Some vertical markets are more competitive than others. If you are lucky you are selling online in a less competitive market. This is seldom the case with many industries these days. To successfully sell online, brands must deploy multiple marketing tactics. It is now these days a comprehensive approach to selling online. There are a multitude of marketing tactics that have to work with each other for the best results. One of the key marketing tactic is SEO. There are some key facts that brands need to consider about SEO for retail.
To sell online successfully, ecommerce websites must be designed with quality in mind and professionalism. The retail website should be easy to navigate. The checkout process simple and short with the right features and options. With incentives properly displayed throughout the website sales should happen. Only website traffic is required now.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process and practices deployed and followed by professional marketers and agencies, in order to rank a website higher in search results. It is the marketing tactic that gives retailers the ability to have their products visible on the first page in Google search.
Why is this important. Well, most individuals start their online experience with an online search. Consumers or shoppers do this as well. Over 80% will do online research about the product they contemplate buying. Ranking in search results for the relative keyword phrases is critical to generating visibility, opportunity, and sales.
How to Improve Retail Websites
The starting point is to decide on a set of keyword phrases that are the most relative and important to the product line and brand. A set can consist of 20, 35, or more keyword phrases. The more keywords, the more work and expanse. The keywords should not be all competitive, but rather a combination of critical competitive, moderate, and low competitive phrases.
After keywords have been decided upon, it is time to start optimizing the retail website. The content as well will have to be edited to match the phrases targeted. With the site optimization, it is best to let a professional organization handle this. Often, websites require lots of work the first couple months. For example, H1 and H2 tags have to be optimized. Images have to be sized for speed. Alt tag fields on images must be properly created. Meta descriptions and keywords for all pages created. URLs optimized for search. Internal linking structure created and much more.
Retail for SEO Includes Content
Lots of unique, relevant, and quality content needs to be created. To boost search results, brands should frequently publish articles via a retail blog. These articles should be optimized for search as well. In addition, retail brands should write custom product descriptions and give incentives for customer reviews. All pages of the website such as company pages, resources, and informational must have the proper optimized amount of content as well. Not just the product pages of the online store.
Certain landing pages should be created with unique content to increase conversion and search results. Those landing pages increase a retail websites content and make it therefore more valuable in search. With an active SEO campaign, unique and relevant content is also generated and published on behalf of the retail brand. This content tends to be published on third party websites. Industry sites, blogs, and so on.
The benefits of a proper retail SEO campaigns are hard to beat The most important one is that it helps customers find the brand and website in search. It drives qualified site traffic of actual potential shoppers. Over time, more keywords are indexed by Google in search. This yields more traffic and potential sales.
