E-commerce, Electronic commerce is the activity of buying or selling of goods and services online or over an electronic network, typically internet. Electronic commerce operates in all four of the major market segments.: business to business, business to consumer, consumer to consumer and consumer to business. Almost any product or service can be offered via e-commerce, from electronics, clothes and shoes, books and music to financial services and plane tickets.
- Business to business: this type of e-commerce relates to sales made between business, such as manufacturer and a wholesaler or retailer.
- Business to a consumer: this B2C relates to the transactions made between a business and a consumer.
- Consumer to consumer: consumer to consumer, one of the earliest forms, relates to the sale of products or services between, customers.
- Consumer to business: the consumer to business means individual consumers make their products or services available for business buyers.
E-Commerce has grown many businesses with the help of new technologies, improvements in internet connectivity and widespread consumer and business adoption. The most popular example of e-commerce is the online shopping. The main reason why e-commerce has an abrupt growth is that of the internet becoming a requirement in our daily lives.
To start an e-commerce business, there is a lot to do such as researching, building, and launching. Not only that but, after launching the business taking the right decisions for getting great development with higher profits is also important.
- Do you know that 1.66 billion people worldwide purchase goods online?
- There are over 1.5 billion websites on the world wide web today.
- And almost half of the percentage are using search engines for online shopping.
So, you can estimate on how much competition would it be to your business to stand out from them? What will help you to make your e-commerce business stand out among them?
One of the main factor after launching your business is reaching out to the people or consumers. How can you do so? Here the SEO, the search engine optimization matters a lot. A person, who is willing to build up an e-commerce business should have a great knowledge of SEO that helps the marketer’s e-commerce comes in the top lists whenever the visitor searches.
What is meant by SEO?
SEO, search engine optimization, is the process of getting traffic from the search results on search engines. This SEO leads to getting more response from the users, which gains more traffic and what then, obviously high sales and profits.
Let us see, the step by step guide to SEO for E-commerce website:
Step 1: Identify your Keywords
- The first and foremost important factor to make more effort is the research on the keyword.
- Better the keywords better the SEO. The keywords you use will surely influence your SEO efforts. Now you understood how big deal is choosing a keyword for your e-commerce website.
Let us see in detail on how to increase your search engine optimization by discovering new and popular keywords for your website.
How to find right Keywords
- The research in keywords has to be advanced. Think in the perspective of the users, how would you search something if you need the product/service you are selling? The keywords must not be in the advanced language. People often use simple contexts.
- Know what is on trend and what are people searching more for. You have plenty of platforms which easily can help you out.
- Let’s say GOOGLE TRENDS, yes this particular platform gives all the keywords that are searched for more. Here, you can search for last few days, weeks etc. also it provides how many times it has been searched for. Go for something which is searched more number of times, that nothing but the volume of the keyword.
- The google has also been providing another platform for keyword searching, that is Google AdWords, it is a keyword generator and not to mention a free one. There are other great free keyword generators like Semrush, IMforSMB Bulk keyword generator, Keyword in, Ubersuggest and many more.
- The other thing you could do is, go to your competitor’s website. Look on why are they in the top lists, why not you? Check what keywords they are using, go into their search engine type some word and there it comes to the suggestions, make sure you come up with an idea of the keyword that is ahead of theirs. Remember the competition is everything in the businesses.
- Give unique keywords that build up an anticipation in the customer to at least have a look at it once.
- Concentrate on that particular product which is more being sold, who knows that product can bring on more customers for your other products? Give the keywords that include your highest sold item.
- Aren’t you getting any unique keyword idea? No problem! search the synonyms of a product name either any dictionary, Wikipedia etc you get dozens of new words. Select one, add it to your website.
- The long tail keywords can increase your traffic to 80% more. Yes, long tail keywords have the higher chance of getting more searched than that for shorter keywords.
- The other way of SEO through keywords is, don’t we all have an idea that few things have more demand on particular days? what we call as a season. Particular things are famous in particular seasons, that leads to a great demand for those products than from other days. Add the season to the name of your product’s in the keywords(long tail keyword) which is another advantage!!
- To increase your traffic through SEO, the other trick is even if you are not selling a particular product that is being searched more but you have something common product that of the keyword, adjust your keyword to that one. This is another strategy that really works well.
- As we have discussed above on how important to matter the competition in business, put a track on your competitor’s e-commerce. If they are in one step ahead, try being two steps ahead that’s how it gonna be worked.
Okay, let’s say you have done a great research on the keyword research and now that your website is ranking the highest in search results, obviously the users gonna be clicking your site. After entering into your site, the visitors must have a good opinion on your website, which is good to look, have a neat and interesting design with proper colors, background, fonts, and also category lists each and everything. That defines the framework of your website or commonly know as website design.
Step 2: DESIGN OF THE WEBSITE
- The things that the visitor expect from a website is, it should contain everything that the visitor needs and that too easy to be found. That gives you an idea that your website must display all the products neatly in the organized form.
- The framework of your website has to do very keenly in an organized way. The organized way is like firstly home page, category section, subcategory section, products.
The below-given flow graph of the website needs to follow, for a better website.
HOME PAGE
It is necessary to know what to be exhibited on the home page. Usually, you need to exhibit your today’s deals and offers, a search bar, a summary images of all the products you sell, all the necessary options if one needs to buy stuff. In short, It should be in such a way that, if one looks at the home page the visitor must get an entire idea of what you are actually selling.
CATEGORY
The detailed version of displaying all the items you provide in an organized way. The categories mean the classification of items you sell, it makes the work of the customer easy and takes less time.
SUB CATEGORY
The subcategory is the further classification of the items. It classifies the products into other sections that make more effortless and painless experience to the consumer. Organise and optimize your category in such a way, that can easily take your customers interest.
The rule is keeping your website simple and more informative.
Titles and Descriptions
The titles and the descriptions of the product also improve your website traffic. For the titles it is same as the keywords, prefer using modifiers like cheap, beautiful, latest, trending, discount with some % etc. Use all the tips and tricks we have seen in the keyword section for better results. As for descriptions, the longer they are, the better in search results. Write a long description, studies shows that the long descriptions are tended to get higher ranks in the google. Also, prefer using modifiers like given above and according to seasons, shipping costs, sales, a great quality of the product. The other tip to use here when writing the description is, write your product’s name number of times. Even this helps in boosting your search engine results.
Product Reviews
Reviews play a major role in the e-commerce shopping. The reviews can grow up your sales as high as possible and can also decrease as low as possible. so, make sure you provide a good quality product that makes the buyers genuinely give your good reviews and rating. Optimise your review from good to bad. The higher review and ratings also increase the chance of search results.
Step 3: GET RID OF DUPLICATION
The duplication is one that is common for every e-commerce site. Usually, the duplication in the e-commerce sites is of two types. They are off-site and on-site.
- The off-site is nothing but the content that appears on many other websites.
- The on-site is defined as many ages of the website featuring same content.
That duplication may be in the products or the content that is in the description of the products. It results in close product descriptions that Google regards duplicate content which in turn are ignored by a search engine that decreases the traffic. The e-commerce website is always to be unique and qualitative that needs to deal with other competitors.
So in order to fix this issue, there must be a unique content for every product. Hire for any freelance writers who can do this work for you.
The eCommerce site with a large block of products is, unfortunately, is appended to the URL, creating an exponential number of pages registering as duplicate content. This can be avoided by a blocking the URL with your robots.txt file. this helps the crawlers from seeing anything more than the selection of products.
Step 4: HYPE UP YOUR WEBSITE
Hype up the existence of your e-commerce website through marketing. That involves advertising, promoting through all ways as possible. The digital marketing can hype your e-commerce business to such a great extent. In the present internet days, digital marketing has become that much powerful and easy marketing media.
Dig out all the ways of digital marketing. Follow every other way like:
Social Media Marketing
Presently, social media marketing along with content marketing as its own importance.The social media marketing involves the marketing through all the social media platforms available. Create a social media marketing calendar to note down when and what to posts for advertisements. Post all the popular deals and offers you are providing, the latest products, share your response and review you got from your customers, be in touch with customers.
Content Marketing
The content marketing is treated as the king, you can know here itself how it is important its role has in the digital marketing. Google gives the highest preference to the good quality content. The content is written based on the SEO techniques also elevates you in the google ranking. Start a blog in which creates a platform that helps I engaging with customers. Add the content of your latest products, other interesting facts which are presented in trend. Promote your products on this blog. Explain the functionality and how great the product is by giving your own reviews.
Guest Posting and Backlinks
Post the link to your e-commerce website on your blogs, social sites. Find some famous websites in your niche and request them for a guest blog and ask for a backlink. Backlinks are one of the most crucial factors when it comes to search engine rankings.