E-commerce and SEO go hand in hand – I would even go so far as to say that you can hardly run e-commerce without also doing SEO. Today I want to share 3 tips you should take to heart.
It’s perhaps no longer particularly provocative to say that well-functioning SEO is a hygiene factor for any e-commerce business. Almost everyone running an online store today understands the importance of writing titles and meta descriptions, and of course those matter. What some miss, however, is that this is far from the whole truth about what SEO really is. I’d compare it to showing up at the Olympics and claiming you’re well-prepared just because you’ve learned how to tie your running shoes. Sure, you need your shoes tied, and if your competitors didn’t tie theirs you’d have a huge advantage. The problem is that they not only have their shoes tied, they’ve also been training their whole lives, have a mental coach, and just came back from altitude training.
Read the article 5 Steps to Becoming an SEO for a deeper insight into SEO, or watch the video about Google’s latest update for a glimpse into what’s happening in SEO right now.
Choosing a Platform
The choice of platform has become incredibly important for how well your SEO will perform. It’s no longer so much about how the platform works technically — since SEO is primarily about how things look on the front end, almost any platform can be optimized to rank. What really matters is how prepared your platform provider is to make the necessary improvements. Because the truth is: all platforms require improvements. I’ve put together a few key points that are important from an SEO perspective when you’re switching platforms.
Trust and Authority
Trust and authority are two areas that Google has focused heavily on recently. A site with high trust and strong authority in Google’s eyes will have much better opportunities to rank than one that lacks them. Unfortunately, these are somewhat fuzzy concepts, but they are things you need to learn about — or get help managing. A good place to start reading is Google’s information about their Core Updates.
Don’t Take Too Many Risks
The most common mistake we see among beginners, or even those with a few years of SEO experience, is being far too risk-prone. Maybe you realized that every new landing page you add to your site creates an opportunity to rank for more keywords, and so you start adding pages at a furious pace, without much thought about the quality of the content on them. Or perhaps you discover that links to your site are the single most important ranking factor and start buying them from Fiverr or from one of the many emails you’ve received from link sellers in some faraway country.
Magnus Bråth
Consultant & Adviser
Magnus is one of the world's most prominent search marketing specialists and primarily works with management and strategy at his agency Brath AB.