There are some general on-page and off-page techniques that apply to any search engine optimisation project.
Though, often Google changes metrics and yardsticks used in ranking websites and consumer behaviour constantly changes too, a study by BrightEdge in 2019 found that organic commands 53% of all website traffic. If you reflect on this figure, it means just getting your SEO right can give you access to up to 53% of the available traffic, without the need to pay for expensive and time consuming PPC advertising, unless you want to supplement your organic traffic with some PPC ads.
There are many benefits that come with good SEO practises, from helping to drive traffic and boosting sales, to creating brand awareness and helping in remarketing campaigns. A good example is that for any SEO project, user experience must be uppermost in mind. Internal and external navigation is another.
Once all the “general” SEO boxes are ticked, what are things or tasks that are specific to the topic or keywords you are trying to optimise a page or site for? In this post, we look at three keywords: ecards, flowers and bees. We will look at some SEO optimisation tips, specifically for those keywords.
1. Write SEO-optimized product descriptions
When you are writing descriptions for your products whether its greeting ecards, flowers or a beekeeping book, it is important to put into consideration how your ideal customer thinks — how would they search for your product? What are the key phrases they are most likely to use? What questions are they most likely to ask?
Check this ecard page and see the birthday ecard description by a UK ecard website.
Your ability to provide answers to questions that come up on Google snippets and optimise for them will go a long way in boosting your brand authority and enhancing your SEO. Creating a good product description will make you stand out from your competition.
2. Choose the right keywords
Optimising for keywords that are related to your products is arguably the most important SEO tactic for an ecommerce website, whether you sell flowers or digital ecards
You are expected to research searches for keywords that are related to products or services that you offer and make sure that your web pages are set up in a manner that ensures those product keywords are properly targeted.
Relevant keywords and keyword variations that can help your site rank higher can be identified with the use of Amazon search bar and product listings
3. Write for buyer intent
The success or failure of a business depends largely on the ability of the owner to factor in customer needs and wants while making business decisions and ensuring that any decision facilitates the achievement of customer satisfaction.
In your product description, you should do well to communicate this information in the best possible way. Your product description should express how your product will provide solutions to your customer problems. This might be seen as optimising for search intent: the intention a buyer has while searching for a specific term.
Google will position your website high in the search results, if people see that they will find what they are looking for on it.
4. Optimize product images
Customers do image search, so it is recommended that you optimise for your products’ images. Product images are relevant in Google search results when a consumer is considering purchasing a product.
You would want to pay adequate attention to the name of the image file and the image meta tag. They are both important and they should concisely describe the products using the right keywords.
Hover over this beekeeping book cover to see an example of product image optimization.
It is generally recommended that you keep the image size under 100kb and always ensure to include alt text with carefully chosen keywords.
5. Write shareworthy blog content
It’s always hard to have all the information about your product discussed in the product listing that it becomes paramount to write detailed articles and create videos about the features of the product and point them to the product itself.
Writing shareworthy blog content should be part and parcel of your SEO practices. If you own a website that sells flowers, beyond the basic practices such as site architecture, unique product descriptions etc., you should write content to rank for flower or flower-related terms. Same goes for ecard and bee websites. A bee website owner would want to write content on a topic like A beginner’s guide to beekeeping or Tree and grass pollen dispersal.
Writing blog content gives you the opportunity to use informational content to capture high intent as well as high traffic terms. This might be difficult to achieve using commercial product pages.
6. Ensure your website is running smooth and fast
A smooth and fast running website is not only essential for user-friendliness, but also helps from an SEO perspective. Improving your website speed is one of the technical SEO tips that are recommended for ecommerce website owners.
All other SEO practices could depend on the speed of your website or what is the point of writing quality content if the user closes the tab because the page is taking forever to load?
There are tools you can use to keep tabs on your page load speed. It is not a far-fetched idea that pages that load faster are very likely to rank higher in the search results.
7. Optimise category pages
One of the benefits of optimizing your category pages is that it helps you target the keyword further up the channels. Other things about category page optimization are :
- It helps to avoid the issue of driving traffic to a page that is no longer available or a page that is out of stock.
- It helps get a higher volume of visitors. Some people do not know what they want and their knowledge about what they want is vague. By getting a collection of related items to rank higher, you stand the opportunity to see a high amount of traffic for users searching for similar products rather than product-specific items.
- By matching collections exactly to specific terms, you can create a great customer experience. This would be quick-wins in your rankings because sometimes people search for niche phrases that are super-specific.- e.g best flowers for weddings in uk.
8. Write convincing meta descriptions
Meta description is the only information about a specific product that is visible to users where your website comes up on SERP. For this reason, you can not afford to overlook the importance of writing convincing meta descriptions.
Though updating your meta tags does not necessarily improve your rankings, it increases the click-through rate. Whether the user chooses to click on your website or not on Google often depends on how accurate or at least relevant the information you provided in meta descriptions is to what the user is looking for.
9. Check the keywords you are already ranking for
By knowing the keywords you are already ranking for, you can do more to even rank better. Most times including the keywords that are ranking on the second page in the title tag will be sufficient to caterport your website from second to first page.
There are various tools online, such as this dashboard, you can use to search these keywords. You will also get to see the words that are driving traffic, as well as the goal completion and the bounce rate.
10. Leverage internal links
One of the ways to improve your search rankings for an ecard, flowers or bee site is through site navigation and internal linking between products and categories. For example if you have a page about flowers delivery nationwide, and another page about flower ecards. You should create a well themed link between the two pages.
Internal links do not only help Google, they also help your site visitors navigate your website quickly and easily. A good site navigation ensures a good online shopping experience and helps increase sales.
These SEO tips are sure to help improve your site ranking. It is crucial to reaffirm the importance of focusing on user experience in adopting any SEO tactics. By that, you would place your site on safer side from Google penalization and you are sure to receive the benefits in terms of high traffic, more sales and increase in profits.