Guide To Local SEO and Ecommerce SEO
Optimizing an eCommerce website for major search engines is much different than SEO for other types of websites such as corporate websites, local websites, and news sites.
We will learn more about What are Local SEO and E-commerce SEO and how are they different?
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| SEO Strategy - Search Engine optimization Tips |
What is Local SEO?
The acronym SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, so Local SEO is Local Search Engine Optimization.
Did you know that 49% of local searches are conducted without a specific business in mind?
Major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing/MSN, recognize that search is the principal way that people look for information about local businesses online. That's why it is very important especially for small businesses to have an SEO site (Search Engine Optimized) that can easily be found.
SEO is the process used to enrich the content and keyword relevancy of your site on the Internet. By implementing Local SEO, your site is ranked higher on the result pages when someone searches for keywords relevant to the goods and services that you provide.
Local SEO takes this concept one step closer to home. Using geo-targeting for your business, your online listing and website will be in front of the people that are most likely to buy your product or services - those customers that are physically located near you.
- Clients will find your site while looking for relevant products and services.
- 85% of consumers search for local businesses online
- Improves your rankings on Google
- Improves your local brand name recognition
- People are likely to trust a local name
Local SEO Strategies For Small Businesses
1. Create Local Places Pages.
Make sure that you have a local business page for all three major search engines (meaning you’ll have three different listings and dashboards to manage). You can visit here for Bing Places and here for Yahoo Local to get started. You can visit here to get started with Google My Business. All you will need to do is fill out your business information such as location, phone number, hours, etc. and then you’ll be all set with an account.
2. Optimize and Properly Categorize Your Page.
Most local search engines offer you the ability to place your business into 2-5 categories to help them understand what your business is all about.
According to Moz Local, search engines will “not display a business that is not categorized, or even worse, mis-categorized for a particular set of keywords.”
Adding appropriate categories related to your business correctly is actually one of the most crucial steps to optimizing for local search.
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| Local SEO Strategies |
3. Accurate Business Citations.
Always make sure all of your business information is filled out and have a consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data for your company across all online listings.
Your business might have already been listed somewhere by someone else, but don’t panic! All you need to do is claim your business listing, often referred to also as a citation.
You can claim a citation by first looking to see if there is another business by the same name with the same location. A few tips:
- Use a tool like Yext or Localeze to help see where your company’s local listings are found online.
- Consider using Google MapMaker to search for your business and phone number to help you see if there are any duplicate listings.
- Search for various names of your business. If you already have a listing created, that information is gathered from around the web so it could be incorrect!
4. Online Reviews
Reviews are quick and easy ways for online customers to decide which link they want to click.
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| Online Reviews and Ratings |
There are many different ways to improve your number of reviews. You don’t want to publish any fake reviews or offer any gifts for those giving you reviews (you want them to be natural), but you can put a button on your webpage so it’s easy to get started for site visitors, prompt visitors to leave a review after purchasing something or visiting a particular landing page, or actually talk with people in your store or company about leaving a review.
5. Quality Photos.
Optimize your online listing. When people are searching for local businesses, they want to see photos. Most local accounts including Google+ Local allow you to upload at least 10 pictures. Your goal should try to be to have that many photos uploaded. It’s also important to take photos of your actual store or building, both inside and out, and even take pictures of your products. Your logo does work, but it’s always best to have an actual picture of the company building as your main photo.
All you have to do to upload photos is visit your local listing and click a little link that says “add photos.” It’s as easy as that.
6. Optimize Your Website.
Part of local search is your actual website as well as what is being said about your site around the web. It’s not just your local listings and pages.
Make sure you have your contact information and preferably a phone number somewhere on your website. It’s also important to try and include city or regional keywords wherever possible and write content that is specific to your local area. It’s also a good idea to reach out to these organizations to establish these connections.
The more people you can connect with - local forums and organizations, etc. The better chance you have that they might visit your website and hopefully link back!
What is Ecommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO takes search optimization to a whole new level. While most websites are rather static or constant, whereas ecommerce websites are always going through numerous changes, ranging from modifications in product listing to content updates. Taking into account all such dynamics and transform your website into a powerful trading platform.
With the rate of online sales increasing 16% in 2013 and 17% in 2014* there is a huge market for retailers to move from bricks and mortar stores over to E Commerce.
Ecommerce is the art of selling online. You have an idea, you have great products to sell, what next? An online store is the answer to sell online. E-commerce SEO is quite challenging and much more than just having an online presence.
In order to sell online, you need to make sure that customers can find you. But this can only be done through the right SEO strategy.
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| Ecommerce SEO |
Benefits Of Ecommerce SEO
E Commerce stores have huge potential to attract visitors from search engines (SERP's). Google suggests that the first interaction for an online purchase is most frequently through organic search*.
With the substantially number of opportunities that an online store has to attract new visitors through search engines, given their high volume of web pages, content and the varied number of search terms that they could rank for.
Missing the opportunity to ensure that your online store is optimized for search engines, would be to miss the top marketing stream for most E Commerce stores.
SEO Tips for E-Commerce Stores
- Find Effective Keywords: Make good use of long-tail keywords as well, which can attract the type of traffic you want, thereby leading to a higher conversion rate.
- Be Cautious of Duplicate Content: Even before coding begins, ensure your web developers avoid the potential for duplicate content. The more control you have over your site’s content, the better your chances of landing the top spot in search results.
- Use Strategic Keywords in Anchor Text: Don’t use the same anchor text repeatedly throughout your site, or you could be penalized. While variety is important, so is good use of keywords. You may also want to consider using important keyword links in your product descriptions that will take the visitor to similar products you sell.
- Make Your URL Structure Easy for Search Engines to Crawl: Proper structuring of your URLs will also make your visitors’ experience much more pleasant. The better the experience, the higher the chances of keeping them on your website for longer. And that increases their likelihood of making a purchase. You want your website to be loved by the search engines, but you want to be sure your visitors love it too!
- Write Up Catchy Product Descriptions: Keep it unique and write up your own descriptions that feature relevant keywords to help make them more search-engine friendly.
- Optimize Your Product Images: Make sure to add relevant keywords into the ALT tags and IMG tags of your images. Ideally, each keyword you choose for each particular image should be as relevant as possible so that every ALT tag and IMG tags associated with each image is unique.
- Leverage Google Ads: Recent research from Google has shown that 89 percent of paid clicks don’t necessarily transfer over to organic clicks, so make sure Google ads are used properly in addition to your SEO efforts. Try to take advantage of cheaper cost-per-clicks ads to make the most of them.
- Check to See if Traffic is Being Converted Into Sales: Make good use of Google Analytics to track your traffic. This tool will help you find out where your traffic is coming from, the demographic most likely to convert, where your marketing efforts are working (and not working), and profit increases generated through your SEO efforts.
- Make it Easy For Your Visitors to Find Your Product Pages: Make it simple and effortless for your visitors to land on product pages by ensuring links to them are found on the home page and other relevant pages within your site. This will even make it easier for search engines to find them.
- Avoid Broken Links: Imagine your experience when you’re browsing through a particular website of interest. You find something fascinating and want to read more. You click the link provided only to be greeted with, “Page 404 Not Found.” How frustrating is that? You surely wouldn’t want the visitors to your website encountering the same problem.
- You can use tools like Screaming Frog or the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress to check your website for broken links and to optimize your site for both visitors and the search engines
Difference between an eCommerce SEO and a Local SEO
Local SEO: Local SEO is focused on providing results that are relevant to a searcher based on their current location.
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| Ecommerce SEO vs Local SEO |
Ecommerce SEO steps includes most of the Local SEO techniques such as:
- Descriptive, clean product URL (yoursite.com)
- A useful breadcrumb trail to help users find what they’re looking for
- Optimized images
- Heading tags: H1, H2, etc.
- Consistent NAP (name, address, place) on all pages
- Deep internal links to product pages
- Links to important product or category pages from the homepage
- Relevant rich snippets to showcase your products in the SERP’s: You can use product names and prices, product availability and reviews and ratings, to name just a few. Here’s a great overview of how to use rich snippets on your ecommerce site.
Listed below are the differences between Ecommerce SEO and Local SEO:
- Local SEO is focused on optimizing web pages for local searches for a single location or region whereas eCommerce site may be focused on single or multi locations.
- Ecommerce SEO includes strategies for optimizing a lot of content compared to Local SEO site.
- Ecommerce sites includes optimizing category pages & structure whereas local business will be focusing on their services page for a specific region
- Ecommerce Internal Linking & Cross Linking techniques are little complex compared to local business sites
- Ecommerce sites are always backed up with a robust CMS platform such a Shopify, Magneto, Bigcommerce, etc http://www.cio.com/articl
e/24494... - A ecommerce site can contain more than 1000 products and may have dynamically generated URL's based on user queries. URL cleanliness is an overarching problem with e-commerce sites, as most have dynamically generated URLs rather than (or in addition to) static, keyword-relevant URLs. Compared to ecommerce sites a local site can be simple HTML pages, or a WordPress platform and not restricted to be backed by a CMS. (while it is preferable nowadays)
- A ecommerce site should be 100% safe as customers put their identity and financial data in your hands. You must reassure them that it’s safe. Adding SSL/Visa/other security and encryption standards or certificates. While Google is in still in talks about adding a "https" as a ranking factor so currently it is not of an importance for Local SEO.
- In ecommerce site you have to deal with Out-Of-Stock items and needs to be constantly updated
- You have to deal With products pages with little or no unique content as some products are almost identical but exist in different colors or sizes while handling a ecommerce site.
An additional difference would be the SEO pricing packages, a local SEO package would be cheaper compared to ecommerce SEO package.
Useful links:
E Commerce SEO Service Company Mumbai.
Ecommerce and SEO is the ultimate combination of 2 of the more intricate and complex processes in the world of online business. Major search engines such as Google taking hundreds of factors into consideration for SEO and E Commerce sites generally having hundreds to thousands of pages for SEO consideration. You should ensure your E-commerce site is well optimized can be a time complex and time consuming task.
At SEO Information Technology, our SEO Expert team have the skills and experience to ensure the task is as effective and painless for you as possible. Our Ecommerce SEO Consultant is all conducted in house at our offices in Mumbai, INDIA. We have ensured this is the case so we are able to exercise a high level of quality control in the work provided by our Ecommerce SEO service.
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| Ecommerce SEO Company Mumbai |
SEO Information Technology - Ecommerce SEO team have experience of working with:
- Woo commerce
- Presta Shop
- Magento
- Opencart
- OScommerce
By also being a Full Service Online Marketing Agency in Mumbai INDIA, the SEO department have the support of our developers, graphic designers, PPC marketers, and more, meaning that work can be completed quickly and efficiently without having to ask our clients to source their own services that will allow effective SEO to be carried out.
Our E Commerce SEO Service is provided at an affordable cost
While Ecommerce SEO is a complex and detailed process, SEO Information Technology have developed our Internet Marketing Services to a high level of efficiency. This allows us to offer our services at great prices. Every online campaign is bespoke due to the multiple different possibilities for the requirements within campaigns.
However we are happy to provide a free, no obligation quote, along with a brief analysis of your site and SEO status.
