As an eCommerce business owner, it’s crucial to optimize your store for search engines like Google. With over 8 billion searches conducted every day, you don’t want to miss out on the potential free, organic traffic to your store. In this article, we’ll explore three simple tips and tricks to help drive more organic traffic to your eCommerce store.
What is SEO and Why is it Important for eCommerce Businesses?
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of updating different parts of your store to make it more visible, relevant, and appealing to search engines. By making these changes, you’ll also make your store more appealing to your ideal customers. When people search for products or information related to your store, you want your store to show up in the results.
The other huge advantage is that people who search for products tend to be ready to transact and hence organic traffic typically has a high conversion rate.
The importance of SEO for eCommerce businesses cannot be overstated. With the rise of online shopping, more and more customers are turning to search engines to find the products they need. This means that if your store isn’t optimized for search engines, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity for free, organic traffic.
But I’ve heard SEO is so hard? So why should I even bother?
The thing is the cost of paid traffic has gone up dramatically over the past couple of years, especially since the big changes in the war between Apple and Facebook and all of the privacy changes.
As a result, the big tech platforms don’t have access to the same amount of information that they used to, which makes online targeting harder.
Generally speaking, this makes social media ads more expensive and less precise. And we’ve met and worked with many small businesses that have had real trouble scaling ads profitably and some of them even struggling with staying above water.
Hence, this opens the discussion for SEO.
But SEO is typically hard. We’re not going to lie to you and say that it’s not, because the traditional way of optimizing for SEO is actually quite difficult and not very small business friendly.
We used to struggle with SEO too until eventually we discovered something that we call “micro-organic traffic” and created a whole Ninja system around it that allows small businesses to get organic traffic from Google fast without having to spend a ton of money on agencies.
The 3 Things You Must know about SEO if you’re an eCommerce brand
The thing you’ve got to understand is that driving organic traffic to your store is kind of like baking a cake or baking a recipe in the oven.
There are some basic ingredients and some recipes you need to follow to produce the type of cake or cookies you want, so that they turn out the right way. If we take some random ingredients and chuck them in – we’re not gonna get the output that we want. It’s the same with SEO.
If we don’t apply the right ingredients in the right order and apply the right cooking time for the right amount of time in the right sequence, then we’re gonna have problems.
1. NOT every piece of content is going to be SEO king
Number one, don’t just start writing content on your website without doing the research first. We’ve met so many e-commerce brands who have put together a beautiful website that looks amazing but not having done the research.
They put all this effort into the product descriptions and listing and collection pages and home pages, and it’s stuff that’s just not going to drive any traffic because it’s not what people are searching for. It’s not what people want. It’s not what they’re looking for. It’s very, as we call it, inside-out thinking.
They’re looking at it from the perspective of the product maker or the product creator and not putting themselves into the shoes of their customer, and using the language and the words that their customers use.
So what you do want to do is spend some time researching what are the search terms or what are the phrases (or queries they are using).
In our micro-organic Ninja system, we also refer to this as Phrase Mining. Because it really is like mining for gold. The opportunities are incredible.
As in any type of mining, you might need some tools for that. To start with, you can just use your Google Search Console and if you’re ready to start taking organic traffic seriously, you can start using a paid tool such as SEMrush.
2. Sorry to break the news – people don’t search for your brand name
Number two, don’t optimize your products, your collections, your pages, or your content for your brand name.
This is a big mistake that we see many small businesses making all the time.
The thing is, if you optimize your pages for your brand name, let’s say it’s Kristen’s Shop and I sell t-shirts, Kristen’s Blue Collection, Kristen’s Red Collection, Kristen’s Extra Large White T-shirt with Traffic Ninja’s logo…
Most people out there on the internet are not searching for those phrases. So it’s gonna be really hard for Google or any other search engine to show your store in the results when people are looking for grey t-shirts.
So if you’re selling grey t-shirts, then you want to make sure that your product pages or your collection pages or anything inside your online store, actually mentions the description of the product that you’re selling, because that’s what people are going to be typing into the search engine.
In other words, use what we call the non-branded or descriptive Ninja phrases.
3. AI tools and SEO aren’t going to be besties
Number three, don’t outsource all of your writing to an AI tool or a copywriting tool. There are some amazing tools out there now and recently it’s a whole nother topic with ChatGPT and they’ve done some incredible amazing work.
And because these tools have become so sophisticated, it’s been very tempting to ask them to write a whole blog or a whole product description for you. The problem with that though is that it’s not original.
And Google and other tools have become so clever that they can detect that it’s not original. And if they aren’t able to pick up everything now, they’ll be able to in the future.
We’ve known a lot of businesses that were getting a free ride for a while but once they got on the wrong side of Google, there just wasn’t an easy way out.
So what you wanna do here is use those AI tools to help you with ideas, but the text and the content, it needs to be original, needs to be on brand for you.
Also, it needs to add value to the customer and actually answer questions and help them make decisions.
4. WAIT before you hit the publish button – Your SEO checklist!
Number four, consider a couple of points before you hit the publish button for your products and collections.
As soon as you’ve got the images uploaded and ready to go, it’s so tempting, right? Like you’ve spent the time loading the images in and writing a few sentences about your grey T-shirt collection with the Traffic Ninjas logo.
But what you want to do is take time to carefully think about these few recipe ingredients here.
Is your page title SEO optimized?
How much time have you spent writing your page title? Sometimes we just write something. I just need a title for the page. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s a great t-shirt. So whatever I write in the title doesn’t matter, right? The thing is, the page titles are so important, and I’m not talking about the heading on the page.
This is the first thing customers will see in the results, so it’s really important that we think about what we want those words to say to make it attractive, appealing and curious. So that it’s clickable.
Did you write a meta description?
Your page title needs to be paired with a meta description. That’s the little text in the search results that kind of explains what the page is about.
Again, you want to really carefully think about what it’s going to be.
Maybe not for every single product you have in your store, but certainly for your main products, like the best selling ones.
Does your page have the right mixture of headings?
The type of headings you use for your page are quite important.
For Google to pick up the right information and send you that organic traffic, it needs to understand what is the main thing (the heading) and then what’s the second main thing (the subheading) so that it can put these pieces of puzzle together.
Decided you want to give SEO a go?
So there we have it. That’s some simple guidance for e-commerce SEO. If you want to learn more about organic traffic and how to drive more of it to your store without an army of employees, ads or agencies, then check the Traffic Ninjas YouTube channel and we’ll see you there soon.
Also, we’d love to hear your feedback. Leave us a comment below.
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