Google is recognized as the largest search engine on the globe. The majority of web users have Google as their primary online search engine. Garnering roughly 89 billion visitors each month, ecommerce businesses leverage search engine optimization to increase their possibility of exposure to a significantly large and diverse audience.
But what exactly is search engine optimization? Furthermore, how can ecommerce businesses improve to boost their ranking on search engines such as Google? With that in mind, here is a comprehensive overview and guide on leveraging search engine optimization as an ecommerce marketing strategy to give you a better idea.
Google and Ecommerce: An Overview
Research has been made significantly easy with the advent of technology and the internet. With just a few clicks, users can have access to an abundance of information with the use of search engines such as Google.
On average, Google carries out approximately 8.5 billion searches daily, a whopping 99,000 searches per second. Being the most visited website for several years, Google is undeniably an integral part of today’s highly digital world.
But what does this have to do with the ecommerce industry?
For one, search engines draw and generate an abundance of web traffic. According to reports, 46% of product searches online start with Google. Considering the number of people who use this search engine daily, 46% still accounts for billions of online traffic.
With this in mind, optimized ecommerce websites gain access to a large and diverse market base by boosting their search engine optimization performance and increasing their online visibility.
SEO also plays a crucial role in ecommerce websites striving to provide valuable content and quality user experiences. A part of search engine optimization revolves around analyzing websites’ on-page and off-page configurations to gauge their performance, value, and relevance to users’ search engine inputs.
Through search engine optimization marketing strategies, ecommerce businesses can generate and drive organic traffic to their websites.
On-Page and Off-Page SEO: What Is It?
To better understand search engine optimization strategies on Google, it is crucial to learn about its two primary components – on-page and off-page SEO. Both play essential roles for websites to rank on top of search engine results pages (SERPs) and, thus, increase a website’s reach and visibility.
On-Page SEO
When we talk about search engine optimization marketing campaigns, it is often on-page SEO tactics that come to mind. On-page optimization involves aspects directly within or related to a website’s content and processes.
Its primary objective is to build a website that is relevant, valuable, and user-friendly. This includes optimizing content through keyword research and strategies, crafting unique and original content, and ensuring technical content composition, such as meta tags, image descriptions, URL structures, and the like, accurately describing the website’s contents.
Aside from that, on-page SEO also aims to ensure positive user experiences by analyzing a website’s UI and UX design, ensuring it is accessible and navigable.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page search engine optimization is an overlooked and underappreciated component of SEO marketing strategies. While most digital marketers would focus on creating quality content and improving their website’s user experience design, it is equally important to pay attention to and conduct off-page SEO strategies to ensure a well-rounded and adequately optimized ecommerce website.
Off-page SEO refers to tactics that are applied outside of a website. Its primary goal is to build a website’s reputation and establish it as a reliable, credible, and trustworthy source of information online. It emphasizes Google’s bias on boosting sites with established reputations as trusted experts or authorities on a particular topic, niche, or industry.
Thus, off-page SEO strategies focus mainly on link building and multichannel marketing to expand the reach and gain much-needed exposure.
Best SEO Practices To Improve Google Ranking
Now that you have a better understanding of what SEO is and how it works let’s jump into the different strategies and techniques digital marketers can use to improve their SEO performance and boost their ranking.
Conducting Keyword Research and Analysis
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Keyword research and analysis are essential in effective search engine optimization strategies. It is what people use in their search queries and what Google uses to gauge a website’s value and relevance to a particular search input.
However, keyword utilization is more complex than adding words, terms, and phrases you deem related to your content, niche, or industry. Instead, it starts with a tedious and intensive research process designed to gain insight into what your target audience is looking for online.
Keyword research focuses on finding the exact words, terms, and phrases that they use when conducting a search inquiry. Furthermore, it also analyzes the users’ intent – whether they are looking to purchase a product or to educate themselves. This process also considers competition surrounding a particular keyword, term, or phrase.
To stay competitive and boost the possibility of ranking on top of search results pages, digital marketers must pay attention to the keywords competitors are targeting, particularly those performing well and ranking. From there, digital marketers can identify other keyword opportunities that they can utilize to boost their SEO performance with minimal competition.
However, a popular strategy in ecommerce search engine optimization revolves around using long-tail keywords. These keywords are more specific and designed to cater to particular search queries.
Aside from that, digital marketers can also look at using keyword variations. Other combinations of words or terms using synonyms can help target and reach other search inputs.
However, the most effective and efficient way to conduct keyword research and analysis is to use keyword SEO tools. These offer insights on current trends, keyword search volumes, user intent, and competition quickly and easily.
Identified keywords are used on almost all website content, from blogs to product descriptions, URL titles, and more. This is crucial in order to show Google that your website has what users are looking for.
Optimizing Website Information Architecture
Information architecture (IA) refers to the process taken to label, describe, design, and organize website elements to improve its overall usability, readability, and accessibility.
Therefore, the goal of optimizing a website’s information architecture is to make the site’s content organized and navigable to provide seamless user experiences. This is achieved through extensive research, planning, and testing. Ideally, a website’s IA effectively conveys how a site works, from one end to another.
But aside from user experience, information architecture also plays an essential role in on-page SEO through keyword optimization.
A website’s IA includes elements such as URLs, page titles, tags, categories, headings, image alt texts, sitemaps, and more. By incorporating relevant keywords, terms, or phrases into these components, search engine algorithms have an easier time identifying a website’s content and gauging its value to web users. Doing this can significantly boost SEO ranking.
Some of the methods used to optimize a website’s IA for SEO include descriptive image alt texts, writing detailed product descriptions, and creating simple and concise URL structures for easier navigation.
Building and Generating Quality Backlinks
As mentioned earlier, off-site or off-page SEO is an often overlooked component of search engine marketing campaigns. However, it is essential that digital marketers are able to continue their optimization efforts outside of their own websites.The main objective of off-page SEO is to build credibility and authority. This is typically achieved by acquiring quality backlinks, serving as proof that the website’s content is valuable and reliable.
However, acquiring backlinks from reputable websites is more challenging and complex. To do this, digital marketers need to pay attention to their content creation strategies.
One technique is to create content that is not only relevant and valuable but also original, such as in-depth guides, research, white papers, case studies, and the like. This increases the chances that other websites will use your content as a source and reference.
Another common yet effective link-building strategy is guest posting. This technique is not only great for building links with other reputable websites but is also effective in expanding a website’s reach and boosting its exposure to other audiences.
Enhancing Technical SEO Elements
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The technical aspect of SEO in ecommerce marketing is focused on ensuring smooth sailing and well-performing websites. More than UI and UX design, technical SEO looks at the website’s server capabilities and is designed to let search engine crawlers and algorithms index a website with ease.
Basically, a good technical SEO performance alerts Google that an ecommerce website is of high value and, thus, contributes to its ranking higher on search engine result pages.
There is a variety of that digital marketers can utilize in order to improve their technical SEO performance.
One way is to ensure fast and smooth website loading speeds. Page load time is a critical factor in providing a positive user experience. Slow load speeds can put off people, leading to higher bounce rates. Utilizing Google’s PageSpeed Insights can be helpful in identifying points of improvement.
Another technique to enhance technical SEO is to secure your website. Google also puts prime in cybersecurity, ranking those websites with established online safety and security protocols higher on search results. Acquiring a security certificate, such as a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), helps in improving your technical SEO performance as well as protecting sensitive customer data and information.
Bottomline
With the continuous development and popularity of Google, search engine optimization strategies have become more complex and sophisticated. Ranking on top of search engines, especially Google, needs a ton of effort and effective strategies in order to succeed. To do this, it is essential for digital marketers to learn about the basics of search engine optimization.
On-page and off-page search engine optimization are two different but equally important components of ecommerce SEO. Online businesses need both in order to effectively boost their search engine performance by providing quality content and good user experience design along with a reputation as a trusted and reliable expert in the industry.
From there, digital marketers can dive deeper into the numerous strategies and techniques to properly and effectively optimize a website. Starting from keyword research and utilization, content creation techniques, and other website SEO practices, both on-site and off.
These tactics can help ensure that a website is well-optimized based on the standards of Google’s analytics and improve the chances of success.
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