3 SEO TRICKS E-COMMERCE SITES OFTEN OVERLOOK

The world of e-commerce is highly competitive. Thousands of niche product sites vie for the clicks of shoppers across the world. In a space where so many competitors jostle for elbowroom at the same table, every edge your site can garner will go a long way.

Most site managers do their fair share of due diligence when it comes to site SEO (search engine optimization). They ensure that a base level of SEO tactics is applied to their e-commerce page. Yet with so much at stake, there are simple things site owners and managers can do to give their site the extra boost it needs to land at the top of the SERPs.

Optimizing e-commerce sites for SEO is different from blogs or company websites. The hundreds or thousands of product pages can create mayhem for SEO game plans. For e-commerce sites, the base level of search optimization doesn’t guarantee traffic. Below are a few strategies many sites often overlook that can give your web store an extra edge.

Ensure Proper Keyword Placement

The placement of your keywords always trumps the frequency. If you stuff too many keywords into your page, you risk being penalized by search engine algorithms. Turn your focus toward ensuring your keywords are in the right location instead.

Google places priority on the beginning of title tags, so this is where you’ll want your targeted keywords. Be sure to include the keyword in the meta description, as well. This will ensure that Google doesn’t choose random content from your page and use it as your description. It’s true that the meta description itself doesn’t affect your ranking, but it’s insanely important when it comes to click-through rates, so don’t neglect it.

URLs, headers, and subheaders rank second behind your page’s metadata. Be sure to include your keywords in these locations as it makes sense to do so. Also, place your keywords throughout the body of the content in a way that reads naturally.

Give Images Context with Alt Text

Many e-commerce sites miss the chance to capitalize on solid image alternative text, or alt text. Alt text is simply descriptive text applied to the images on your site. This text lets the Google web crawlers read your image and give context in relation to the content surrounding it.

Properly written alt text can give your site a leg up on the competition by taking advantage of the popularity of Google’s image search.

This is especially important for e-commerce sites considering the large number of photos included in a typical web store. It’s important that you take the time to add quality alt text to each of your product images. While this is a large undertaking, you’ll definitely see the benefit when you edge out your competition in the SERPs.

Keep in mind, your efforts may be in vain if you don’t include quality alt text. Solid alt text gives a detailed description of the image. Avoid simply stating what the item is; instead, include brand names, item numbers, and other specific descriptions. Most web page crawlers only read about 125 characters of alt text, so keep it short. Take advantage of the alt text by including your keywords but avoid stuffing. You simply want to concentrate on providing context to the picture and incorporate your keyword if logical.

Avoid Duplicate Content

You may have heard that content is king when it comes to building out solid SEO. This is definitely true, but the saying only tackles part of the issue. Original content is truly king. You can have all the content in the world on your site, but if duplicates exist elsewhere on the web, your ranking will suffer drastically.

While you won’t be penalized directly for duplicate content on your page, you will create issues for the search engines when they attempt to index your URL. Duplicate content makes it difficult for the search engine crawlers to determine which URL is most relevant for given keywords.

This can be pretty common for e-commerce sites with vendor-provided product descriptions. Vendor-distributed product descriptions are often copied and pasted onto individual e-commerce stores, creating a vast amount of duplicate content across the web. You should aim to create as many unique product descriptions as possible. This is a big undertaking when you consider many e-commerce sites have hundreds, if not thousands, of products. You may have far too many products to write unique descriptions for each one, and that’s OK. The idea is to avoid page after page without any unique content. Aim to rewrite the majority of your descriptions, and you’ll be off to a good start.

It’s true that e-commerce SEO presents a different set of challenges compared with traditional sites or blogs. The massive amount of moving parts and content can make optimizing your web store extremely difficult. It may be tempting to lay out a basic SEO strategy and consider it good enough, but by taking a few extra steps, you can leverage tactics that many site managers often overlook. If you put in the effort, you’ll see your hard work result in increased traffic.

 SEO HACKS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR CLINIC’S SITE

Search engine optimization is crucial to the success of your website and, therefore, your clinic. The way patients find a doctor today has completely changed from 15 years ago. The majority of patients start their search for a doctor online. In fact, a reported 86 percent of patients conduct an online search before booking an appointment.

The simple truth is this: Your clinic’s online presence matters. You’re missing out if you’re not taking the steps to ensure your site has the best chance of being seen. SEO will get eyes on your site and patients into your clinic. The following SEO hacks will help you do just that. Full disclosure, these “hacks” are simply efficient ways to implement SEO and are in no way gray- or black-hat techniques.

Harness the Power of Video

If you had to guess the second-largest search engine in the world, what would your answer be? Bing? Yahoo? You’d be close, but wrong. YouTube receives over 3 billion searches per month. You should definitely be leveraging the platform to drive traffic to your site.

A clinic YouTube channel is a great way to supplement your site’s original content while also adding value to the user experience. The useful information you can give to potential patients is nearly unlimited. Not only will you deliver great informative content, you’ll have the chance to have your videos indexed on YouTube and within Google search results, which will drive traffic from two huge sources.

Combine JavaScript Tags

Various sites, like Google Analytics, Google+, and Twitter, request to install JavaScript code onto your site to power certain processes. While some of these functions have their usefulness, each one that you install pulls down your site speed. Slower speeds are horrible for SEO and cause your site to take hits with the search engine algorithms.

You can prevent loading time issues by using the free Tag Manager tool from Google. Instead of having your site deploy each snippet of code by itself, enter the code snippets into the tag generator. The tool will give you a uniform, site-wide tag that will deploy the individual JavaScript snippets. Your load times will drastically decrease compared to when your site had to fire each snippet off individually.

Utilize Social Media to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Be sure to monitor social media platforms and forums specific to the medical field. If you see a topic of discussion that constantly seems to be trending, incorporate this conversation topic in your site’s content and blog. This is an excellent way to do keyword research.

Picking up on these conversational trends will boost your site in multiple ways. Being out front of a hot topic or question will help you rank for that particular phrase. By having answers to questions that everyone is asking, you’ll also take steps towards becoming an authority in your field. By keeping your ear out for trending conversations on social platforms, you’ll be well in front your competitors in ranking, in site traffic, and as a thought leader in your field.

Get Rid of the Huge Pictures

Your high-resolution images may be hindering your SEO efforts. Large pictures can drastically slow your page’s loading speed. This not only puts a big dent in your search rankings but also tanks the user experience. No one wants to sit and wait forever for your site to load.

You’ll want to be sure your images are solid in quality, have the correct aspect ratio, have decent resolution, and are the right size to be compatible with various devices. If you’re having trouble spotting large image files that are slowing your load time, use a tool like https://tools.pingdom.com. It will check the files sizes of all the elements on your site and identify any that are unnecessarily large.

Don’t Neglect Your Meta Description

Many digital marketers seem indifferent to their meta descriptions. Since they think the meta description isn’t factored into Google’s algorithm, they haphazardly throw in some characters and move on. Don’t make this mistake for your clinic’s website.

It’s true, Google does not take meta descriptions into account for ranking purposes, but they’re still extremely important. This is the space you get to include your call to action and entice clicks with powerful language, which does affect your rankings. Take the opportunity to write a persuasive, creative description and watch the clicks roll in.

If you thought SEO was just for e-commerce sites, you’ve been missing the mark. Your potential patients are out there, turning to the web in droves to decide which clinic to visit. Take full advantage of the opportunity to optimize your site so that you’ll be there at the top of the results page when they’re ready to click.

UNDERSTANDING HOW SERPS DRIVE BUSINESS SUCCESS

Technology continues to develop at a staggering rate. Almost everything – including marketing – has become digital now. You want your company and your brand to be at par with your competitors, so you build yourself a website too, in order to spread information about your product or service. But just having a website does not guarantee success. You have to consider many other things, one of which is your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking.

What is SERP?

What is SERP, exactly? When a user looks something up in Google, the first page he would see after typing his query and hitting enter is a list of relevant websites to his query, ranked in the order of importance, with the most relevant site on top. This is the search engine results page.

People are impatient. If they do not find what they want in the first few links they click, they would try another search query. This is a fact proven in a study made by Jupiter Research in April 2008. The results showed that the number of users clicking the first few websites on the first SERP increased by 68 percent from 2002 to 2008. Moreover, fewer users looked at the second or third page of the SERP. This is why being on the first page is important. Being on the second or third page of the SERP is equivalent to you losing 90 percent readership from your target market, potential customers and, eventually, profit. You need to ensure that your site ranks high by making it optimized for search as much as possible.

SERP ranking is Important

SERP ranking is important because Google wants to give its customers the most relevant results to their inquiry. The higher your ranking in the SERP listing, the higher the likelihood of people visiting your website. Since Google is a machine that does not have the human capabilities of understanding the context behind images or videos, it can only look at the text information in the site and monitor links to it. Therefore, you need to have content in your site that is optimized for search engines (more commonly known as search engine optimization or SEO).

Factors that Affect SERP Ranking

How do you get to the top of the listing? Here are some of the considerations:

1. Google wants to give its customers the best results, so it takes into consideration the location of the user according to their server. The closer you are to the customer’s server the more likely your site will rank high in the SERP. If the customer is not very specific with the search (for example restaurants in Dallas) then Google will make the assumption that the customer needs something near him and adjusts the SERP ranking of sites accordingly. In order to optimize your website for local search, local SEO will have to be done in order to ensure all elements are present on and off your website.
2. When people look things up, they type their query on the search bar. “Houses for sale” is an example. These are then called keywords. Google sends its spiders to crawl the web and send back to the SERP the websites that contain the keywords.
   

It is for this reason that website owners hire writers and SEO professionals to produce good content with keywords adequately distributed throughout the body of the content. When you plan your content, make sure to come up with good keywords – what your potential customers are most likely to use as keywords when searching a product or service that you offer.

In the past, keyword density was of huge importance. Websites were on a race to churn content teeming with keywords in order to top the SERP listing. However, putting too many keywords – also known as keyword stuffing – made for badly written content, which now leads to penalizing from Google. Therefore, your site must have meaningful content with the keywords and related words sitting prominently in the title and scattered well throughout the text.

3. Links act as recommendations and up votes. When you have other websites linking yours, then Google will think that your site is relevant. As a result, your website will get a higher SERP ranking. However, it is important to get links from trustworthy websites that also rank high on the SERP, not just link spamming from non-related websites.

4. This is the most important factor that will help see your site to the top of the SERP listing. Great content gives valuable information and is written for users, not for search engines.

The better your content is, the more visits you get – and this is something Google can determine. If your site is dynamic with people commenting and linking to it because of good content, then you are sure to get a higher ranking.

5. Social activities. These include shares, likes, and social following. If you need proof about how important this is, you just have to look at your Facebook newsfeed (supposing you have one) and see the content your friends are sharing – videos, articles and what-have-you. Google also takes into consideration the behavior of users. If you have very good content, then it would naturally get shared. Your website will have more traffic because people are talking about it. The more shares your site has, the more credible it becomes. When Google detects rising social activity in your site, it will place higher in the listing.

As with everything else, search engines will continue to change based on the behavior of their users. Naturally, search engines like Google want to provide the most relevant information their users need. By understanding the basics of SEO and SERPs, you can optimize your website to make it rank high on the SERP listing. As a result, your online presence will be strong. This strength will be communicated not only to your existing and potential customers but to search engines as well. Be clever with the use of links and keywords. Write fresh content that people find valuable to read and share. By following these tips, you will have a higher chance of ranking high in the SERP listing and a higher chance of success.