Ranking highly in search engines is crucial for your new business and it can be difficult to determine how to make it easier for your potential customers to find you online. To start, knowing the basics of SEO can be hugely helpful, so we’ve put together some expert tips on how to build an SEO strategy for your business.

Keyword Research

One of the first and most important things you should include in your strategy is keyword research. This gives you the chance to do some easy market research that can help you promote your existing products as well as potentially developing new ones based on demand. By using tools such as the Google Adwords keyword planner, you can get valuable insights such as:

  • search volumes for products you offer
  • seasonality
  • who your competitors are
  • the demographic types searching for products like yours.

Once you’ve identified what keywords you should be targeting , and prioritised them (to help you determine how valuable each keyword is) it’s time to start the real work. Here’s a couple of the key steps in the process:

Categorisation

Being a manually intensive process, keyword research can be slow operation. Of the many steps it involves is categorising and it’s one of the most important phases. This will help you at a later stage when it comes to prioritising which categories and pages you want to optimise first.

You should review each keyword you have and categorise it accordingly to reflect your site map. Don’t have a site map? Use the categorisation phase to inform your sitemap. Once you have your broader categories (for example: magazines, gifts and homeware), you can then categorise them further into subsections (such as subscriptions, seasonal gifts and food and drink).

Mapping

Following this, you’ll want to manually map a keyword to an existing page on your site and then optimise each page accordingly. This process highlights potential opportunities, not just at a category level, but also at a URL level. It can also flag up any gaps you might have; if there’s not an existing page which would be appropriate for a keyword, you should create one.

Other data you might want to consider incorporating into your keyword document includes:

  • Current click-through rate (CTR)
  • Current rank
  • Current ranking page

To take this a step further, you can determine what the glass CTR ceiling is in order to understand the maximum opportunity there is for each keyword. This opportunity outlines the potential traffic that a keyword will drive if your site was to achieve maximum ranking for that keyword.

With around 2 trillion searches a year and 16% of these searches a day completely new and unique, it’s good practice to continuously update your keywords research document for the best results.

Yard SEO for Ecommerce

 

The world of SEO is a complex one, and it can be pretty daunting that it’s constantly evolving. However, knowing these basics is a great start. For a deeper dive, take a look at this in-depth guide to SEO for e-commerce businesses from Yard.

 

Editorial Staff

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