Whether you’re a long time seller or pivoting into the eCommerce space, small and medium-sized businesses that effectively work SEO optimization techniques into their online business strategies reap high-level returns for positioning their brand. Improving their site’s discoverability, driving relevance among their audience that ultimately leads to new sales.

Given the fact that online shopping has become one of the most popular online activities worldwide, businesses that overlook engaging their online customers not only miss out on closing a sale but also a cut of revenues running into trillions of dollars. In 2020, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 4.28 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 5.4 trillion US dollars in 2022.

Below we’ll examine 5 SEO optimization tips to maximize your websites’ potential in driving free, recurring, high-converting traffic, taking your business to the next level. 

If you find yourself struggling to implement these suggestions, call us today at 703-988-5039 to speak with a consultant about how Cloud Code Experts can help.

If you’re a local in Virginia that needs SEO services, troubleshooting a campaign or want to remote in about a project, Cloud Code Experts can help, leave us a message about your project anytime here. 

How SEO Fits Into Your Business 

Search Engine Optimization- SEO pulls together a combination of strategies giving focus to keywords and activities that improves your website’s visibility on search engines. These keywords help customers find your website when they use Google, Bing, Yahoo etc when they enter keywords relevant to your business. 

On the technical side, search engines peruse billions of websites and content, measuring multiple factors to determine which content is most likely to answer a customer’s query. Cataloguing web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process referred to as “ranking.” 

Here’s how you can score SEO points and get in front of the right customers through organic search:

1.Keyword optimization

Keywords are the cornerstone of your SEO optimization strategy, without keywords your prospective customers may never find you. While figuring out the right keywords to associate with your website and content, you’ll need to                  simultaneously conduct keyword research. 

There are a number of keyword research tools that will help you choose the right keywords such as Google AdWords. By using Google AdWords, and other planning tools you can validate that the keywords you chose are frequently used in online searches.

It’s also wise for you to work in long-tail keywords. These are keywords that contain three or more words, typically they have higher conversion rates because they don’t have as high of a search volume to short-tail keywords which typically consist of one-two keywords. This means there is less competition from other brands. Try putting these long-tail keywords in your products’ names and their descriptions.

An example of a long-tail keyword is “Pediatrician in Palm Bay, FL” compared to a short-tail keyword like “pediatrician” 

Someone searching for “Pediatrician in Palm Bay, FL” is likely searching for a local office to visit or engage, hence why these types of long-tail keywords drive in traffic that is credible and valuable to a business. 

Once you’ve settled with your keywords of choice your next step is to integrate these keywords into places that the search engine will crawl including headings, titles, meta descriptions, and body text of your pages. This will help your page rank better for those keywords.

As you integrate keywords, be careful not to overdo them. This can lead to keyword stuffing, which negatively impacts your ranking.

2.Build A Website That Performs

It’s commonplace to upload an image of products for sale on your online store giving your users an overall shopping experience however many store owners default to uploading the numeric or generic name of the photo, e.g "18875524_1.png", generating limited value in search because it doesn't identify what the image is in the filename.

Consider renaming product files to be more descriptive such as “blue-fitness-sneaker-shoes.png," and add an appropriate image alt tag like: "Blue Fitness and Track Shoes For Women and Girls", your image may rank well when people are doing image searches. Naming your images appropriately and labeling them with img alt tags provides another point of entry to your website for users looking using Google Image search and others platforms. 

Another avenue for visual content can come from creating and embedding optimized YouTube videos into your website. Videos are particularly useful in pulling in organic traffic while improving your website’s user experience. Including video with highly relevant keyword titles along with a detailed text description helps to increase your exposure in search engine results pages. 

Another useful tip is to include links back to your site within the description text of your videos, this will open up your funnel for new sources of referral traffic. For many, YouTube acts as the second largest search engine after Google. 

On a related note, quality backlinks are one of the critical factors that Google uses to determine search engine rankings. The more people that are linking to your content and to your domain, the more authority you are seen as having. 

5.Use Social For Backlinks 

If you want to help your site improve its SEO ranking, you need to earn backlinks. Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO optimization. These are links that your business obtains from other credible sites from across the internet.  An interesting pull for modern SEO comes from social media, and this is because an increasing number of consumers are turning to these platforms to engage with brands. Nearly 80 percent of people turn to Facebook when they want to find interesting content, and this means there's a huge opportunity there for you to reach new audiences, attract more prospects, and develop lasting relationships with customers.

Get started today

If you’re ready to start working on your web projects’ SEO and start earning more valuable traffic and leads through a  customized SEO plan, connect with us online or call us today at 703-988-5039.  Looking forward to helping your online business grow!