SEO for e-commerce websites: A total beginner’s starting guide to achieving online success
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is a crucial aspect of running an e-commerce website. By optimising your site for search engines, you can increase the visibility of your website and improve your chances of attracting potential customers.
If you're new to SEO, you may be wondering where to start. This succinct beginner's guide will provide you with some essential tips and tricks to help you improve your e-commerce website's search engine rankings. It’s by no means a complete guide to e-commerce SEO, but that’s intentional: when you’re completely new to the world of SEO and/or e-commerce, information overload is common and very much not welcome! So start small…
Wait, what’s a search engine?
A search engine is a website that helps people find other websites based on keywords or phrases that they enter. When someone types in a search term – say, into Google – and hits "enter," the search engine scans its database of websites and returns a list of results that are relevant to the search term.
SEO is all about making sure that your website appears as high as possible on the search engine results page (SERP). This is important because studies have shown that most people only look at the first few results on the first page of the SERP, and they rarely go beyond the second page. So, if your website is buried on the third page or lower, it is unlikely to get much traffic from search engines.
To improve your website's SEO, you can focus on two main areas: on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation. On-page optimisation refers to the things that you can do on your own website to make it more attractive to search engines, such as using keywords in your titles and descriptions and making sure that your website is fast and mobile-friendly.
Off-page optimisation refers to the things that you can do outside of your website to improve its reputation and visibility, such as getting other websites to link to yours and using social media to promote your website.
Tips for improving your e-commerce SEO
Conduct keyword research to identify the terms that your potential customers are using to search for products like yours. Use a keyword tool like Google's Keyword Planner to see how often these terms are searched for and to determine which keywords are most relevant to your business.
Once you have a list of keywords, optimise your website's content to include these keywords in a natural and organic way. This means using the keywords in your product titles, descriptions and other relevant content, but avoiding keyword stuffing or other spammy tactics.
In addition to optimising your website's content, you should also focus on improving its structure and organisation. This includes organising your products into clear and intuitive categories and subcategories and using descriptive and keyword-rich URLs for each page on your site.
Another important aspect of SEO for e-commerce websites is building high-quality backlinks from other relevant and authoritative websites. This can help to improve your website's search engine rankings and increase its visibility. You can build backlinks by creating content that other websites will want to link to, such as informative articles or videos, or by reaching out to other websites and asking for links.
Make sure to track your SEO efforts and measure the results. Use tools like Google Analytics to track your website's traffic and monitor your search engine rankings to see how well your SEO efforts are paying off. This will help you to identify areas for improvement and to adjust your strategy as needed.
Overall, the goal of SEO for e-commerce websites is to increase the visibility and ranking of the website on search engines, so that it can attract more traffic and potential customers. By following these simple tips, you can improve your e-commerce website's search engine rankings and attract more potential customers. With a little effort and patience, you can use SEO to help your business thrive.
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