a product has already provided you with an excellent product description that you want to use but which is also in use on a number of your competitors’ websites, you can still use it – just make sure that you modify it so it passes a plagiarism check. You can verify this for yourself by using Copyscape’s free comparison tool. This tool enables you to compare a block of text with a specific URL. Simply write out your new product description, copy and paste it into the comparison box, and then choose a suitable URL to compare it to.
Product Descriptions Can Be A Goldmine
Not only will copying content from elsewhere land you in hot water with Google, but it also means that you are neglecting one of the most important parts of your website for boosting your SEO. Product descriptions are another opportunity to target important keywords and to create internal links to other parts of your store.
You should also remember that, in spite of the name, product descriptions are as much about selling the product as they are about describing it for a user. You will need to strike the right balance, of course. If your product descriptions are too salesy then they are going to be less effective and might even be off-putting to some people.
Keep An Eye On Your Conversions
There is little sense in working flat-out to boost your SEO if you aren’t going to monitor your website to find out the results. Before you embark on any kind of marketing project, you should first define your goals and objectives. More importantly, you need to determine how you will measure your success and what metrics you will be monitoring.
Your conversion rate is one of the best indicators of how successful your SEO efforts have been and how well you are running your store. Pulling people in is one thing but converting them is what really counts. Again, decide beforehand what you want to convert people into. For example, do you want them to become paying customers or subscribers to your email list?
E-commerce has never been as important as it is in 2020. People who are currently shut inside under lockdown still need to buy things and e-commerce stores are where they go to do it. With the tips outlined above, you should have no trouble sending your SEO to the next level this year.