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For your eCommerce business to succeed, you need a sound SEO strategy. The logic here is simple: If your pages appear top in search engines, you are bound to succeed, unlike when they appear on the bottom pages. According to Zero Limit Web, the top five organic results in search engine results pages account for 67.6% of clicks.
The evolution of the search engine optimization landscape coupled with its increased significance could be fascinating and intimidating in equal measures. As a marketer, I am sure you already understand the essence of staying on top of Google algorithms and a few tips for doing so. But SEO tips and best practices are constantly transitioning, and the strategies that worked in yesteryears could fail to be effective today. SEO best practices often change without warning, and (believe me) they will never reach their finish line. So, where do you begin?
This post will show you how to boost your SEO rankings. The post will outline ten actionable SEO strategies that can be implemented almost immediately to drive your web pages to the top of the search engine results pages.
Publishing Relevant and Authoritative Content
The quality of your website content plays an integral part in SEO. Search engines prefer web pages with enticing, refreshing, and fresh content. Content originality also matters a great deal. Copy pasting another site’s content will only lead to heavy penalties from search engines.
The content should be as informative as possible. For instance, if a blog is about SSL security then, a blog about ‘RapidSSL Wildcard certificates’ should answer customers’ burning questions such as “The top Vendors to buy RapidSSL Wildcard,” “Reasons and Benefits of buying the certificate,” among many other pertinent matters.
Websites should also diversify their content. Using text content will work for your SEO strategy. But combining text content with visual content could yield even better results. Visual content exists in images, podcasts, infographics, and videos. Video content is fifty times more likely to get organic traffic than text content. However, remember that, unlike text content, Google does not understand visual content, so I highly recommend including text in the video content.
Lastly, you must remember that content creation has no finish line. As a best SEO practice, always update your content with relevant keywords and backlinks to increase content readability.
Keyword Targeting and Relevancy
The logic of writing for humans first and search engines second carries much weight in search engine optimization. And the secret to fulfilling it is implementing the right and relevant keywords. Keywords get to the heart of what website visitors and search engines are looking for and should remain at the heart of any SEO strategy. Chucking the keywords left, right, and center will not work for you. The best way to approach the aspect of keywords in SEO is to conduct thorough keyword research. Good keyword research should highlight the long tail keywords that will work for you.
As a best practice, always include the long tail keywords in your metadata and your anchor text. I am stressing the element of long tail keywords because they have a 3% to 5% click-through rate higher than organic searches.
Lastly, stay away from keyword stuffing as much as you can. Keywords should naturally fit in your content to enhance the readability of your website content.
Leverage the SEO Power of HTTPS
Search engines have user privacy and security at heart. They will not entertain web pages that can potentially compromise users’ privacy. For this reason, they will rank those pages they deem secure ahead of insecure websites. And this explains why most search results are filled with HTTPS websites rather than HTTP. See the graph below that indicates the prevalence of HTTPS pages in results pages.
Credit : Moz
HTTPS is a secure transfer protocol that protects data from security attacks. Initiating the HTTP to HTTPS migration will boost your SEO rankings in search engines and increase your visibility to the advantage of your website’s success. All you need to initiate the migration is an SSL certificate. Many certificates will play to the advantage of your web security and search engine rankings. However, you can go with a single domain, wildcard certificate or any other type of SSL certs. If you have subdomains then, a wildcard would be a good choice because of their cost-effectiveness and easy certificate management advantages. A wildcard certificate such as RapidSSL wildcard, Thawte wildcard SSL, AlphaSSL wildcard will be cost effective for your SEO strategies. RapidSSL Wildcard price or any low cost wildcard SSL price stands at $50 to $100, depending on the nature of the certificate and the certificate vendor. It will be a cheap wildcard SSL for your website’s security.
Moreover, Google now uses the SSL factor as a tiebreaker in a situation where websites have equaled all other ranking factors. If you want to stand ahead of your competitors, you must buy an SSL certificate.
Unique Meta Description
One of the essential SEO strategies that most webmasters overlook is crafting a unique and informative meta description. You should understand that your meta description is the first thing your searchers will see whenever Google serves them with search results.
Simply defined, a meta description is a small paragraph within the HTML code of your web pages. They appear in the search engine results just below the page titles. They briefly explain the content and purpose of the web page. When writing meta descriptions, try as much as possible to avoid content duplication. Duplicating meta descriptions could put you in deep trouble with search engines.
Whereas it is a great idea to include keywords in the meta descriptions, you should avoid keyword stuffing where you throw keywords anywhere and anyhow within your meta descriptions. Remember, you only have 150 characters to create the meta description, and you must catch all pertinent aspects of your web page within those characters.
Build Relevant Links
Link-building is an excellent strategy for building a robust domain reputation. A strategic link-building campaign can be so advantageous to the entire SEO strategy. There are two sides to link building- outbound links and inbound links.
Your website will gain a lot in terms of authority whenever other sites link to it. And the advantage of this is, even more, when the websites linking to your pages are popular and trustworthy. While you do not have much control over the backlinks, doing things right, especially with quality content creation, will automatically earn you the backlinks. All other SEO ranking factors are held constant; a web page with more backlinks will receive more traffic than those with no or fewer backlinks (Ahrefs).
For example, if you’re trying to rank for a competitive keyword like “traditional landline phone service“, you’ll likely need backlinks from sites in your niche to outrank your competitors.
Contrary to backlinks, you have full control over internal linking. Internal links are also important in your SEO strategy. You must link related articles to drive your web visitors deeper into your website. Remember to make the internal links natural and use them sparingly.
Pay a Closer Attention to User Experience
Website user experience is an important factor that could make or break your website. You are creating the website and web content to give value to web users. Always keep that in mind. As a best SEO practice, you must eliminate all hurdles that could potentially compromise the users’ experience.
Logically, users will turn away from a website they are not pleased with, which means high website bounce rates. Google can penalize a website with high bounce rates by relegating it to the bottom of the research engine results page. Low loading speeds and mobile incompatibility are more UX factors that could hurt website rankings.
Boost Your Website Speeds
For your web pages to feature in the top search engine results pages, you must eliminate all hurdles that slow down the website. According to Google research, there is a 32% chance of a bounce happening when a page load time lasts three seconds. The same report also shows that the chance for a bounce increases to 90% when the load time goes beyond five seconds.
Whether you are running an informative blog website or a high-profile eCommerce website, you must make the site accessible, quick, and easy to navigate. A slow website could hurt your site visibility in search engines, harm your lead generation, and compromise your conversation rates. The following are some of the ways to increase your website speeds.
- File minification and combination
- Minimizing HTTP requests
- Always use asynchronous loading for JavaScript and CSS files
- Minimize the response time for your servers
- Selecting reliable hosting providers
- Run frequent compression edits to your images, videos and other files
- Initiate browsers caching
Format Your Web Content For Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are the new rulers of the search engine results pages. If your content manages to earn a featured snippet, then know you are doing something right. You must adhere to certain styles and content formats to increase your chances of earning a featured snippet.
For instance, you can use bullet points, numbered lists, question-based searches, and infographics. Featured snippets are important to raising the bar in search engines and brand awareness and getting your name top of the search engine results pages.
Check Your URL Structures
Yes, SEO strategies apply to URLs too. Search engines check for keywords in the URLs just as much as they do in the web content. As a best SEO practice, always feature keywords in the URLs.
Also, it would be best to use static URLs instead of relying on numbered pages or dynamic URLs. Search engines prefer informative URLs and would rank web pages with such URL features top of the SERPs.
Update Old Pages
You should not have a bunch of blog posts on your web pages collecting dust. Such pages could provide a unique opportunity to increase your visibility in search engines. Old pages should be updated with new keywords and content that catches the eye of the searchers.
Conclusion
A sound SEO strategy could be the point that separates you and your competitors. Google uses a plethora of factors when ranking websites, and keeping up with all the factors can be a real hurdle. The tips explained above are surefire ways you can adopt to boost your rankings in the search engines.
