With the relative ease and convenience of setting up a new business online, ecommerce companies are faced with more competition than ever before. Not only are customers not bound geographically, there are a great array of similar products looming on dozens of other sites. It’s important to make sure that your business stands out against the others, and when you’re functioning online (and even if you’re not), a large portion of that means making sure you’re easy to find and highly prioritized in search engines. Especially to anyone new to search engine optimization (SEO), and especially with constant SEO developments, this can seem like a daunting task shrouded in mystery. Fortunately for all of us, there are some helpful tips to increase search engine rankings, making it easier for customers to find you and your site.
Quantity Does Not Beat Quality
Quantity can be a great thing, but not if it doesn’t have the quality to match. Panda, a recent update to the Google SEO algorithm, now seeks for information to not only be original, but also of good quality. Google wants to see that people are spending a decent amount of time on your site before clicking away, and diverse traffic coming to your site bodes well for it, too.
Part of having quality content means making it unique, and yes, this is often easier said than done. Sometimes, though, one of the most effective ways to get original and unique content is to let your consumers do the hard work for you. Encouraging customers to write reviews or upload videos and pictures can save you money and time. Vintage clothing site Modcloth, for example, encourages consumers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the dresses with reviews so that other clients can determine whether it meets their needs. Adding a level of interaction can also increase a sense of ownership and brand loyalty, something you definitely want to encourage.
Know Your Tools
As if running your business wasn’t enough, learning the business of SEO can become overwhelming in addition to everything else on your schedule. Utilizing the tools available to you can reduce the time of your learning curve, as well as time and money. There are all sorts of programs and sites dedicated to helping you get your name and business out there, so use them!
Google alone has a wide range of extraordinarily helpful products, both for SEO beginners and experts alike. Their keywords tool is designed to help you choose which keywords to associate with your website on search engines, aiding you in selecting a combination of broad and specific phrases to maximize traffic to your site. Google Merchant Center allows you to upload product feeds that will be easy to spot in any Google Product Search. Google Adwords helps you advertise your business on Google itself. Especially if you want to increase rankings within Google (the most popular search engine), making use of Google’s easy to use—and often free—tools are a great way to start.
Be Addicted to Social Networking
Addicted may be putting it a bit strongly, but in all seriousness, take a note out of the book of the average teenager and start paying more attention to social media. Make an official page for your business on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google+. You can advertise new products and promotions on all of these sites while gaining customer interaction.
Anytime a customer checks in (if you have a brick-and-mortar shop somewhere), tags your business in a post, or even leaves a comment on your page, all of their connections can see the interaction. This can potentially peak interest, especially since your business has gained a vote of confidence from someone they trust, as opposed to possibly ignoring one ad in a million somewhere online. Making your business more personal by putting it on social networking sites gives it more exposure, and can help make people pay more attention.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Putting all your faith in one singular thing to be successful is never a good idea, ever, and we all tend to learn this lesson at some point in our lives. There are too many uncontrollable factors in life to put all of your hopes in one sole party without having any back up plans for when things go wrong (because let’s get real, they always seem to go wrong). This is true when it comes to business, and it’s true when you’re looking at search engines. While it’s fine to focus on one search engine (Google tends to be a popular one, especially with the tools mentioned above), this doesn’t mean you can’t ignore all of the other ones. Not everyone uses only Google (Bing and Yahoo Search are still around for a reason), and you could be missing out on clients by ignoring the other engines completely.
When putting all your eggs in one basket, you also run the risk of not even doing that well. It’s no secret that search engines work tirelessly to continue to evolve, getting smarter to get users better and more relevant content. Even if your content is the best and most relevant content, a simple tweak in algorithms might mean that your site could drop in search engine rankings. If you’re putting all your energy into only one, your traffic ratings could take a serious hit if that happens. So while staying on top of SEO changes is one way to prevent this, making sure you’ve boosted rankings in all engines is crucial.
Put The Money Beets Up Front
Office reference, anyone? For everyone not as obsessed as I am, farmer Dwight remarks in one episode that he puts the “money beets” in the most visible spot, the ones that will make people want to buy. This is true for businesses of every type. Car dealerships feature the newest and most expensive models—the ones that make your jaws drop—up front, hiding older models and used cars behind them. In a physical store, you can’t put all of your merchandise in primes sales spots, so don’t do it online. The majority of a site’s sales tend to come from a few select items, so putting the most marketing efforts on these items can drive traffic and sales up—including of complimentary add-on items. Have links to these products in advertisements and on your home page to promote quick clicking towards it.
Make Connections
You often have to network in the business world to increase success, and this is true with your ecommerce site as well. Search engines keep an eye out for credible websites, and having other sites link to yours is a way to increase credibility. Not only do you gain authenticity with search engines, you also gain it with users of the other sites. Their users, trusting the site to lead them to valuable content, will be more likely to find your site and pay more attention to it.
This goes two ways, too. Send some of your customers their way, returning the favor and creating business connections that can advance both of you further. You can also link to your other sites or within your main one, making it easier for customers to get around your site to content you think they’ll find valuable, whether it’s yours or someone else’s.
Keep It Clean
The page layout, that is. With plenty of other options online, few things can scare away a customer faster than a confusing, badly laid out, slow loading site. Design your site so that it’s efficient, organized, and easy to use. Have a clear, distinctive call to action that is placed strategically in places to get people to buy, and don’t overwhelm it with distracting clutter all around it. Use security badges (like Better Business Bureau) to gain trust of customers, making them more likely to leave you with their credit card. Make sure your site is accessible to all types of browsers, including mobile ones.
Make sure your check-out-process is simple. Offering features like “add to wish list” or the option to e-mail the customer when an item is back in stock can increase sales overtime, allowing you to gently remind customers how much they wanted that item they may have forgotten about. As for the actual purchasing process, make sure that it’s simple and efficient, ensuring the reduction of shopping cart abandonment.
Having pictures and videos can be helpful to sell products and your business. However, don’t overwhelm your site—and customers—with tons of unnecessary media. A site burdened with unnecessary picture after unnecessary picture can cause extraordinarily slow loading times and impatient customers who click away from them. Not only will the site load slowly, it will distract from what you want customers to focus on—your call to action and the top products and it’s likely selling. Keep it simple, professional, and clean. You want to make it easy for customers to purchase your products, not a navigational challenge.
By Ana Gotter
Comments