Many of your clients may think that merely having a website is enough to grow a flourishing online business. But you’ve been in the game long enough to know that Search Engine Optimization is an essential tool that needs to be factored in when planning and creating a website. Sure, building an online presence is easy when you use Wix (can I get an Amen?!), but a true pro will devote time and effort to create a game plan that will be the foundation for long-term growth. When you deal with the web on a daily basis, you know how crucial it is to develop an SEO strategy for your clients (even if they may not be aware themselves).
That being said, your clients and their sites may come in all shapes and sizes. And in the online world, employing a ‘one size fits all’ technique simply won’t work. Of course, the usual recommendations such as mobile optimization, working on your on-page and technical SEO will apply to each and every website. But taking those general elements aside, each website has different conversion goals and KPIs. So whether your client has an online store, a physical shop or an online portfolio, the SEO approach won’t be the same. In this article, we’ve categorized the main three optimization strategies you could run into when dealing with a client’s business, and detailed the SEO nuances for each one of them.
eCommerce SEO
Goal: To drive traffic in order to increase online sales.
Who is it for: Clients that intend to sell items online through their online store.
The major differences:
Conversion oriented
It’s a known fact that the way visitors interact with a website has the power to impact its ranking. Imagine the path a person goes through to go from searching the web to buying online. Let’s say someone googles a certain product, for example ‘geometric golden ring.’ They get to the first page of results, enter a site and don’t click back (low bounce rate). They spend some time browsing through products and clicking through to more pages (time of page increases). They finally select an item, add it to their cart and make their purchase (pages per session increases + conversion goal accomplished). For each stage a searcher goes, positive signals are being ‘sent’ to the search engine. This is exactly why it’s so crucial that an online store is built to convert. This means that the path to the shopping cart and final ‘Thank You for Purchasing’ display screen should be an intuitive, logical and fun experience for the visitor.
More pages
It’s only natural that an eCommerce website has more than several pages. Which is a good thing. Simply by having more pages on your website, the opportunities to rank for one of those increases. More specifically, for an online store, each product can be seen as a different page, with its own dedicated SEO title and URL. The same goes for your category pages. In addition, you can think of different ways of slicing up your category products by product item, or by collection, to be able to increase the amount of pages.
Less text
Let’s face it. A product page isn’t exactly the place to go full-blown Ulysses in terms of content length. However, we do know how much search engines love text. Aside from having more material to crawl, it helps them understand context better so that they can efficiently pull up pages for a relevant search. This is why it’s important to go into detail about a store’s products. Don’t forget to add detailed descriptions for products and include key information, size guides, raw materials used, etc.
Key points for optimization:
Keyword research
Obviously a good SEO strategy starts with a thorough keyword research. Get your customer to give you a thorough list of their inventory, and search for the optimal keywords for the different products and categories. Once you have your keywords, map them out for each page on a simple excel sheet. For each page you want to target one main keyword, and use additional semantically related words within the content. This can appear in the textual content of the homepage, category page or product page as well as the SEO description.
Get reviews
Even before looking up a product online, the first thing someone interested in making a purchase tends to do, is to check the product reviews. This is why it’s a great idea to add them right onto the product page. In addition to increasing credibility for a business and its products, you’re providing another source of unique textual content for Google’s bots to feast their eyes upon.
Provide essential markup
Adding certain markups to an eCommerce website can help search engines understand the context of your pages (i.e. an online store versus a blog). In addition, it can help search engines display a richer snippet for product pages in search results. There are different types of schema markups, and most of them don’t even involve using Velo by Wix to implement. For Wix Stores, the markup is automatically added from the get-go. So nothing to worry about here.
Local SEO
Goal: To drive visitors in order to increase foot traffic or bookings.