We often get faced with questions from some of our more sceptical clients who just don’t see the benefits in engaging in a proactive Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.
They may have been promised #1 ranking spots for £x within a certain time period and results have failed to materialise. Expectations have been set to high. SEO is not something that happens overnight, it’s a continuous process which needs to be monitored ongoing and adapted as search engines change.
Or for some online businesses, they have been on the receiving end of a miserable relaunch of their ecommerce store, with developers paying little heed to the importance of technical SEO and seen their ecommerce store all but disappear from Google.
Is SEO Still Important for Ecommerce?
The answer is a resounding yes. SEO is far from dead, search engines and algorithms are not going away anytime soon, and many online stores rely on a dedicated SEO plan to maintain visibility and traffic to their sites.
Here’s a few of our top tips for good practice SEO in 2017
- Whilst keywords still have a role to play as part of an optimisation strategy, if you put your target audience at the heart of your content marketing, creating high quality, useful and engaging content, you’re off to a great start. Then having an optimisation and distribution strategy to promote your content is very important. SEO needs to help Search Engines like Google discover your excellent content.
- Featured Snippets, which is a summary of an answer to a user’s query, displayed at the top of Google’s search results. It’s extracted from a web page and includes the page’s title and URL. There are three types of snippets – paragraph, list and table – and paragraph is by far the most common, occupying 82% of featured snippets. Featured snippets are important, because Google is choosing your page over others, and helps you to display above organic results. Users love featured snippets, as they provide quick answers to their questions and can help boost traffic by up to 30%. Want to learn how to earn a featured snippet? Chat with the Williams Commerce Marketing team to learn more.
- Optimise your images Google suggest to use descriptive titles and captions. Adding in the relevant keyword for the page is helpful too. Filling in the fields of title, alt tag and description will all contribute to making your image more visible in the search engines. Unique images over stock images are preferred!
- Hello local! Even if you’re an online business only, there are still steps you can take to help along your local visibility. Ensure a listing on Google Business is accurate and up to date and care deeply about those reviews.
- Heard of Mobilegeddon? It’s happened and is happening. Google formally measures the mobile friendliness of your site amongst its ranking factors. If you don’t want to lose customers browsing on mobile at a rate of knots a mobile friendly site that loads quickly and is easy to use on mobile screens is mission critical. We’re constantly working to enhance our clients’ mobile user experience and we’re looking at using Accelerated Mobile Pages – a light, fast version of a page.
- Link Building might be considered dead, but we see Link Earning as an important part of any SEO strategy. Links are important ranking factors and the most effective method of link earning is based on awesome, considered content. Good links always matter.
- Social Media activity can have influence for an online store. Social Media usage is increasing, so if you are building social authority across different platforms, this may contribute towards discovery and indexation by the Search Engines. Plus, sharing content on social, can only help to earn links and refer traffic to your ecommerce store.
- Build in technical SEO from the outset. The train analogy used by econsultancy “No matter what the carriages look like (on-page content) if the engine (technical SEO) doesn’t work properly, nobody will ride the train.” says it all. Having a technical SEO team involved from the outset of a website’s construction, planning good site architecture, which enables search engines to regularly crawl, cache and index pages is the best time to ensure technical SEO elements are catered for from the start. In the absence of this, get a technical SEO audit to understand more.
We will be creating another blog very soon around the importance of technical SEO, so keep an eye out for that.
If you’re looking for a full end to end service agency who can offer Magento ecommerce, Magento hosting, integration and SEO expertise, you’ve arrived at the right place. Call the Williams Commerce team today on 0116 326 1116 to discuss how we can help accelerate your business growth online.
