Ecommerce SEO has its own set of do’s and don’ts. In this blog post, we’ll give you three SEO do’s and two SEO don’ts for boosting your website traffic. We want to arm you with information that will help you to build and a step by step SEO action plan for boosting your ecommerce website traffic.

Ecommerce SEO Do’s

Feature high quality content – Each page of your site should be well-written, relatable and grammatically correct. You want to write with your ideal customer in mind. Each product page should have a unique product description. All pages should be optimized for specific keywords. Your business blog should be updated regularly. Write about things that interest your customers as well as feature your products. Content should always be written primarily with the end user in mind, not search engines. 

Add internal links to your most important pages – Internal links are an important part of SEO. By adding internal links, you help Google understand the relationship between different pages of your website. The more internal links you have to a particular page, the more important that page is deemed by Google. It’s important to think of your website content in a hierarchal manner with the most important content as a foundation on which to build. This is your ‘cornerstone content’. You should link from your cornerstone content to related pages in order to pass a link value to them. At the same time, link to the cornerstone pages from other pages in order to bolster their standing. 

Consider temporarily using paid ads – You can do all the right things when it comes to SEO and still not see your search engine rankings dramatically improve for months. In the meantime, you can consider bolstering your search engine results with paid traffic. The two most commonly used channels for paid traffic are Google Ads and Facebook Ads. You can learn about running these ad campaigns by doing simple internet searches. Remember, to look at the data surrounding your ads and how they’re performing so that you know what you’re doing well and what you can work on. 

Ecommerce SEO Don’ts

Don’t write bad content – It’s almost better to be light on content than to write bad content. Bad content is grammatically incorrect. It doesn’t make sense to the reader. It’s not relatable or related to your topic. You also may engage in bad practices like keywords stuffing. You don’t want to overuse your keywords on a web page because Google may penalize you for keyword stuffing. Google may actually rank your site lower than higher for keyword stuffing. You want content on your site but poorly written or keyword stuffed content is a liability. 

Don’t pay for links – There used to be an SEO practice of buying links. It was good when links were first considered important. However, there were a lot of sites called link farms that were created. Link farms don’t have good authority. If you pay to link to them, you are wasting your money. Google doesn’t like link farms and will penalize you if you associate with them. You should definitely try to get external links on your ecommerce site, but you want to make sure they are good links and have a high authority on their own. 

We hope this blog has given you some insight in what to do and what not to do when using SEO to help boost your ecommerce website traffic. To learn more about SEO, we invite you to look through our blog archives.

Your business website needs SEO even if it serves a local market. If you have a local business, you need to think in terms of local SEO and about the local ranking of your website. Local SEO will help your business website come up in search results for related queries in your area. Since Google shows local results first in a lot of cases, you need to make sure that Google understands where you are located.

People often wonder whether SEO or content marketing is the way to go with their marketing strategy. The truth is that it’s not an either or situation. SEO and content marketing can work together to create a solid marketing strategy. You need both SEO and content marketing to market yourself properly in the digital age. 

Why is there a SEO or content marketing debate? 

For some reason, there are people out there that want you to pick a side. Many SEO companies want you to use SEO exclusively while content marketers will say that their strategy is the one to go with. The implication is that you need to hire one specialist or the other. However, true online marketing professionals recognize the need for both strategies. 

You can create SEO that is content marketing. 

You need to create content to support your marketing objectives. If you’re doing this wisely, a vital part of your execution strategies should be focused on optimizations that will increase the probability that your content will be discovered via a Google search. Saying that SEO and content marketing are two separate marketing tactics is akin to saying that newspaper headlines and copy are foes. Headlines are written to get people to read copy. In a similar manner optimizing content for search engines allows your content to be discovered so it can be read. 

In reality, SEO isn’t optimizing for the search engine exclusively. It’s really about optimizing your content so that it is well done and able to be found by the end user. Maybe content optimization is a better way to look at it. 

What does good content look like? 

Good content is content that is relevant to your topic and well-written. Of course, content should be written in such a way that it holds the interest of your reader from beginning to end. You should also use keywords in your web content. The keywords should flow naturally as you write about the topic at hand. You don’t want to overstuff your content with the keywords because that will not only make your writing read unnaturally, it also may get you penalized by search engines. 

Content marketing can’t be done well if your content isn’t done well. It’s a simple fact. If you’re writing good content, you can easily make it SEO friendly. The choice between SEO and content marketing doesn’t have to be a choice. It can be a both proposition. One will follow the other. So, the best strategy for your small business is to have content marketing that is SEO-friendly. You should not choose between SEO and content marketing, you should be doing them together. So, free your mind from the SEO or content marketing debate. There should be no debate you need both good content marketing and good SEO practices to succeed in today’s competitive online marketplace. 

For more information on writing good content, please visit our archives. We talk a lot about this topic, especially about content that appeals to both search engines and end users.