It can be said that increasing online sales is one of the main goals of an online store. Some time ago, you had to get in your car and go to different shops to see the latest electronic devices and toys. Amazon’s domination of the e-commerce world is a new phenomenon.
Stores used to be a major source of revenue for retailers, and now only a few of these stores operate online. This way of doing business is about to change.
Amazon dominated the e-commerce world during the previous holiday season. It is estimated that more than 50% of the sales rate in e-commerce will be attributed to this online retail giant by 2021. If this routine continues, a small part of this big cake will reach the rest of the sellers.
E-commerce currently accounts for only 10% of retail sales in the United States. The latest reports published by a source called Forrester indicate that 71% of consumers in the United States use a search engine to find new services, products, and brands. If you do not have a rank in these searches, you will be out of competition in the business world.
Simply put, if you want to compete online with giants like Amazon, Wal-Mart, and other similar brands, you need to win at SEO.
At first glance, such a competition may seem like breaking a giant’s horn with a simple saw, but there are ways and tricks that will help you compete with the large army of sellers you want.
E-commerce SEO ensures that your products are discovered online, while also helping consumers make the best purchasing decisions and providing them with valuable content to share with their friends. put
In the following, explanations have been given about the areas that you should focus on in order to apply better online store SEO.
Solutions to increase online sales
Right time and place
In the entire life cycle of a consumer, from discovering a product to making a decision about purchasing this product and maintaining it, online search plays the role of a very important element.
In a world where the search is king, retail sites are queens. If you’re an online retailer in the e-commerce world, you need to do more than optimize your site. You cannot easily ignore the rank of your products and services or even your brand in search engines.
In global searches, Google takes the lead and then the rest of the search engines play a role. As a seller, you need to know what you need to do to be discovered first and more by Google.
Even when the final purchase is not made online, 65% of consumers research the product they want online before making a final decision to buy in a brick-and-mortar store. This process is called ROBO (meaning online search, and offline purchase).
If you’re in the business of selling electronics, cars, clothing, and gadgets, even if 90 percent of the time shopping happens at a retail location, online product discovery and selection processes are important to your business.
If you have offered products online for a short time, you know the advantages of being on the first page of Google search results.
The click-through rate on top results in Google is over 20%, but the rate for pages other than the first page is 1.5%. It doesn’t matter whether you’re searching online from a home computer or a mobile phone, an important thing to consider is that the farther you get from the first page of search results, the higher your search rank and click-through rate. Your products and site will be reduced further.
Your potential customers have to go somewhere to buy the product they want. If these people don’t buy from you, they will go to Amazon or your competitor.
Keywords are your main keywords
It is good to have your online store on the first page of Google search results, but until your product is not included in the results of related searches on this page, being on the first page will not be of much benefit to you. That’s why you need to research your keywords to sell your products online.
Being on the first page of Google results for a competitive term feels great. However, pages that do not rank well should be covered by a long-tail keyword strategy.
First, you need to understand the limitations of broad keywords.
Broad keywords have a very high competition potential, and in addition, several months or even more time is needed to rank them. It’s also likely that such terms need to cast a very wide net to effectively target your target audience.
An old proverb says: Beauty is in simplicity; This proverb simply shows the function of long-tail keywords.
According to research, 70% of search traffic belongs to long-tail searches.
You need to find keywords that will attract the attention of your ideal customers in the search and also improve your ranking. The result of this search is a win-win process for customers and you as the seller of that product.
If you don’t know where to start, refer to your competitors’ keyword information to get a better idea of what keywords to use for your online store’s SEO.
Be a content-writing machine
One of the best tricks to rank for keywords on a shopping site is to create an informative blog. Once you have designed this blog, you can search for the keywords you want in Google for the SEO of your blog and find the topics that are actually the questions of your customers and publish their answers on your blog.
Marcus Sheridan has achieved great results using this method. He regularly appears online to answer questions about pools. This person answers questions that are asked by buyers and no one else can answer them. This strategy has made him a bright digital star in the world of inbound marketing.
Providing online predictive answers to buyers’ questions has catapulted Marcus, once a small pool salesman, to the first page of Google search results in a short period of time, as well as a major pool business.
Blogs have more benefits than just improving search rankings. The conversion rate of websites with content marketing is six times higher than the conversion rate of websites without it.
Suitable content on the site will stimulate your potential customers to spend more time with your brand; You need to help these people feel closer to your brand than they think. And this is enough for you to see a tremendous increase in online sales of your products.
70% of customers prefer to get to know a brand through a blog post compared to corporate advertising messages. Help your audience get to know you and your brand better by providing highly relevant blog content.
Note that in order to increase internet sales in an online store, in addition to the site itself, the content of your blog must also be SEO.
If the content creation for your store site does not look natural, don’t worry. You don’t need to design an entire SEO strategy in one go. It is enough to choose a solution in this field and try it. For example, put a movie.
On average, web visitors view pages with video 2.6 times more than pages without video. Companies like ThinkGeek are aware of this and use various videos to drive search traffic to their website for better SEO. Such a site with videos that average 600,000 visitors has a very high potential to generate web traffic.
Among the ways to increase internet sales and store website SEO, in the first part of this article, things like the right time and place, the use of long keyword strategy, and blogging and content creation for customers were mentioned. In this section, we discuss the rest of the store site optimization methods:
Optimizing the store site structure
The structure is important for SEO and PPC. If your content is spread throughout your site without a real structure, you will be counter to the efforts you have made to improve your site traffic.
Search engines look for structure when they check your site. Simply put, your most important content should be placed on top of your site and everything else should flow from this main infrastructure.
Using internal links in the content is one of the ways to optimize the site structure. By adding links to product pages and categories inside the blog pages, you direct your audience to the desired product pages. In addition, if you give an internal link from page A, which has 20 backlinks, to page B, that is, the product category, which has no backlinks, the product page has a higher chance of increasing Google’s rank even without any backlinks!
Every long article you write on topics of interest to your audience is a cornerstone in the structure of your site to attract customers. Don’t forget to link to your own content. In addition to helping Google better understand the structure of your site, it also enables visitors to find and share your content more easily. If your audience has to work hard to find your content, they will stop searching.
The navigation of the sites related to the online store should not be more than three steps. This means that users should reach their desired page on your site with a maximum of 3 clicks. Increasing this number will cause poor site navigation to reduce your sales.
This is also true for your products and blog. The more you ask a visitor to search a site, the more likely that visitor will not leave the site. When you want to design and manage your store site and its menus, consider simplicity. In addition to reducing the number of levels of your site in order to reduce its complexity, you should also keep its URLs simple.
Make URLs understandable at a glance. For example, use mydomain.com/product-name instead of mydomain.com/category/layer1/layer2/product-name and strings of random numbers and letters.
And finally, add keywords to your URLs.
Increase reputation and credibility online
When a tree falls in a forest and there is no one around to hear the sound of it falling, no one will know about that tree falling. If there is a site on the internet and no site links to it, no one will know about it. If you want to experience good internet sales, you should know that backlinks are the foundation of a website and are recognized as an important ranking signal in Google.
Another strategy that helps you build credibility online is using influencer marketing. This solution not only gives credibility to your store’s SEO but also increases your scope and creates a better ROI.
Bigelow Tea Company increased influencer sponsorship to help drive blog traffic and online sales. With the help of an influencer marketing campaign, they saw 32,000 contacts through the blog and an 18.5% increase in sales.
Use HTTPS
Google announced in 2014 that it uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. The audience of this message was actually the community of web developers. This is especially important for site owners and developers, as it means that if their hosting platform is not secured with a valid SSL certificate, it will be penalized in Google results.
If this penalty is not enough, Chrome warns users that sites without HTTPS protocol that require sensitive input information such as credit card information and various passwords are insecure. Google recently said it will warn buyers about any site that still uses HTTP. This warning is a huge red flag for potential customers and can drastically reduce your conversion rate.
About 50% of the world’s top 10,000 sites now use HTTPS. Retailers in the e-commerce industry should now use SSL on their sites for security reasons and to reassure potential customers that they are dealing with a safe and secure site.
Most of the world’s largest store builders such as Shopify and Bigcommerce now offer free SSL certificates with all their plans, however, if you have chosen to host your store site yourself, you may need to set it up yourself.
Increase site speed
Site performance is an important evaluation parameter for store site SEO. Harry Shum, director of artificial intelligence at Microsoft, said: (Even if the speed of your site is 250 milliseconds slower or faster than other sites, it can be considered an important factor in getting ahead or falling behind your competitors). If your site loads slowly, potential customers will leave your site before they see your products or services.
As of July 2018, page speed has been considered a ranking factor in mobile searches. The benefits of creating a mobile user experience are much greater than the amount invested for this work, because it increases your sales and conversion rates.
Testing site speed is simple. You can measure the performance of your mobile device and web pages using a free tool like Page Speed Insights. Sites like Shopify dependably deal with speed-related metrics and receive the results of this relationship. The uptime rate of Shopify Pay is 99.8%, and the speed of checking this site is also 40% higher than that of its competitors. This has resulted in an 18% increase in the online sales of this company’s products.
The amount of effort you put into store site SEO will increase internet sales and make your products, brand, and services more visible. The reason why your competitors are ranking higher than you in Google searches is that they have taken more actions than the listed actions.
You want an edge, but the retail giants simply won’t give you or their competitors that opportunity. You need to spend time and energy to improve your ranking.
There is still a significant portion of retail sales left for online retailers who spend time researching keywords, producing quality content, and optimizing the performance and appearance of their site, so it’s never too late to sell online. It is not too late to have an example. Give your customers a reason to visit your site more often.
