Search Engine Optimization can make or break an e-commerce business. If you don’t have an effective SEO strategy, you’ll get pushed down further into the rankings and begin to lose sales. In the physical world, you can promote your business by becoming an important facet of the community that locals come to know and trust. In the online world, you can go from the most visible business on page one of the search results to virtually non-existent in a single day. Veterans of the search engine optimization industry know that you have to build deep roots to weather search engine algorithm changes. However, if you have good SEO to begin with, any changes to the algorithm won’t devastate your ranking.
Search Engine Land notes that website optimization issues can prevent a website from maximizing their exposure and getting the qualified traffic needed to generate the revenue that functions as the lifeblood of any business. While your business focuses on design, you may be overlooking the most important aspect of your online success — SEO. An attractive and functional website may help you complete conversions but none of that matters if your customers can’t find you.
The User Experience
The first mistake that many website owners make is to put the user experience over the SEO of the website. The user experience only helps when you already have a massive amount of traffic coming into your website. A properly optimized website will naturally have a high aesthetic appeal. Search engines look for sites that are useful and easy to use. A beautiful website that lacks useful product descriptions won’t get discovered and indexed by search engines. While you can also optimize your graphics to appear in an image search, you still need the necessary text to help search engines index your website.
Original Product Descriptions
Search engines use smart and complex algorithms to index websites. They tend to rank the manufacturer for a product description higher than a reseller. Simply pulling your product descriptions from the manufacturer’s site will look like duplicate content to a search engine. Search engines want new and useful information. Finding the balance between creating unique and useful product descriptions while still placing a heavy influence on the official specifications of your products, can help improve the visibility of your website.
Shallow descriptions won’t bring in the traffic you need. Pose as an authoritative voice for your brand and give inside information that doesn’t exist on other sites. Without engaging, informative and vibrant text, your website won’t get the recognition it deserves. Product descriptions should be at least 150 words. Writing descriptions with more than 300 words helps give the search engines more information to use. Most experts recommend descriptions of at least 500 words. The number of words you use depends on how similar products are marketed. However, gaining the attention of search engines requires more than a minimum word count. You also need to provide useful and relevant information that sticks to a very specific focus. A good product description will refer to the category, subcategory, product features, uses and reasons to purchase the product.
Allowing Customer Reviews
If you enable reviews on your website, expect to see some negative reviews. Savvy customers will expect a few imperfect experiences. Additionally, reviews on a website will naturally enhance your content while providing a social aspect to your website. This can encourage buyers to return to your website. If a customer comes to your website and only sees 5-star reviews that rave about your product, it could raise some suspicion. You need a system that allows only verified buyers to purchase reviews. Allowing negative reviews gives your company a way to publicly respond to customer problems. This shows customers you care and maintain a willingness to resolve any issues.
Keyword Optimizations
Many websites try to cram as many keywords into the text as possible. Avoid this practice. Write good content that fully answers a question. Keyword cramming only results in search engines viewing your website as a potentially spammy site.
As a result, your site gets ranked lower. Customers may also leave your site when they can’t find the information needed to make a decision. Search engines and consumers view keyword stuffing as non-genuine. This practice usually results in your site getting demoted and trusted less by potential customers. A specialist in SEO knows how to spread out the needed keywords throughout your text to avoid offending search engines and customers. Remember to avoid the tendency to get too creative with product names. Use the labels and names customers are most likely to search for and provide the necessary information to help your customers find your product or service.
Micro-Based Optimization
There are several smaller aspects of your website that you might not think about. The website URL, the titles, and headings provide essential information for both search engines and customers. Continually add content that brings customers to your site through a blog or article database. Provide information that customers can only find by coming to your website. This practice builds a strong and loyal following that helps you weather any changes that come from search engines algorithm changes. Make sure to speak to your audience and establish yourself as an authority to instill trust in your customers.
Hiring a Professional
Many companies that specialize in SEO will promise the world and deliver very little. The truth is there are few companies out there that can truly help you meet your search engine goals. Internet Marketing Team is a company that can help you get to number one in the search engine rankings in just a few short months.
In many cases, it only takes three months to get to the top spot in search engines. The company uses their expertise, connections, and knowledge of the world of search engines to get your website ranked highly. Not only will the company help get visitors to your site, they will also help you optimize your website to keep them coming back.