Last Updated on May 12, 2018
Getting good rankings for your online stores in organic search engines like Google or Bing is not a herculean task as it looks. Your aim to optimize your website in search engines and top the rankings can be achieved by adding backlinks relevant to your online store and adding keywords that top the search rankings.
Reaching the lead position in the search engine rankings is a complicated and time-consuming process. Most of the online marketers wish to go for paid services to withstand the competition for short-term benefits but doing good SEO is the key that helps you out in the long run. To grow your business quickly, you may choose online paid advertising services.
If you want to invest a little time and money in your online business, SEO will be the good option. SEO for online marketing can be availed free of cost and companies like MarketingCharts show that most of their customers are attracted by doing organic searches for their store in popular search engines, the number accounted to 39 percent of their loyal customers.
The checklist provided in the article will be helpful to provide you the basic knowledge to improve your website traffic. You can work on each and every point in the checklist to achieve success in getting massive traffic to your online store.
Some of the tools you can set up to analyze and improve your online store traffic are given below.
Role of Webmaster tools to enhance your website traffic
- To use your Webmaster accounts effectively to improve your website traffic, you can create an XML sitemap and present it to Google or Bing through your Webmaster accounts. Then all the Shopify stores generate XML sitemaps for your online store automatically.
- Examine your pages for 404/500 errors, duplicate content, or any crawling errors. You can use Google Webmaster tools for this and can rectify the issues if you find any errors.
Key Word Research
Use of keyword planner helps you to find apt keywords to be used in your page to enhance your website traffic. Google’s keyword planner is useful to find out the volume of keywords and keywords you can try on to improve your rankings. This tool helps you to find the keyword phrases that have the highest searches you can concentrate to enhance your website rankings.
Optimizing your page
Assure that you are using only one H1 tag on your pages
H1 tag contains the main keyword you have to use on your pages. Make sure that you are using one and only one H1 tag on all of your website pages.
Maintain hierarchical order
Always maintain hierarchical order using texts related to the header tags. For example, an H2 tag should be used under H1, H3 should be used under H2, and H4 should be used under H3.
The length of the page title should be less than 70 characters. Otherwise, it will be truncated in search engines and this may impact your website rankings.
Don’t mush up your page title with keywords. Create good and legible page titles.
Meta description should be under 150 characteristics. This description helps to introduce your page in search engines. So, take care that you don’t over optimize the meta description.
Include a keyword in URL of your page, but avoid overoptimization.
Make sure that you add ALT tags and file names in your images.
Use dashes(-) instead of underscores(__) in your page URLs.
Backlinks
- Role of Link Building Strategy
Create a link building strategy to get other websites link back to your online store. This is an important factor to decide the authenticity of your website in terms of Google search engine rankings. If you get more websites link back to your online store, you get the highest search engine rankings. This ranking will be done on the basis of keywords used in particular website of your store or pages related to your store.
- Estimate your competitors SEO and Backlinks
An overview of your competitor’s backlinks and SEO give you an idea of the marketing strategy and backlinking strategy you have to follow to get good rankings for your online store. Tools like OpenLinkProfiler, MOZ OSE, and Ahref help you to know about the optimization strategies your competitors follow to improve their rankings and sites that are backlinking your competitors’ store.
Content
There is a saying, content is king. Your online store is not an exemption for it.
- Content strategy
You should depend on content strategy to develop your rankings. For example, if you check results for “how to practice a musical instrument”, you need to write blog posts related to guide the users for learning such musical instruments using keyword research to top the rankings, or top companies and brands that produce certain musical instruments your store is related to, etc.
- Descriptive text
Make sure that descriptive text in your page should be 250 words. Getting a good rank will be difficult in searches as Google looks for relevant keywords and high-quality descriptions to rank your website.
- Length of blog posts
Length of blog posts or informational content should be above 500 words. Make sure that the length is above 500 words to top the search engine rankings. Take care of quality as the length of content may be less appealing if it is of poor quality and may impact your website rankings.
- Duplicate content
If your page contains descriptions of the same product in a number of pages, try to make canonical tagging. Google penalizes websites with duplicate content.
Write unique product descriptions on your page to keep your store safe from penalty. Avoid descriptive content from manufacturers.
- Genuine product reviews with long tail keywords help to enhance your website traffic.
- Add redirection links to your content. Do not delete product descriptions from your page without creating redirect links for that description on your website.
How to gain reputation?
- To enhance your reputation, publish reviews on your products on other business websites. You can get backlinks from e-commerce sites and sources like Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, TrustPilot, and Epinions.
- Make use of social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and LinkedIn to improve the brand name of your website. This step makes your website reach number of loyal customers.
Other factors to enhance your website rankings
- Make sure that your store is mobile friendly. Every online store on Shopify can be easily accessible on mobile phones. You can use links like http://mobiletest.me/ to test how your website looks on mobile version.
- The opening speed should be less for getting top place in the website rankings. The loading speed should be less than 3 seconds for an ideal website. You can make use of Google’s PageSpeed Tool to analyze the performance of your site for better optimization.
- Check the performance of your website to avoid penalty from Google. For this, you can take the help of this guide and learn good SEO techniques to optimize your website better.
To end up, keep in mind that getting more organic searches for your online store through SEO techniques is a time taking process. You have to put your effort and patience to better your website rankings. You have to start blogging and creating content to get good indexing for your website. This step helps you to attract more customers to your brand.
