Welcome to part 3 of your complete guide to eCommerce SEO. Now that you’ve gained a lot more knowledge on how to get the best results for your eCommerce SEO work, let’s go over the last 2 topics so you can be on your way to higher rankings.
In part 1, we talked about the importance of keyword research. We gave you actionable steps that would help you find, choose, and integrate your keywords into your website. We also discussed website structure and taught you how to organize your site effectively for SEO purposes.
In Part 2, we tackled on-page SEO. We gave you the best practices to optimize your pages, create quality content, and develop effective page titles and descriptions. Then we covered technical SEO. We discussed the most common problems businesses see when they perform a site audit. We listed the causes of the most common problems and the easy steps you could take to fix them.
In the final part of this series, we’ll discuss content marketing for eCommerce and how to build links the right way. Let’s get to it!
Chapter 5: Content Marketing for eCommerce
Content marketing is a huge part of your online success. It’s an easy way to gather an influx of targeted traffic and ultimately increase sales. But there’s a whole science to doing it right. So, how do you use content to boost your rankings and increase traffic to your eCommerce site?
We’re about to break it down!
1. Find Out Where Your Target Customers Spend Their Time Online
Watching the trends of your customers can give you incredible insight to benefit your business. You can learn all about their life by sitting back and observing. But since it’s not always possible to hang with your customers personally, you will need to identify where they spend their time online.
Do they hop on forums still? Are they checking into the latest Facebook groups? Where do they go to gather information on topics related to your brand?
2. Learn the Lingo
Once you’ve found out where your target audience is spending their time online, follow their every move. We’re not suggesting you stalk them, but close to it! Keep an eye out for the common words or phrases they use to describe their problems. For example, if you have a sports brand of clothing and shoes, look for the language they commonly use when they have a problem.
They might say something like “Looking for a lightweight, long-distance running shoe. Any suggestions? By identifying words and phrases used by your audience you’ll develop a list of amazing keywords that are targeted directly towards the people who would shop for your brand. You’ll use these words later to create amazing blog content.
3. Create Valuable Content Around the Keywords You Find
Once you learn the language, it’s time to put in the real work. Your content needs to be valuable and of the highest quality. Creating valuable content isn’t just about writing an article that’s interesting, it’s about using SEO strategies to draw traffic to what you’ve written. To do this, you should follow these three step:
1. Research Similar Content That’s Performed Well
Find competitive keywords in Google and check out some of the content that’s doing well. Something that’s attracting a lot of links, traffic, and shares. Once you find this type of content, it’s time to take the next step.
2. Create Something Better
It’s not a time to reinvent the wheel, but it is time to bring things to the next level. Create a piece of content that is similar, but way better. This will give you the piece of content that everyone is talking about. Deliver content that is more thorough, relevant, and more visually appealing.
3. Get the Word Out
Use email outreach to target people who linked to some of the top-ranking content you researched, to begin with. Explain that you saw they linked to that popular content. Talk about what you liked about that resource then explain that you’ve written something a little more thorough or up-to-date.
Use this process to develop all of your content. Then continue to publish consistently on your website. This will help you generate more links, build traffic, and create an amazing awareness around your brand. You’ll be doing all of this while you’re simultaneously climbing the rankings with the search engines.
Chapter 6: eCommerce SEO Guide & Link Building
Now that you’ve created great content, it’s time to build links. It’s important to do this the right way. If you don’t, link building can negatively impact your website. Let’s look at two ways to effectively build links for eCommerce. One practice explains link building without content. The other shows how to use creative strategies to boost organic traffic.
Building Backlinks from Popular Blogs
When it comes to backlinking, the number of links you have is important. But what’s even more important is the type of links you use. If you want to find eCommerce success online, it’s important that you incorporate contextual links from websites that are highly relevant to your niche.
Here’s one way to do that:
Step 1: Find Outdated or Expired Resources
Research popular blogs in your niche and find resources with links that are not working. Expired domains, companies that closed, or old brands are examples of links that might be built into great content but don’t work.
When a website domain expires, it turns into what’s called a “parked domain.” This means the domain itself still exists, but the links aren’t actually broken. This makes it harder for site audit checkers to identify these links as broken. You can check things like GoDaddy Auctions to get a list of big domains that have expired.
Step 2: Find the Sites that Link to Outdated Pages
Once you’ve identified expired or outdated websites, it’s time to find the blogs or other sites that link to them. From there, you can directly search any backlinks to the outdated resource. This will lead to your final step.
Step 3: Get in Touch
The truth is that the owner of the website that’s using an expired link might not even know they’ve got links in their articles that aren’t working. Now is your time to capitalize. Send emails that let people know about the outdated link and offer a replacement. Outreach emails tend to convert well.
Building Back Links with Creative Strategies
While most businesses want to build links as fast as possible, it’s even more important for those in highly competitive industries. That’s where these strategies can come in handy.
Find Groups in Your Industry that Deliver Events
There are countless Facebook groups available for businesses of every industry. Find the most popular ones in your niche and join them. Once you’ve been accepted, find the events tab inside the group. Browse through the upcoming events where your products might be a good fit. Some events will even be marked that they are looking for venders.
Get connected with event organizers that might be a good fit for your products. Reach out to event hosts or major event planners. Ask if they’d like to feature your products. Some event planners will be more than happy to feature your products. In some cases, you might want to offer a few free products to gain credibility.
Once the event is finished. Keep in touch with the organizers. You want to be sure that they were satisfied with your product. Ask them to write about your products in their follow-up posts and include a link to your website. You can even share the links when they go live for more exposure.
Be sure to say thank you and show your appreciation. This will help you build a network of professionals as you go along. When new events pop up, they will be more willing to feature your products or reach out to you to work together on another event. This can lead to a huge spike in website traffic and sales!
That’s All There Is to It!
There you have it! This 3-part series can help you increase your search engine rankings and get better eCommerce SEO results. We know it’ll deliver a ton of value to your business. And, as always, we’re here to help you with any questions you might have along the way!
We Want to Hear from You!
We’ve done an awful lot of talking and now we want to hear from you! What was the most informative piece of information you’ve taken from this guide? Which step are you going to jump into now to get better SEO results? Drop a quick comment below and fill us in!