SEO can be a stumbling block for many online businesses. For many of you reading this article you may even be thinking ‘I don’t have a clue what SEO even means, never mind where to start!’. That’s where we come in. With over 40 years of combined ecommerce experience working with some of Northern Ireland and Ireland’s leading eCommerce brands we’ve helped clients build manageable SEO strategies that enable them to grow their online business.
What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO (or Search Engine Optomisation) is the means by which you get more non-paid traffic to your eCommerce store.
How do I do it?
By taking steps to optomise your on and off site content in a way that makes it easier for search engines like Google and Bing to read. Examples include:
- Researching keywords to include in blog posts
- Optomising product titles
- Ensuring key landing pages for your top brands, categories and services are optomised and tailored based on your target audiences search trends
Why is it important?
SEO enables you to drive high-quality traffic to your site by focusing on keywords (search terms, such as ‘camping tent’) that customers are interested in and searching in your target market. On average customers are 13 times more likely to click a non-paid search result on Google, so ensuring your search result is at the top of the page is super important. Moreover, the top 3 search results get 70% of all clicks, so ranking lower down the page can mean you’ll lose out on some serious traffic. This traffic has no associated cost and therefore is a cost effective means by which to drive up traffic and ultimately sales on site. Free sales? Where do we sign?!
How do I prioritise what to do first?
SEO can be pretty time consuming, however, you can quickly identify the main areas of focus for your site by reviewing some key pieces of data:
- Most visited landing pages
- Best selling products
- Top selling brands
- Top selling categories
- Key information pages
- Key blog posts
Focusing on these areas will cover off the vast majority of your site traffic and is a good base to work off getting started with SEO. SEO is all about putting in place good routines that can scale over time. Master your priority pages first and you can build from there using the templates and structures you created in the first wave of optomisation.
What resources do we recommend?
Backlinko
There are many resources available to help you tackle the SEO minefield but few are better than Brian Dean’s Backlinko. Free to subscribe to Brian has compiled an encyclopedia of SEO best practices to help you rank higher efficiently.
Check out his easy guides below on getting started with SEO:
- The Definitive Guide to On Page SEO – this is the bread & butter of SEO. If you’re going to start anywhere, start here and optomise your site to attract new visitors.
- Technical Guide to SEO – this invaluable resource covers off Crawling & Indexing, XML Sitemaps, Duplicate Content, Structured Data, Hreflang and more!
- The Content Marketing Hub – this complete guide to content marketing will help you whether you’re a complete newbie or looking to scale your approach.
- Which Keyword Research Tool Should I Use? – this helpful comparison states the features and benefits of the main tools on the market. We love SEMrush, but we’ll let you make your own mind up!
Neil Patel
If you’re totally new and want an overview Neil Patel’s simple overview of what SEO is and how you can use it to your advantage can be found here. Stuck for time? Check out his summary video below with a cup of tea or coffee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIbQfOcsEsE
Note, these are just some of the great resources available online.
If you’re stuck for ideas and want some expert guidance on how to take your SEO to the next level, get in touch with our team!Get in touch to find out more
