It amazes us how many people we talk to have an "SEO consultant" - generally costing them anywhere from $1,500 to $4,500+ per month in "management fees" - and their eStore websites are not doing some of the basic things needed to rank high in the search engines. This article is meant to provide some basic concepts for online retailers to think about before signing up for SEO services.
First of all, Google is going to drive the bulk of your traffic so focus on getting your eStore optimized for Google first.
Search engines generally work from 2 principles and are tied together - Paid Listings, and Organic Listings. Paid Listings or "Sponsored Ads" require you to bid and pay per click whereas organic results are free. Organic positions take time to build and your goal should be to list on page one of Google for your chosen keywords.
Online retailers must start by determining the search terms (keywords and phrases) they think their target shopper uses to find their products or ones they want to use to compete with others. Google has tools to help them determine closely related search terms and the actual volumes of searching happening for them. Google AdWords Tool for example.
Google will only list up to 2 pages in organic listing per search term (keyword/phrase) in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). Therefore there is no point in optimizing an entire site for the same search terms.
It is important to lay out the pages on your site according to search terms and ensure these HTML pages are optimized for search (title tags, meta description, keywords, anchor text, image alt attribute, etc. ).
The next step is making sure these pages do in fact have content that is relevant to the search terms you believe are important. Simply optimizing the HTML tags is not enough. For retailers, this can be product landing pages or top-level entry pages with dynamic product listings.
You can test the quality of the pages using tools from Google, you should be targeting a 7+ (out of 10). For Paid Search Listings, a high quality score will also help your Pay Per Click costs (keep them down) and ensure your ad is shown.
Once your pages are optimized and have relevant content, the next step is a strong link building strategy. Inbound links build relevance in the eyes of the search engine and also help with your Page Rank, which is part of how Google rates the relevance of a site.
Link building can be done in many ways including press releases, manually listing yourself in high-quality directories, working with industry partners to exchange links, articles/blogs, and social networking. It is important to link from relevant site and hopefully pages with a high page rank. Avoid linking scams or "black hat" techniques that could cause Google to punish your listings in the SERPs.
All of these strategies are centered around 1 website domain name, so if you have more than 1 domain name you have an opportunity to widen the net. Although we recommend focusing on other keywords and phrases on the second site vs. competing with yourself.
Another critical part of an effective SEO strategy is to ensure the HTML code meets the latest XHTML standards, is error free, and the website performs well. Google will not rank websites high that have errors or are slow. Also important is your full URL path (page names, folders, etc.) as a method of capturing keywords and strengthen the results.
For online retailers, it is crucial that the eCommerce platform you select has the tools and expertise to help guide their clients to a successful SEO plan.
The OrderDynamics on-demand eCommerce platform not only provides easy to use SEO tools, our Account Managers and Developers have SEO expertise and help advise our Clients on how to make the most out of their SEO dollars.
