A lot of people start an online business with high hopes. When they begin an online business, some of the issues that they have to face are related to traffic and revenue generation.
Despite their hard work, these new online store owners do not receive enough traffic to their online stores and e-commerce sites. Since there is not good traffic, there is no revenue generation.
Even after many months of operating an online store, when there is no traffic and no revenue, many online store owners give up on their online business.
How To Master SEO To Drive Traffic and Generate Sales
You might have heard internet marketing gurus and online entrepreneurs speak about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. You might also be thinking about increasing sales through SEO.
However, as a new online entrepreneur, SEO might confuse you. You may have to spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars in SEO training class, and you may not have time and money.
To make things easier for you, we have compiled some SEO techniques in this article. While this article will not make you an expert, you may know about some common SEO practices.
Search Engine Ranking for a New Website
Search Engine Ranking is very important when it comes to getting traffic. If your site is not ranking, or ranking badly, you will not receive search traffic.
Site ranking is one of the main problems faced by new bloggers. If your site is not ranking well in the search engines, you will not receive organic traffic.
You can, of course, drive referral or direct traffic on your site, however, organic traffic is more valuable in terms of revenue generation.
If you are using highly competitive primary keywords, it might be very difficult to rank high. Therefore, you should be focusing on secondary, or longtail, keywords as well.
For example, you might use iPhone as your primary keyword. You can also focus on secondary keywords like iPhone case, iPhone charger, or how to fix an iPhone.
Backlinks play a major role in site ranking. However, most of the bloggers commit a grave mistake by building backlinks only for the home page only and not building backlinks for the internal pages. Therefore, you should be building backlinks for your home page as well as internal pages.
The Basics of SEO: Different Types of SEO Strategies
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a technique to make your website, contents, products and services be found on search engines.
SEO is broadly divided into three categories:
- On-page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Technical SEO
On-Page SEO
In order to rank your website high, your website needs unique, original, interesting, useful and informative content. However, having good content alone is not enough to rank high.
Your contents must also have focus keywords and key phrases. Keywords and key phrases are the terms that people use to search online.
If you are selling digital camera and your content is about digital cameras, “digital camera” is your primary keyword. When you are developing content on digital cameras, use a title that is long tail search term. This basically is the exact term that searchers are using to find digital cameras. You can find about the potential keywords on Google Keyword Planner Tool.
Use at least 5 percent primary keywords on your content. For example, you need to repeat your keywords at least 50 times if you are writing a 1000 word article.
Your article description, image title, image description, image caption should also contain keywords.
Off-Page SEO
In order to get high ranked, your website should also be linked with other sites with high page rank. This is generally referred as backlinking.
When high ranking sites are pointing towards your website, your search engine rank will not only improve but you will also get traffic. You can build backlinks by leaving your links on social book marking sites, forums and blogs.
You also need to generate social signals to your website to get ranked high. Social signals are the likes and shares you get when you share your content on social media.
Technical SEO
While indexing your website, search engines also consider site design and site loading speed. Your website needs to have a good design that is easy to navigate and is user friendly.
Apart from design, search engines also give priority to site loading speed. If your site loads slow, it will be down ranked even though it may have unique contents and a user friendly design.
If these SEO strategies are confusing you, you can use WordPress SEO plugins like All in One SEO plugin. This plugin will make you things easier for SEO on your contents.
Using proper grammar and spelling is also important to helping you rank higher. Engaging articles that keep visitors on your website longer are rewarded with higher rankings. If you need some help with your grammar, you can always use a service like Grammarly to help.
Increasing Sales Through Search Engine Optimization
Whether your online business succeeds or not is largely depended on how well the website is optimized for search engines. Since a large percentage of visitors find your business, products, and services through search engines, it makes sense to increase the visibility of your ecommerce website on search engines.
Whether you have a dropshipping business, online store, or an affiliate store, you need traffic for your online business. Your traffic needs to convert into sales if you want to make money from ecommerce. So, how do you do this? Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short, is the answer.
Why Do You Need SEO?
To get a good rank on search results: Generally speaking, search engines are the primary source of traffic. When people want to find something online, they will search through Google, Yahoo or Bing.
If your website is ranked within first few pages, chances of getting traffic significantly increases. Normally, people do not look for search results beyond 4th page, and most of the time internet searchers only check the top five results. If you want to increase sales, your business needs to remain at the top of the popular search engines.
To get traffic: Since search engines are primary traffic source, you need to improve your search engine ranking to ensure a good rank in search engines.
You will get traffic only when your website appears in the top results. If your website is at the 10th page, it is very unlikely that you will get visitors.
To generate sales: Search engine traffic is organic traffic. Organic traffic means people voluntarily come to your website. People check your website because they are genuinely interested in your products and services. If people are genuinely interested on your products and services, they will surely buy your products and services.
SEO Strategies: How to Optimize Your Website and Web Contents For Search Engines
You have great products and services to sell, you have written and published a great content. However, how will potential buyers find your products and services, or how will potential readers find your content?
The answer lies in optimizing your website, webpages, products and services for search engines.
The Basic SEO Strategies
The SEO Strategies can be as simple as finding proper keywords or as complicated as using meta tags/description on your website. However, some simple SEO Strategies can help you get started with SEO.
Keyword Research: Keywords are the words that people type on search engines to find products, services or web contents. Use keyword research tools to find proper keywords.
Keyword Usage: Once you find the proper keywords, you will have to use those keywords on your title, description and the body of the content.
Backlinks: Backlinks are the links that point towards your content/website from other website. You need to create backlinks from authoritative sites.
Create Awesome Content: Create and share content that people find useful and will share. Social signals, backlinks, and going viral all start with great content.
