Incorporating search engine optimization tactics is critical to scaling an eCommerce business in a competitive international market.
For the first time in history, global eCommerce will exceed $5 trillion in sales. That’s more than a fifth of all retail sales for 2022. And in a few more years, total eCommerce sales are predicted to exceed $7 trillion. For small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), those numbers add up to loads of opportunities to outrank your competition. In an international market, how can your business stand out from the rest? Start with search engine optimization (SEO).
What is SEO?
SEO is a blanket term that describes a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic (non-paid) search results. The factors search engines use in gathering and listing results change constantly, but they all involve two things: positive user experience (UX) and peak website performance.
The goal of SEO is to increase your website traffic and improve your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). When it’s done right, SEO will:
Understanding SEO’s “big picture” is easy. It’s the detailed parts like obtaining choice ranking, increasing site traffic, and creating opportunities for more sales, that are challenging. Search engine bots or “spiders” crawl the web, indexing the information it consumes. Those bots pass all that data through algorithms in order to rank indexed pages’ relevancy, according to searched keywords and their authority. These formulas are fluid and adapt to multiple variables that frequently change, like consumer behaviors, trends, and technological advancements.
Needless to say, it’s essential for small businesses to stay on top of strategies that optimize search engines’ extensive reach and harness that power to scale their businesses in this expanding eCommerce market. Here are a few basic SEO tips that will “feed the spiders,” drive more traffic to your eCommerce products, and increase your sales.
Dive into data
It’s important to understand and monitor your site analytics because it uncovers valuable details for your business that can help you find and retain new customers, such as your customer's exact journey through your site or the keywords that your site's pages rank for. It’s useful to know, for example, which posts are successful and which ones aren’t. Analytics give small businesses an opportunity to experiment and find what works best to scale their eCommerce business.
Speed rules
Maintaining peak website performance is one of the two key drivers of successful SEO, the other is positive UX. Focusing on page-load speeds and responsiveness checks both of those boxes. When a customer has to wait for a page to load or a video to buffer, they will likely move on to another website that’s easier and faster to use. How long visitors spend on your website is directly related to its ease of use, including site navigation and structure. Basically, the quicker it is to move about your website the more responsive it is and the clearer, more organized its content — the likelier you are to attract traffic and rank results.
Links, links, and more links
Make new friends with your online neighbors and create backlinks that help drive customers to your product pages. When another website connects to yours, that link is called a backlink. The more backlinks your website has, the higher Google ranks it. Links from sites that are untrustworthy are not what search engines are looking for when indexing pages, so it’s a good idea to verify your backlinks with a link checker tool to ensure you’re connecting with trustworthy and authoritative sites that your search engine likes. It’s also important to crawl through your site and find broken links and fix them. Eliminating broken links and ensuring clean code and scripts helps you rank better and drive more traffic to your website.
Topics matter
Including any old keywords in your content won’t help drive traffic to your product page much. Instead, research topical groups of intent-based keywords that align with your product along each stage of your customer’s journey. Be strategic and utilize emerging search trends and new eCommerce platforms to meet your customers where they are.
Content is king
Improve your brand’s visibility in searches by writing more content, and go deep — not wide — with it. Provide your site’s users with authoritative content that is also informative, timely, relevant, or answers to customers’ product-related questions. This could be as simple as updating existing content to include more information — and targeted keywords — to starting a blog.
Staying current with SEO tactics is definitely a skill and an art, given the frequent advancements in technology, variable consumer behaviors, and evolving trends — but it is essential. Remember that every SEO tactic you employ should relate to either improving your UX or your website performance. When you do, your search engine ranking climbs, brand exposure increases, and more customers will find you and purchase your products.
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