Why Ecommerce Business Owners Should Learn SEO

Running a successful ecommerce store is a challenging task because there are too many competitors in the market. Everyone is vying for customers’ attention, but only a few are truly making profit. Some people think that SEO or search engine optimization is not important for ecommerce as it’s an online retail business, not a blog or service related website. It is a major misconception because in this highly competitive market, it is absolutely crucial to learn SEO techniques to make your ecommerce site popular among target customers.

Let’s first try to understand why it is important to learn SEO for a successful ecommerce business and after that, we will concentrate on the techniques to make an ecommerce site search engine friendly.

It helps you understand how people search:  Unless you know what people are typing when they are searching for the products you sell, you won’t be able to target the right keywords. A thorough knowledge of SEO helps you create better organic SEO strategy.

Stay safe from Google updates: Google often releases new algorithm updates and punish the sites that fail to meet their guidelines. For example, if you have duplicate product content in your ecommerce site, Google Panda update may blacklist your site. By learning SEO, you can make changes in your website’s content, keyword density, backlink profile etc. and avoid losing traffic when a new SEO update is released.

Confident online market strategy: Search engine optimization and online marketing are closely related. For example, PPC ads on SERP bring the customers to your site. However, unless you have a proper understanding of short tail and long tail keywords, you will not be able to use the best keywords in the ad content and as a result expenses on online marketing will get wasted.

Now that you we have discussed why you must learn SEO to run an ecommerce site, it is time to focus on some useful search engine optimization techniques to ensure consistent business. If you think that you need to enhance your SEO knowledge, take admission in an SEO school for a certification.

Ask buyers to write reviews: Google loves user generated content as it offers unbiased opinion about your products and services. Besides, reviews help customers decide quickly and thus, enhance the trust factor. Therefore, always request your buyers to share their feedback on the product pages.

Get rid of duplicate content: Online retailers generally don’t copy paste content, but they get confused when there are 2 products by the same company with minor differences. For example, what if someone is selling 32 GB and 64 GB iPhone models? Only the storage capacity is different in these two models. Though there is not much difference, you must write fresh content for the 64 GB iPhone product page because if you copy paste the content from 32 GB iPhone page, it will disappoint both buyers and search engines.

Add hover zoom facility for images: High quality images are necessary to convince the customers about your product quality, but you must not forget that high resolution images can decrease the site loading speed. Therefore, the best way to maintain page speed and customer satisfaction is adding the hover zoom function.  Reduce the file size of images and embed a hover zoom function to help the users view large product images effortlessly.

Offer social sharing option: Social media sites play a huge role in search engine optimization as they help in creating backlinks as well as build social signals. Hence, embed Facebook share, Google +1, and Twitter buttons in each and every product page. When people will share your products via these buttons not only their friends will visit your site but Google will also understand that you are offering something useful to the end users.

Put these strategies into effect as soon as possible and you will see improvements in sales figures. Your ecommerce site will rank high on search engine result pages and you will be able to beat other ecommerce sites in the same niche.