You think you have done the work. You have high-quality photos and blog content on your e-commerce site. There is a lot of interest in your physical store, too. But why isn’t your online store able to generate that many leads? You are counting on it to tide you over during this pandemic, but there’s just something about it that your customers aren’t seeing.
The problem isn’t with the people visiting or ignoring your site; it’s not about them rejecting what your site has to offer. The better question is if they are finding your website in the first place. Do they have the awareness that your site exists? How high or low do you rank on search engine results?
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How can you raise more awareness? Indeed, the old handing of brochures and flyers at the entrance of the grocery store isn’t going to cut it. Your online store needs to expand outside your local market. The primary goal of an online store is to reach more markets. So, whatever kind of traditional marketing you’re thinking of right now, forget about it. When it comes to online stores, there’s only one way to go, and that’s digital.
What Kind of Digital Marketing Can Help E-Commerce Stores?
There are countless ways you can use digital marketing for your e-commerce store. At the core of all these hundreds (if not thousands) of methods are SEO services for e-commerce websites. Search engine optimization or SEO Toronto is the foundation of every successful website. The simple analogy is that for customers to find your site, you have to be on top of the search results page.
There are two ways to do that. One is through organic search results, and the other one is through paid ads. The focus of every website is to attract web customers organically. Meaning, most websites don’t want to invest further in things like pay-per-click advertising. Thankfully, there many ways on how you can do that.
Optimize Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are very effective at ranking a web page. These are keywords that don’t get as much traffic as general keywords. However, they also make up the bulk of search engine queries. It is easier to rank using these keywords than short-tail ones or also known as the fat head keyword.
For example, ranking for the keyword “flowers” is more challenging because there are probably hundreds of thousands of searches for this every month. Ranking for the long-tail keyword “long-stem flowers as a gift” is easier because you’re competing with a couple of thousands of searches. Besides, these keywords are more specific, which means people who are using them are more likely to buy.
Redirect Out-of-Stock Product Pages
In a large inventory, some products will go out of stock. Don’t take these pages down because it will lose any backlinking credits it gained. Also, it will create a 404 page that will hurt your ranking on the search engine. Instead, what you should do is identify the internal links that create 404 pages and redirect these to the appropriate pages.
No, don’t redirect everything to the homepage. Google sees that as a soft 404. Identify a redirect page that’s appropriate for that page. The page should contain similar keywords, categories, and subcategories.
Optimize All Pages
Don’t forget to optimize new product pages. Never let them go live without first optimizing them for the web. The product page should have a title tag and meta description that uses the long-tail keyword, images with alt tags that contain the keywords, H1 heading tag, unique content, and easy navigation.
Create a checklist to follow so that nothing will be missed during the page optimization. Remember that search engines rank each page and not the whole site. Even if you have a good ranking for some of your web pages, that doesn’t mean your customers will visit all pages.
Add User-Generated Content
Your web page should be unique to visitors. One of the ways that can be achieved is for you to add user-generated content. This type of content is big in the industry right now. You can display reviews and recommendations on each product page. That will tell web visitors that they need to check out these products, too. Do you know that 90% of customers admit that reviews influence their purchase decisions?
You can also encourage customers to send you photos of the products they bought from your online shop. Let others see how these products look in real images. That is a great way to earn the trust of the customers.
Organic search results are at the core of every digital marketing strategy. By being consistent with your strategy, you can gain more customers and earn their trust. That is a good starting point to boost your profits.
