How to use SEO to market your ecommerce website

Ecommerce websites have become a huge point-of-sale (POS) for a multitude of businesses, with many of them operating entirely through an internet storefront. The storefronts, while digital, still require marketing efforts in order to drive paying customers to them.

However, with the internet expanding and becoming more competitive every day, how do you make noise in such a crowded marketplace? The answer is to use search engine optimisation (SEO) to boost the organic relevancy of your website.

Let’s take a look at the best ways to use SEO to market your ecommerce website.

Target the keywords your audience uses

Before engaging SEO you should already have market research that informs you of who your target audience is. The next step is to perform keyword research on your target audience to see what search terms they are using.

For example, if you’re business is selling dog toys your audience would be dog owners who want to provide a fun distraction for the pets they love. Therefore it would be logical to target keywords such as “dog toys”, “buy dog toys online” and “quality dog toys”.

The audience not only wants dog toys, they want high quality ones that they can purchase online. By targeting all of these keyword phrases you reach the maximum possible search audience while associating your brand with quality products that can be bought online.

Once you figure out the keywords you want to target, you then need to incorporate them strategically throughout your website in order to boost its search relevancy for said keywords. This means including them in H1 and H2 tags, image ALT attributes and blog content related to your industry.

Make your storefront mobile friendly

With the prevalence of smartphones in society, it was only a matter of time before the majority of internet searches were performed on mobile devices. This is now the case, with Google stating that it would rank sites that were mobile friendly above ones that aren’t.

If you want to reach these mobile users, it’s essential that your ecommerce storefront is mobile friendly. It needs to be intuitively designed so that nobody feels like they are getting less of an experience in using the mobile store over its desktop counterpart.

Build links to your storefront

The best way to use SEO to increase traffic to your ecommerce website is for links to the storefront to appear in other high authority domains. This is why sponsored content that links a storefront in blog copy is so popular, because it uses high quality content to host a link to a ecommerce website, directly driving business.

The advantages of maintaining a blog on your business website

When we think of blogging, many of our minds turn to small time journalists and travel photographers that dominate the blogosphere with interesting and personal stories. While these are definitely blogs they only make up a small portion of the internet, with many other blogs being business and industry specific.

You may have noticed while browsing the website of business that they have a blog section. Depending on how long, well-written and regularly updated these blogs are they are a significant advantage for a business.

Let’s take a look at some of the best benefits of maintaining a blog on your business website.

Driving search traffic

Regular blogging is one of the best search engine optimisation (SEO) strategies that a website can employ. It tells search engines that your business website is active in discussing the industry and wants to give users quality content to read.

Blogs are a perfect way to host keywords on your website and have them indexed in separate pages. Every blog is a new page that gets indexed by search engines, meaning that your site will show up more often in internet searches using related keywords.

When your blog shows up in search results, people looking for information can click on your website and then be exposed to the rest of your marketing material. Sites with well-written and in-depth blogs rank highly because search engines recognise the site as trying to publish new content for the benefit of users.

Because of the highly shareable nature of blogs, they are great when paired with social share buttons that help drive your social media influence. This in turn helps drive search traffic as your website becomes more and more relevant.

Convert readers into customers

The secondary role of your business blog is to capture people with engaging content and then give them a call to action (CTA) that prompts them to visit you point-of-sale (POS). This CTA is usually featured at the bottom of the page, after the reader has seen what your blog has to say.

This is a great way of exposing people to your business as many readers will come for the blog but stay for the product. Business blogs are an excellent method of bringing an audience to your website that you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.

Establishing your brand as an authority on the industry

If you manage to run a well-written and highly cited business blog then you will slowly be seen as an authority in the industry. This is especially useful in service industries where audiences are looking for the business with the most expertise.