You hopefully won’t need the Piranha Designs team to remind you of the importance of optimising your ecommerce store for the search engines to maximise its visibility online – but doesn’t doing such a thing require a certain amount of financial investment?
The short answer is no, not necessarily. Indeed, the following are ‘do it yourself’ SEO tips that online business owners can apply to their sites straight away, without spending a penny.
Improving title tags
All too many online store owners overlook the scope to easily optimise their site’s title tags, having simply accepted the default titles generated by their chosen ecommerce platform.
So, if the title tags for your site’s category pages, for example, are currently along the lines of ‘[Page title] – [Site title]’, consider what extra common-sense details you could incorporate to help both search engines and the human user.
Instead of making do with ‘Men’s – Joe’s Footwear’, could you modify such a title to something like ‘Men’s Trainers – Joe’s Footwear’ or even ‘Men’s Limited Edition Trainers – Joe’s Footwear’? Remember that Google typically shows the first 50 to 60 characters of a title tag, so you shouldn’t go beyond this for the lengths of your modified titles.
Scrutinising rivals
Consider who your competitors are in the organic search results, encompassing not just sites that sell the same products and services as yours, but also sites that may compete in an informational sense by answering questions frequently asked by your target audience.
Any sites taking up space on search engine results pages for queries that your brand is also targeting can be regarded as your SEO rivals.
So, look at what they’ve done in order to enjoy such strong search results. Are they embracing content themes that your site currently doesn’t? Is their site structured in a way that better targets certain strategically important keywords? What kind of user experience does each given rival brand provide – and is it more engaging than the one your site offers?
Answering questions like the above will then enable you to fine-tune your SEO strategy to be better aligned with what is actually likely to work for your brand.
Producing regular content
While we can certainly provide such services as blog content production and guest blogging as part of our search engine optimisation and marketing packages, there’s little to stop you producing your own content in the meantime, provided that you’re confident in doing so.
After all, you know your own brand’s products, services and industry better than anyone else. And if you’re thinking to yourself, “but I’m not a confident writer”, remember that “content” isn’t just words – the likes of product images, how-to videos and other graphics also count. A professional writer could then help to ensure it’s all presented even more effectively.
Nor do you need to be pumping out new content every day for it to be “regular” enough to help your site in the search engines. The weekly or even just monthly publication of new and unique content will be of benefit, provided that the content is of genuine value and usefulness for your target audiences.
These are just some of the steps that you can take with your site now to enhance its SEO prospects – so if you have any further questions about the possibilities, why not enquire to Piranha Designs today? We will be pleased to have a no-obligation discussion of your needs with you, and can also present you with a competitive quote.
