SEO Tips to Improve Your Ranking
When it comes to laying the foundation for your website, ranking high on Google and appearing on the first page for a search query is a top priority. Because, let's face it, when was the last time you looked at the second page of your favorite search engine?
That's right, the front page is where it all happens.
A good ranking on the search engine results page, or SERP, means greater discoverability, and getting to the first page can have a lot to do with SEO.
For those who don't know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, it's the process of improving your website to make it more visible when people use Google or other search engines to search for products and services related to your e-commerce store.
Search engines like Google use crawlers to "read" your website, ranking it based on its keywords and the relevance of its content.
The beauty of working on SEO is that it's never too late, whether you're building a new e-commerce store or trying to improve your existing online business. We'll list the best tips you can use to improve your SEO and the overall performance of your online store.
Here are our tips:
1) Keyword research
The first step in any SEO strategy is keyword research. This is when you research and analyze the search terms people type into search engines, with the goal of optimizing your site for and around those terms.
For example, if you're searching for SEO tools online and type "best keyword planner," you've just typed a few key words into the search bar.
The reason online businesses need to conduct research boils down to the need to understand what your target customer is searching for. Once you know the answer to this question, you can begin building a strategy to make your website more visible on SERPs using keywords relevant to your website's content that will help you rank.
Keyword research gives you direction in creating your website content: you'll be able to understand what your target customer is searching for, not just what you think they're looking for.
2) Title tags and meta descriptions
Your site's title tags and meta descriptions are important SEO features. They're a tool for providing value and information to your target market or audience via search engines, providing them with meaningful reasons to click on your link.
Think of the title tag as a headline. When you type a search query, title tags are that clickable title. They're crucial to the user experience on search engines because they provide a concise description of the web page.
According to Google, "Title links are essential for giving users a quick overview of the content of a result and why it's relevant to their query. This is often the primary information people use to decide which result to click, so it's important to use high-quality title tags on your web pages."
A typical title tag is usually 50-60 characters long.
Meta descriptions, on the other hand, are the texts you see below the titles and URLs of search results. Meta descriptions are the summaries you see from your search engine describing a website's content. They're about 155-160 characters long, but their brevity can act as a powerful hook for people searching online.
When writing title tags and meta descriptions, it is important to include your target keywords, using concise, clear sentences that are relevant to the web page they lead to.
3) Optimize images
When it comes to SEO, we tend to focus on written content first and forget about optimizing our images. If done well, the images you use on your website can play a significant role in your ranking.
This means that if you aren't thinking about optimizing the images on your site, you're ignoring a very valuable resource for your online store.
There are several things you can do to optimize your website images, one of which is to use images unique to your site whenever possible. It's also important to provide alt text that describes the image. When providing alt text, use words that clearly describe what's in the image to help search engine crawlers understand the image's content.
Another important consideration for all e-commerce store owners is image size and ensuring images are compressed. When images are too large, they can slow down a site's loading time, which in turn lowers your search engine rankings, as SERPs tend to favor sites that load quickly.
4) Improve site speed
A slow-loading website will cause your customers to leave in another direction because they don't want to wait. New research has found that 9 out of 10 website visitors are likely to leave your site if it takes more than 10 seconds to load.
This means that no matter how interesting your web design is and how great your web content and products are, you will make far fewer sales because people won't have the patience to wait for it.
You can check your site's loading speed on Google's PageSpeed Insights—the closer your score is to 100%, the better.
Google simply prefers websites that load quickly. The faster your site loads, the better your chances of ranking in the search engine results page.
5) Building connections
One way to optimize your website is to use both external and internal links.
Internal links are hyperlinks on your site that redirect a user to another site from your website. For example, you run a blog about pet care with an article that includes product links on your product page.
Internal links are great because they help you keep customers on your site longer.
The reason internal links are great for SEO is that they help search engines understand the internal structure of your website. According to Google themselves:
Google must constantly search for new pages and add them to its list of known pages. Some pages are known because Google has visited them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.
External links, on the other hand, are hyperlinks that direct a customer to a new site. External links or backlinks may seem counterintuitive, but they're great for linking to information from reliable sources. Adding reliable and informative backlinks to your website is a great way to build credibility and authority for your site.
Even better are backlinks from other websites that point to your site. This can happen when you publish useful content that another company finds valuable and provides a backlink to the information as a source for their own blog or articles.
Probably one of the most important factors for improving your ranking is getting those backlinks from other sites. The underlying idea is that external links are one of the most difficult metrics to manipulate, so the more backlinks you have, the more popular and respectable your website appears to search engines, encouraging them to assign you a higher rank.
Conclusion
There's more to SEO than keyword placement, and we've provided some tips to help you improve your search rankings and acquire those customers organically. Search engine optimization takes time and serious dedication. It takes research and some trial and error, but it's worth it to get your site on the first page of the SERPs!
