DIY SEO Guide : Best 4 Best Practices to Boost Search Engine Ranking

DIY SEO 

When your budget doesn't allow you to hire a freelancer or an agency to help your business with SEO, doing it yourself might be your only option. In fact, one could argue that it is necessary for a business to do it's own SEO at some level, in order to make sure their customers can find them.

This post is designed to offer the entrepreneur (not the SEO expert) a complete guide on optimizing your business website.

Doing it yourself is really a misnomer because you will need help. That's why we compiled this list of low-cost optimization methods that you can do without hiring an agency.

Please keep in mind that there are a lot of factors to consider when doing your own optimization. Your audience, your location, and your competition, just to name of a few.

Use DIY SEO software

SEO on your Website

There are a myriad of Do-It-Yourself SEO software on the market. Most of these tools are designed for marketing agencies and consultants. However, there are a few tools that are geared towards business owners who are willing to get their hands dirty.

Below is a list of DIY SEO tools that are categorized based on how difficult they are to use. Most will have a cost to them but some will have a free trial period.

Claim your Google My Business Listing

Claiming your GMB listing is key to getting local searchers to find your business. You can find instructions on how to claim it on Google's help page. However, the steps are quite simple.

• On your computer, go to Google My Business.

• Sign in with your Google Account, or create one.

• Enter your business’ or location’s address. You may also be asked to position a marker on the location of your chain’s branch on a map. If your business doesn’t have a physical location but works in a service area, you can list the area instead.

• Choose if you want your business location to appear on Google Maps.

• If you don't serve customers at your business address, click I deliver goods and services to my customers and then Next.

• Search for and select a business category. You can also choose a more specific category as appropriate.

• Verify your business over the phone or through a postcard. You can also click Verify later. If you’re not authorized to manage the Business Profile for the chain, find the person in your organization who’s authorized and continue the process.

Start a Blog

We covered reasons why you should love blogging in an earlier post, and one of the main reasons to blog is for Search Engine Optimization. However, before you think that starting a blog will instantly increase your traffic, you should better understand what SEO is for, the purpose of your blog, and who your audience is.

According to Google, the purpose of SEO is to "...make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content... you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site.” – Google (SEO Starter Guide)

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In other words, when you write a blog post, make sure to focus on 'what's best for the visitors of your site'. Remember your audience first and make sure your blog post adds value, answers questions, provides information and is an authority on what the searcher is looking for.

If you stay laser focused on addressing what your visitor is looking for, Google and other search engines will rank your site for those looking for answers.

Leverage Social Media

You probably have heard this a millions times. Use social media marketing to grow your business. It's a lot easier said than done.

To keep this short, I will give you two things to do on social media. Yup, that's it. Here is a great resource you can read which goes much deeper, if you want to read it. But for now, here are 2 things to do on social media.

1. Share your blog posts.

• Since you are already writing a blog and want to share it with the world, why not provide the resource on social media.

2. Follow your customers.

• This takes time and effort and requires your engagement, not just theirs. This includes liking and sharing their posts as your business.

Originally Publish At www.turrem.tech

eCommerce SEO Checklist : Best Practices To Optimize Your Online Business

eCommerce SEO Checklist

Tackling eCommerce optimization is a hefty task for any SEO. Here at Tower, we have worked with many clients that have eCommerce websites and have gained an expansive knowledge base. That being said, we’ve compiled information from our team’s experience to create an eCommerce SEO checklist. It’s designed to help any SEO who may be beginning to work on eCommerce optimization for the very first time.

Listed below are some best practices you can utilize. eCommerce websites are known to have a range of issues that affect how they rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some of these issues include:

• Duplicate content issues
• Huge lists of product categories
• Thin content

1. eCommerce Keyword Implementation: Web Copy, Titles, & Metadata

Conducting Keyword Research

Take keyword research as a learning opportunity for discovering what your target audience’s search intent is. Search intent is the user’s goal while using a search engine. What does a user’s search intent have to do with keyword research? Figuring out the type of search intent allows you to choose better keywords to implement on your eCommerce website. Some of these types of search intents include:

• Looking for somewhere to go
• Looking to learn something
• Looking to do something

While conducting keyword research, pay attention to the semantics and the ways your audience is interacting with your related products or services. For example, if you sell homemade pottery, learn how users are searching for pottery. Are users searching how to make pottery or where to find pottery? This will dictate your website’s content and intention.

To begin researching, we recommend using free keyword research tools such as SEMrush, Moz, Uber Suggest and Answer the Public.


Implementing Your Keyword Research

Deciding where to place your keywords on your eCommerce site can prove to be difficult. There are, however, key areas of an eCommerce site where keyword implementation takes priority. Here’s an outline of the basic, most-important pages that should be optimized on any website:

Web Copy

• Individual product pages
• Product category pages
• Blog content

Metadata

• Meta titles
• Meta descriptions

Before implementing your optimizations in page copy or metadata, our team suggests utilizing excel, numbers, or other grid-style programs to help outline the work you’re about to accomplish. Once you’ve decided on your program, create a format like the one in this photo example:

Using a program to outline your efforts is not only good for saving your work, but it’s also great for keeping your optimizations on file just in case anything were to wipe out your work on-site.

2. Category & Product Page Optimization

One of Google’s best practices in ranking requires you to satisfy your target user’s experience or journey throughout your website. To do this, consider the following:

Unique Category Page Content

Integrating unique copy into your category landing pages will help your users better understand how to find what they are searching for. Take category landing page copy as an opportunity to utilize keyword research variables and longer-tail phrases in the headings of these pages. A great example of a category page that interacts and engages a user comes from Sephora and their buying guides. The website suggests that the user has never shopping for ‘x’ products before. It prompts product category quizzes for the user to take in order for the user to figure out what they need.

Optimizing Product Descriptions

By matching your users’ search intent and optimizing descriptions on your product pages, you’ll be able to help each user learn more about the quality of your product. Make sure to not stuff keywords into your product descriptions, as Google will penalize this. We personally love the product descriptions from Aerie. In the photo below, you can see how the product title alone has a long-tail keyword term, but the description uses simplistic bullet point format for how the product wears, fits, and feels:

Internally Linking Important Pages

Internally linking your products to categories and internally linking your categories to parent pages will help Google crawl and comprehend your website easier. As an added bonus, it will also assist your users in navigating your site, which may increase their time on your website.

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Target’s patio ideas category page is the perfect example of internal link domination. The user’s uncertainty of what kind of patio furniture they need is solved by the subtle art profiles that Target has laid out (ex. bohemian, modern). They also include a description of each particular style.

3. Optimizing Product Images: Alt Text, Keywords, & Image Search

Thanks to Google Shopping, users can browse products by images and purchase directly from their Google search window without having to visit the website in which the product is offered. The issue with this is that Google can’t read images. When Google crawls a website, it may seem that there’s an image, but it won’t know what the image shows. 

That’s why it’s extremely important to add optimized alt text to your images. You can check out a great example of alt text below with a search for Nutella stuffed red velvet pancakes.” While inspecting the image, you’ll notice that the alt in the sidebar is the term searched.

4. A schema for eCommerce: Why You Should Learn More

eCommerce sites contain content that is optimized for humans but not necessarily for search engines. Adding mark-up code to product pages using schema.org will provide search engines with access to your data and ensure a better understanding of your products. These protocols will assist Google in returning properly-organized results for users’ search queries.

 Implementing structured data in your product pages will help search bots read your website. The data also helps them see what kind of product you sell, which allows them to match the product with the product searches that your users are conducting.

5. eCommerce Tracking: Users’ Journey & Generating Revenue

It’s critical to identify if visitors viewing your site on a daily basis are actually turning into paid customers. With this type of information, you can develop your SEO strategy further to generate relevant traffic that will be more likely to turn into paying customers. Use the free Google Analytics platform to track your traffic and understand:

• Where your website traffic is coming from.
• What demographics are being reached.
• Which areas of your marketing efforts can be improved to increase profits generated through SEO efforts.

Google Analytics eCommerce tracking will help business owners better comprehend the types of traffic coming to the website and where sales are approximately being made from. We’ve also created a how-to guide on the best Google Analytics reports skyrocketing your website performance. This guide will aid you in setting up all the reports you’ll need to better analyze your results.

Is your eCommerce site optimized? Is it bringing in as much revenue as it could? Are you being found by your target audience? Partner with Tower and optimize your eCommerce website.

Originally Published At www.towermarketing.net

eCommerce SEO Checklist: Best Tips To Implement That Surge Growth

eCommerce SEO Checklist

One of the most important steps that count when you are trying to drive traffic and sales to your e-commerce store it the search engine optimization (SEO).

On-page SEO is the main and critical factor that you need to take into consideration when doing this. There are a number of articles across the web that take you through eCommerce SEO strategies. This could get confusing.

To make it easier for you, we decided to offer you with the eCommerce SEO checklist, which comprises only the important tips.

It is important that you create some really important eCommerce SEO strategies before you move on.

You can start with the basic factors and then build the foundation for your e-commerce SEO. There are a number of websites that come with a weak foundation as they focus only on today and happen to indulge in the forbidden SEO techniques. Below is our eCommerce SEO checklist to make the process easier for you.

1. Is Your Design Mobile-Friendly?

Now, it is the time when we need to think of designing our site in terms of the factors: responsiveness and mobile-readiness. A number of people, these days, prefer to use their mobile phones to access the web. This means that most of your traffic would be coming from mobile devices.

So this means you need to make sure that your site is responsive, mobile-friendly. Search engines happen to notice such sites and rank these better. Users prefer such sites as they believe they could enjoy a seamless user experience, with better traffic and user experience.

2. Have You Installed an SSL Certificate?

This is the next most important point in your checklist. Ensure that you have an SSL certificate installed for your website. This helps to add security to your website. This would prevent any sensitive or confidential data (including the user’s contact and payment details) from being hacked. It would be encrypted while sending across the web. SSL SEO is an important thing you should be taken care of.

When there is an element of trust, customers decide to make a purchase and pay online. This comes when you have the SSL certificate installed to protect the privacy of their details. The SSL certificate adds to Google’s ranking factor as well.

3. How Quickly Does Your Site Load?

Have you checked your website loading speed? It is found that around 40% of users happen to abandon a site, which takes more than 2 seconds to load. When it comes to e-commerce sites, it is observed that over 75% of the visitors don’t come back when the site had loading problems. In such instances, again, the search engines take note of the performance rate and make sure such sites do not rank in the top search results.

4. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Account

Another important point in our eCommerce SEO checklist is to set up Google Analytics and Google webmaster account. The Analytics part is important as it will help you to analyze user engagement on your site. This will help you to understand further what will prompt them to engage with you and further help with improvements. With the Webmaster account, you can track how well your site performs and then optimize the visibility as needed.

5. Have You Created a Sitemap?

It is important that you set up a sitemap and ensure that it is submitted to the search engines, such as Google and Bing. This sitemap is usually a file, containing information with regard to pages, videos as well as other files on your site and the relationship between each of these.
It is from these sitemaps that URLs will understand more about crawling.

6. Conversion Tracking Metrics

It is ideal to set up conversion tracking metrics, such as enhanced e-commerce, which will give you detailed insights into shopping activity, page views, completed transactions, merchandising metrics, and more. It will help you to create an e-commerce strategy to improve the shopping funnel and conversion rates.

7. Know Your Competitors and Target Audiences

In order to be successful at your site’s SEO, it is necessary that you have a clear understanding of your industry, products, and audiences. With this, you will be able to conduct research and create an improved and effective e-commerce SEO plan.

What you can do is build buyer personas which will list out the demographics and behavior patterns of your audiences. This will also help you with keyword research while also determining the content type that your audiences want to consume.

When you have a clear understanding of what your user needs, then you can create an SEO strategy, which will help you to offer them a seamless experience as they need.

Undoubtedly, you must have finished conducting your keyword research. Haven’t you?

One of the most crucial aspects of any e-commerce SEO checklist is keyword research. When you have all the necessary details, you can conduct keyword research to drive potential buyers. If they are satisfied, this will get you ahead of the competition. With a keyword strategy that works, you will be guided through SEO, content creation and paid marketing strategy.

With a great SEO plan, you have head keywords and long-tail keywords that will help with conversions. You can split your SEO efforts across high-density, low competition, high-competition, and narrower keywords.

The best way to connect with your target audiences is by searching for related keywords and their variations within top searches in your industry. When you conduct competitor keyword analysis, you can understand where they get all their traffic from. This will help you to identify the opportunities that will bring traffic to your site as well.

8. On-Site Optimization

This is one of the main aspects of your websites – performing on-site optimization for your e-commerce site.

Meta descriptions for pages of your e-commerce site: homepage, category and product pages.

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A meta description should comprise around 155 characters of text, which will be embedded within the HTML code. This meta description usually carries a summary of the page’s content. This makes it easier for search engines to understand the content. It is important to optimize this meta description. It is a vital part of on-page SEO. This will ensure that it has been done for the important pages of the site and comprises the primary keywords in the meta title, page, and description.

9. URL Optimization

It is important to create an SEO-friendly URL. It should be short and comprise primary keywords. These URLs should follow a logical and consistent structure across.

10. Product Pages Should Have Content

Have you added content to your product pages? If not, start adding some content, such as product names, descriptions, and images. You would have noticed that pages with 300 words or more always rank better.

11. Category Pages Should not be Missed

The category page breathes life into your website. These pages provide an opportunity to drive traffic to your site. With a banner copy and optimized SEO descriptions, users will be driven to your pages.

Have you thought of creating a blog content calendar?

Most of the time, it is noted that blog posts with good and relevant content are capable of driving audience attention, thereby helping to convert these people into buyers. Moreover, these intend to educate their audiences and support the SEO goals of their audiences. To create a blog content calendar, which has consistent timelines for publishing and content that your audiences will prefer.

12. Internal Linking?

If you haven’t, you should. With more content being introduced to your site, it is necessary that the content that runs from one page to another seems to have a connection with the other. This would better help the search engines and crawlers to comprehend your website.

The intent is to ensure that the users spend more time on your site and its pages.

13. Add Schema Mark Up to All Pages

If you haven’t, then you need to. Scheme Markup comprises of code that is added to your website, which will help search engines to return results that are helpful to the audiences. With this, rich snippets can be found in the SERPs, with additional information about photos, reviews, and prices.

14. Image Alt Tag Optimization

You might have observed that with images, user engagement increases. You can add alt tags to your images to help search engines understand what each image is about, which will help to display the image in the search engine results.

15. Optimize Your Revenue and Sales to Increase Turnover

We all aim to improve the conversion rate. You can always work on improving as there are a number of options always available. Some of those are listed below:

• Improving product pages
• Optimizing price
• Using e-commerce personalization
• Optimizing for mobile
• Flash sales
• Reducing cart abandonment
• Guest posts
• Customer reviews and feedbacks

Acodez is a leading eCommerce development company in India. We offer all kinds of web development and web design services as well. We are also a renowned digital marketing agency offering SEO, SMM, SMO services to boost your online business.

Originally Published at acodez.in