Best SEO tips for retail websites, online stores

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If you run a retail website, then I’m sure your biggest goal is to make more sales, right?  Well, improving your SEO (a.k.a. search engine optimization) skills to help you show up higher on Google will certainly help that.  After all, studies show that the first result on Google gets almost double the impression as the 2nd, so any increase could help your retail website, and help it a lot.

So naturally the next question is, how do you improve your Google Ranking?  Well, here are 10 helpful SEO hints that could help you improve you improve your search engine ranking and in turn, help you make a lot more sales:

1) Use an Ecommerce solution with built-in SEO features.  The best way to get good at SEO fast is to be using a solution that helps you.  If you use 3D Cart, for instance, you can manage & configure your store’s Search Engine Optimization settings in one centralized location.

2) Improve the speed of your website.  Google takes speed into account when choosing rankings, so you’ll need our website to be as fast as possible.  Here are some tips on how to speed up your website if you use WordPress.

3) Use targeted product suggestions.  If you list other products that interest a customer might like and they click on it, then this increases the time spent on the website which in turn is great for SEO.  You can display similar products, related product, or people also viewed options – studies have shown that using people also viewed generates 68% of total e-commerce sales.  If you use WooCommerce, you might want to consider this Woocommerce Related Products Plugin.

4) Do your keyword research.  This is when you try to find some keywords where there are opportunities for you to do well in.  You can start by using a free tool like
Google Keyword Planner. and start typing in keywords related to your product (like, if you sell shoes, you could type in “women’s shoes” or “women’s sandals”, etc.).  You can then find other suggestions based on that and from there, you could find an opportunity of a phrase people search for but where there aren’t that many results.  If there aren’t that many results, then it will be easier for you to show up high for a Google search and in turn, that will help get more customers to your retail website so you can make more sales.  I know keyword research can be a bit overwhelming if you are new to it, so consider using products like
KeySearch StarterKeywords JeetTraffic Armour Keywords or Surefire Keyword Goldmine to help you get started.

5) Write your own product descriptions instead of just using the product descriptions given by the manufacturer.  This is a great opportunity for you to use some of those keywords you found and let Google know what this product is so you’ll rank higher in Google.

6) Add Schema Markup, which means, improve the snippets that appear on search engines.  Schema Markup has been shown to increase click-through rates by up to 30%, which means more traffic which will get you better rankings.  If you use WooCommerce, you can get this WPSSO Schema JSON-LD Markup plugin and you can go even further and get better structure data for your reviews, too, if you buy WooCommerce Product Reviews Pro.

7) Get high quality backlinks.  This is when high quality websites link to your website, which helps improve your ranking Google.  There are a few ways you can go about improving this.  First, you can use tools like BuzzSumo to find out who is linking to your competitors, and then you can reach out to those websites and ask for your website to be listed, too (this won’t always work though – you will probably get a lot more No’s or no response than yeses, but it could be worth a try).  You could also ask manufacturers to link back to your product pages, but once again, this may or not work.  Similarly, you could reach out to niche bloggers to see if they would include your product.  Though you might have more luck improving your backlinks by using a tool like LinkFool.

8) Improve your retail website’s site structure, which means you should make sure your content follows a logical hierarchy of categories, your pages don’t use iframes, your URLs contain standard characters and are readable, etc.  This is something you don’t have to worry about if you use companies like 3DCart, Shopify, Big Commerce, etc. because your site will already be structured correctly.

9) Avoid duplicate content for your keywords because if more than one product uses the same keyword, then it can be confusing for search engines to know which entry should show up highest and in general, search engines like Google link to limit how many results on the first page are from the same website.  And coming up with different keywords for each product is a great way to get more keywords in and potentially more people can find your website through different searches.

10) Optimize your images so that they can be found in search engines.  Make sure you name all of your images with great keywords and use great, clear keywords in alt attributes, too, to help your Google Images show up higher.  Just make sure you write them in a way that makes sense and isn’t just a bunch of keywords stuffing (such as “cheap inexpensive budget buy now low cost” which isn’t a real sentence).