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How To Improve Google Rankings Of Your Online Retail Store
By Sahil Kakkar, RankWatch
It is really tough for online retail stores to boost their search engine visibility, since they have to optimize countless product pages for numerous categories. This leads to issues concerning metatags, URL structure, duplicate content and so forth.
So I will provide you with seven SEO tips that any retailer can use to improve their store's rankings on Google, and steer clear of running into the issues mentioned above.
Before that, let’s take a quick look at the SEO needs of online retail web sites.
Why Does Your Retail Web Site Need SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is an invaluable way to drive quality organic traffic to your web site and rank it higher in the SERPs. And once a site gets positioned in the top SERP, it begins to generate:
● Higher quality traffic and more clicks: The first SERP receives more clicks than the other SERPs. Therefore, the web site’s ranking in the top SERP gets the most traction.
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● Exceptional credibility for your domain and products: Search engines analyze various elements of a web site before ranking it in the SERPs:
• Target keywords
• Backlink profile
• Social mentions
• UI and UX, etc.
Therefore, the sites positioned in the top SERP receive 95% of traffic.
7 SEO Tips For Your Online Retail Store
1. Build a solid keyword strategy
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Building a robust keyword strategy can be a strong point for your web site, and it becomes a success when you target long-tail keywords and not just short-tail keywords. This is because long-tail keywords signify the user’s intent clearly.
For instance, here's a short-tail keyword: blue shirts. This keyword denotes that the searcher is looking for 'blue colored shirts,' or perhaps that's what the search engine will decipher. Now, if you optimize for a long-tail keyword like 'buy blue shirts for men,' then it delivers the searcher's clear intent of what he/she wants: to ‘buy blue shirts for men.'
Moreover, long-tails are not as competitive as short-tail keywords, and if the optimization process of long-tail is executed appropriately, then they also can include short-tail keywords — similar to how the keyword 'blue shirts' was included in 'buy blue shirts for men.'
2. Analyze your competitors
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Your competitors are a gold mine of information that you can dig into and find plenty of opportunities to boost your rankings and outrank your competition.
You can use competitor analysis tools to excavate these opportunities that primarily rely on keywords. When you have your competitor’s keyword data, add them to your keyword database along with the unique ones that your competitors didn’t target. Now, start optimizing your site’s content with these keywords.
Apart from that, you can add cross-industry keywords that your competitors are unaware of and add them to your database. For instance, you can optimize your products under the apparel category with keywords from web sites or blogs that cater to the fashion industry.
This way, you’ll be able to rank for more keywords and broaden your target market.
3. Don’t forget about customer reviews
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Customer reviews can influence your brand image. Receiving negative reviews will make your brand infamous, whereas positive reviews will make it a credible platform to shop from.
Customers can share their experience with your web site or brand on Google, third-party review sites and social media. These are user-generated reviews so Google analyzes every mention of your brand on the Internet.
Therefore, if your brand has several negative reviews, Google will rank web sites with positive reviews above yours. But if your brand receives more positive reviews, then you’ll be ranked higher..
4. Make your site mobile-friendly
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Google receives most of its traffic through mobile devices. And 81% of people search online before making a final purchasing decision. So if your web site isn’t mobile-friendly, users are going to face trouble navigating through or checking out. Since mobile optimization is a ranking factor by Google, this affects your site’s rankings.
So, you should conduct a mobile-friendly test and optimize your web site for mobile users if you want to dominate the top Google SERP.
5. Create local listings
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If you have an offline store, it must be listed in the online directories; this can help drive the locals to your store. And whenever a local query search is performed, your web site gets ranked in the SERPs.
You can add your business information to directories like:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- Yellow Pages
- Bing Places
- Apple Maps Connect
Remember to provide accurate details about your services, contact details, web site, location, etc. Any discrepancies in the provided information can lead your listing to rank or highlight in the wrong location and reach the wrong audience.
6. Optimize on-site elements
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In SEO, you cannot ignore optimizing the on-site elements:
• Title
• Heading tags
• Alt Tags
• Meta Description
You must place the keywords across these elements organically to boost your rankings. And for a retail store, you must focus on the alt tag. Why? Sometimes due to a slow Internet connection, product images don’t load, so their alt tags are shown to the visitor. The purpose of alt tags is to describe the contents of the image. Missing alt tags will deliver an empty space to the users that hold no value for them.
7. Make your site faster
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Finally, you need to work on making your web site load faster. Go to PageSpeed Insights tool and run a speed analysis on your site. If the score is not that high, then you need to work on the suggestions provided by the tool.
Apart from that, some of the most popular and effective ways to improve a site’s page load time are:
• Reducing the size of the images
• Improving the server response time
• Minimizing the number of redirects
Conclusion
Following these seven steps appropriately can help you improve your rankings in a month or so. And you must not follow any black hat techniques to boost your rankings and traffic. Also, add a human angle to your product descriptions to make them relatable.
So, what are you waiting for? Optimize your retail site with SEO now!
Sahil Kakkar is the CEO and Founder of RankWatch — a platform that helps companies and brands stay ahead with their SEO efforts in the ever-growing Internet landscape. Kakkar likes making creative products that can help in automation of mundane tasks, and he can spend endless nights implementing new technologies and ideas. You can connect with him and the Rankwatch team on Facebook or Twitter.
It’s no secret that there are plenty of tools to get your online marketing job done. And there are a plenty more that keep getting added. With marketing plans getting bigger and marketing budgets getting tighter, finding the right tool(s) becomes a challenge. But wouldn’t it be great if you can get the best of these tools for free. Yes, you heard me right. The best marketing tools for free! So, I spent some time skimming through a whole lot of those tools to come up with this list. Let’s waste no time, and get started right away by stacking them up for you. Website OptimizationIf you have a website, it is only fair that you be curious about how visitors use your website. Do they leave the website the minute they land on it? Do they click a particular button more often than the others? Do they scroll through to the end of the page? To find out, all you need to do is submit your website on Hotjar, install the tracking code, and watch the magic happen. Heat maps show you which part of the website, users have been most interested in. Recordings playback your visitor’s behavior on the website. You also have options to analyze your funnel or add messages, take surveys, run polls, etc. With such powerful user research, you can ace your marketing strategy.As an alternative, you could give Yandex Metrica a shot.SEOWe know how important this is for us, marketers!Google does a whole lot of crawling to pull out the most relevant webpages for its users based on their keyword search. If your website does not have those keywords, then there is no way your website will be shown to the users. Simply put, your website or blog should be search engine optimized.And there’s always an SEO tool to your rescue! RankWatchlets you use all their features such as website analyser, back link data categorisation, Keyword suggestions, competitor analysing and much more in their Free trial pack.Building Landing PageWe, marketers, know the importance of good landing pages for our website. But we also know that setting one up can get expensive. But with ONTRApages you may put that thought to rest.ONTRApages lets you design and builds a landing page that complements your website’s design aesthetics. Select a template that best communicates your goal, insert images and text, and go live. Yes, it is that easy. What are the other alternative landing page creators you ask? Umm... there’s Ucraft and Lander.DesignYou don’t have to be a designer to create stunning images for your social or blog posts or for anything at all. In fact, the list of graphics you can create using Canva is endless and the possibilities limitless. Their built-in templates make it all easier (read as: fast) to create pictures in all shapes suitable for each social media channel. Simply select the template you want to work with, choose a layout, throw in beautifying elements, and you’re done. Cool, eh? I think so too. The Canva team regularly publishes informative posts on how to build good graphic designs easily. So, you’re all covered!(Psst… Just drag your cursor across their homepage for some visual treat.)There’s always the temptation to seek out other options, but nothing beats Canva.Lead GenerationWhat’s marketing without lead generation? Huh?Getting leads is one of the most important goals of any marketer. With HubSpot Marketing (for free) you can easily generate leads by capturing email addresses with the help of a pop up. Creating a pop up is as easy as signing up with HubSpot Marketing. Choose a lead flow, select a layout, add relevant image and text, test the flow and you are all set. The tool provides additional information regarding pages that your leads visited, pages that have higher conversion rates, etc.Another tool that is as good as HubSpot is Sumo. It’s a simple bar that you can stick to the top of your website and is worth a try. (But you may not find layout options to experiment with.)CRMA CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool is a must for any marketer. What do you do with a user, now that they have signed up for your service or subscribed to your blog? You need to know in which stage of making a purchase decision they are in. This allows you to tailor your communication or make a sales pitch accordingly. Whether or not you are using HubSpot Marketing for landing pages, moving leads into HubSpot CRM is pretty easy. Apart from being your address book, it has amazing abilities to pull data about users from the internet and email engagement. This is the feature I like best about this tool and it is what puts HubSpot CRM ahead of the competition.From the big names in the CRM world, you have FreshSales that you can opt for if you are just starting out. They have a free plan that lets you add up to 10 users. As your marketing budget increases, you may look at switching to one of their paid plans.I did consider other tools like Spreadsheet CRM and SugarCRM Community Edition but nothing quite like HubSpot.Real-time AnalyticsAsk it anything when it comes to tracking the traffic to your website and Google Analytics will happily provide you with all the information you need at no cost. That’s Google Analytics for you. Just look at the number of options that break down user behavior in sizeable chunks of information. All that in real-time! It not only saves you a lot of time but also helps you monitor and understand user behavior for better marketing strategies.Within the real-time analytics radar are Piwik and Open Web Analytics.Share ButtonsSee those sticky share buttons along the top, bottom, and side of this blog post? Well, you need them for your blog. Why? To make it easy for your users to share your content. Now that that’s settled, let’s move on to pick the right (read as: free) plugin, one that does not have us entangled in a bunch of codes. Sign up for ShareThis, get an easy-to-install code—just one single code, and be notified when your content goes viral. Whoever said, getting the word out was difficult!SumoMe is one of the newest plugins but has become quite popular among marketers. You may want to check that one out too.Social Media ManagementImagine if you could plan ahead when it comes to posting on your social profiles. Wouldn’t you be saving yourself a lot of time? Let’s say you schedule content for a week. That’s a week of social publishing taken care of. Seven days!With SMhack, you can do just that! Sign up, link your social profiles, publish, schedule as many posts for as many social profiles you want. If you want to publish posts at optimal times, then move them to queue and the tool will take care of them for you. If you want to publish multiple times, then there’s an option for that too. And if you ever want to bring your team members on board to help you take care of the social conversations, then SMhack might just be the tool for you. Psst… there is no limit on the number of members you can bring on board.Social Reporting is crucial to quantity your efforts. Tools such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics and many others give you data on individual social profiles. But it is practical to have just all of them in one place. No? SMhack gives you in-depth analysis and ready-to-present reports of your social presence. IFTTT is another tool for you to look up. With a lot of ready-to-use recipes… err… applets in IFTTT, you wouldn’t have to worry about creating new ones. But if you are the adventurous one, then you can create not just one but many applets to get your social marketing taken care of.I wonder why nobody ever talks about using it for scheduling content.And with that, we’ve covered the important aspects of marketing that could use some sort of automation. It’s time to roll up your sleeves and get some crazy marketing automation done. But before you go, if you like what you read, give it a share.You can also let me know what your secret stack of tools has. Drop them here as comments.Originally Published at RankWatch Blog
Here is the list of 10 Marketing tools you need to use and include right away in you marketing Strategy
