How to Write a Killer SEO Strategy for Your Online Shop

Content marketing is one of the most valuable and ROI-friendly marketing channels for eCommerce businesses. However, it all starts with a good, solid plan. If you start churning out articles and blog posts without clear goals and metrics to observe whether you’re achieving them, you will quickly go off the track and miss out on the amazing benefits SEO marketing has to offer.

One of the facts that digital marketing gurus rarely mention is that ranking first on Google for competitive and semi-competitive keywords is incredibly hard. It takes years of consistently providing high-authority, compelling and engaging content connected to a particular keyword to rank first on a competitive keyword.

It may be hard, but with the right SEO strategy, it’s definitely possible. Here are some of the main guidelines you should follow to come up with a killer SEO strategy for your online store:

Outline Your Primary and Secondary Keywords

The cornerstone of your SEO strategy will be your keywords, and this is where you will always start. If you’re not sure about the keywords you’re targeting, your entire SEO content marketing strategy is basically not a strategy at all.

Many laymen believe that simply writing about the stuff that your store is about will get users to it. Sure, you might get some accidental visitors here and there, but any good digital marketing agency will tell you: if you want loads of organic traffic, you have to develop a network of target keywords.

“Make sure you incorporate a variety of different types of keywords: from highly competitive to low-competitive, short and long, high and lower search volume. Of course, the goal is to find the golden mean between any two extremes”, says Estelle Liotard, marketing writer at WowGrade.

Create Impeccable Content

Succeeding at SEO and ranking first in search engine results is not only about algorithms and math. In the end, it all comes down to providing significant value to your audience, which search engine recognize by analyzing your audience’s behaviour.

For example, a high bounce rate (the percentage of your visitors who do a single-page visit) might signal that you’re not providing relevant content or the information is not valuable enough for readers to stick around.

To make sure your content is on fleek, use some of these services and tools to provide the crème de la crème to your audience:

• MyPaperWriter - online paper samples database to get idias for your own content
• GrabMyEssay – writer database where you can purchase blog writing services
• YoastSEO – a WordPress plugin that will show you how good your content is SEO-wise as you’re writing it
• Studicus – writing service portal for finding blog writers
• SmallSEOTools – an online collection of simple tools for checking search engine optimization of a text
• Bid For Writing – a portal of writers who you can hire to do your SEO writing for you
• Readable – a website where you can check the readability score for your text (readability is very important for search engine rankings)
• SupremeDissertations – a writing agency that can craft your industry blog posts

Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse

No one can resist a freebie, a huge discount or an amazing shopping offer. Make sure you remember to include these content pieces and keywords in your SEO strategy because they can be a real traffic driver!

If you take a look at some of the major eCommerce brands, you will see that almost all of them offer coupons and discounts. You would be hard-pressed to find an online store that doesn’t have an “apply discount code/promo code” field in the checkout process!

Get Backlinks

There’s no marketing like word-of-mouth marketing, and search engines are no exception. Just like we take recommendations into consideration when making a purchasing decision, search engines listen to the buzz that surrounds an online store to determine how much it’s worth it to present it to searchers.

Just like everything else in SEO (as you might have noticed so far), getting high-quality backlinks is much trickier than it sounds. Of course, the easiest way is to simply run an awesome store that will get recommended by websites and bloggers, but in reality, we know that most of the time, they’ll ask for something in return.

There are many different scenarios of getting a backlink:

1. you ask for a link on another website and agree to pay a fee
2. you “trade links” – post a link to your online store for free, and then mention the website that did it on your own store’s blog
3. find free guest post websites – get backlinks in return for writing them a content piece…

“Never underestimate the power of backlinks. No matter how hard or unattainable it may seem to get a link to your store on another website, if you keep at it, you’ll be able to see some miraculous results both in your referral and organic traffic”, says Marie Fincher, writer and marketer at TrustMyPaper.

Set Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

Just like any other strategy, SEO has to be built on a goal. What exactly do you want to achieve with your SEO strategy? Do you simply want to increase brand awareness, get more social media followers, increase your sales or something else?

Remember that it’s smarter to come up with a precise and time-defined goal, rather than a broad, generic goal such as “increase sales”. Follow the SMART goal guideline:

• Specific: what exactly do you want your online store to achieve?
• Measurable: can this progress be tracked and measured?
• Attainable: is this something your online store can achieve? Dream big, but be realistic.
• Relevant: is the goal in line with what you imagine for your online store/brand in the long-term?
• Time-based: when do you want to achieve this goal?

After you have defined these aspects, make sure you set a couple of long-term goals for your SEO efforts as well as many short-term ones. Succeeding at short-term goals can have a motivational effect and can compound into achieving huge, majestic things, even if it doesn’t look like it from a close perspective.

Conclusion

Investing a lot of time and effort into search engine optimization without a strategy in place is like being a blind dog in the meat market. If you want to achieve the long-term goals you have for your online store, you will have to approach SEO strategically.

Bio

Dorian Martin is a writer and marketer, currently writing for IsAccurate. In his free time, he likes spending time outdoors with his family and taking part in various sports like tennis, volleyball and basketball.