If you have an online webshop, you can hardly much online marketing without involving SEO. Whether you sell a physical product or a virtual product, you want to get as many relevant people into your webshop as possible. It can be from social media where you post nice pictures of the products, or from your Google Ads/Google Shopping campaign. But the fact is that there is still a very large part that does a Google search for a product and only clicks on one of the natural (also called organic traffic) results.
And if they don't find your website among the first 3-4 results, then you're missing out on a lot of potential customers.
If you want to reach this large customer segment as well, you need to focus on search engine optimisation. But let's take a look at what that might take and why it's so important for webshop owners.
You should always start with a keyword analysis
The most important aspect when talking SEO, is to always do a good analysis of which keywords are relevant to your business. Get a handle on what keywords or phrases people are using when it's your products they're looking for. Find out how many people on average search for the words you have found each month and then find out how much competition there is. If you can't do the keyword analysis yourself, consider hiring a marketing agency to do the job. For example, if you are looking for an SEO agency in Aalborg, you would typically do a search for SEO Aalborg, or SEO company Aalborg to find a local partner. Often it's much better to find a local SEO company to help you out, instead of picking in the other side of the country (or a completely different country).
Consider the competition on page one
Once you've finished your keyword analysis, it's time to take a closer look at just how much competition there is for the various words. If it's a lot of big companies that are in all the top rankings on page one, and you can see that their SEO is spot on, then this is probably not where you should start. Instead, focus on the smaller ones at the beginning, words where competition is minimal and you therefore have a chance of appearing relatively quickly.
You can always, when you have more resources, start allocating a larger budget to SEO and there consider going a little off words with bigger competition.
In the beginning, it is often unnecessary to compete with companies that have spent years on their search engine rankings. Something you just can't compete with as a new webshop unless you have a huge marketing budget.
Use your categories and product pages
Instead of creating a bunch of new landing pages for your keywords, you could, in many cases, use your existing category structure when talking about webshops. For example, if you sell clothes, a category like socks could easily be used to go for words like quality socks, fashionable socks or men's socks, depending on what makes the most sense in your setup. For some keywords you will most likely still have to do a new landingpage.
In many cases, you could use different categories (and filter pages) for the pages you SEO optimize for certain keywords. If it is a brand new website or webshop, it is important that you compare your keywords with the category structure from the start, so that this makes sense. It not only saves you a bunch of time, it's also a great way to do SEO for webshops.
Create landing pages where needed - both for SEO and for Google Ads
There will not be all cases where a category will be the best choice for a landingpage, for example men's clothing - Christmas gift idea, or black friday socks, here you need to create different landing pages, which you target to the most relevant keywords.
These are things like headlines, title tags, image tags, and page content that need to be optimized so that your webshop comes up among the first results. If these are not things you think can handle yourself, hire an seo agency for the job. This oftens give you the best result, but can be pretty expensive in some cases.
Core Web Vitals - part of your SEO here in 2021
In the summer of 2021, a new concept for many - Core Web Vitals was introduced by Google and subsequently used as part of Google's algorithm for the search engines. Now it is therefore important that you also think about things like usability/UX, speed and page stability when you get your website or webshop developed. If you have a slow, or unusable website, not only will you miss out on sales because customers are not happy, but you also risk missing out on sales because Google is not happy, and thus not giving your site the ranking it might have.
That's a bit about SEO for web shops. The most important thing to remember if you have a webshop and we're talking search engine optimization, is that you don't use product texts (images are perfectly fine) from the manufacturers, but make your own unique texts. That's the typical SEO mistake I often see on a webshop nowadays. Hopefully this little blog here gave you a few ideas about SEO for webshops and how you can improve your rankings on the search engine so that your online shop becomes more visible and get's all the good traffic. See you next time with my article on how to improve your traffic with Google Ads and Google Shopping.
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