When it comes to developing strategies aimed at increasing the number of clients online, everyone quickly understands that simply launching a web store is just the half of the battle. What matters most is that it takes a lot of effort to detect your web store as deserving the top spots, since search engines are ruled by complex algorithms. To boost your eCommerce business via SEO, you need to know and follow certain rules related to optimizing your web store and also involve bots with necessary signals. Have you ever wondered how to implement it correctly? Companies will spend $65 Billion on SEO in 2016, much of it will be wasted. Keeping that in mind, how to avoid such a foreseeable failure in distributing company resources?
Let’s review the top-of-the-line eCommerce trends you may want to use to benefit in your entrepreneurship journey:
1 Out-of-the-box SEO is improving.
The leading platforms providing comprehensive tools for developing different kind of web resources tend to get their clients covered upon that matter. WordPress offers plugins allowing to handle on-site SEO by simply filling out corresponding text boxes. Magento 2 SEO is full of useful features that are available as a part of basic functionality. Keep in mind that Magento 1.X has certain SEO flaws though. BigCommerce, PrestaShop and Shopify also are working on developing various SEO features of their platforms.
2 Content marketing is the thing that’s IN now.
2016 is the year of long-form content. People prefer to have access to all information the can possibly get to, so that they can pick what is right or wrong for them and what they want to focus on. Your aim to simplify searching process to allow customers to find necessary information. One of the good examples of successful long-form content implementation is Amazon. Its product pages are jam-packed with information on features, flowery descriptions and specifications. Long-form content makes you look more professional in your area, increases engagement and sharing, improves your search engine results page (SERP) rank.
Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests that up to 10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic. That’s why today we’re introducing new search results to help users find in-depth articles.
Pandu Nayak, technical staff member at Google and creator of the Panda algorithm update.
So, Google defines long-form content (1200 words and more) as in-depth articles.
Avoid the middle. According to Kevin Delaney, the editor-in-chief of business news site Quartz, articles that range between 500 and 800 words are least likely to be successful.
Quality Over Quantity. Content on your website must occur in naturally flowing sentences. Visitors easily detect “fluff” and quickly leave such resources, which is taken as a bad sign by Google and leads to decreasing SERP rank of your web store.
Offer a summary of your article at the very top to allow visitors get the gist without reading the whole thing. Break up your long-form text sheet with relevant high quality images to make the page look more appealing.
And the last but not the least: your content needs an effective keyword strategy and a great title that can spark the interest of your potential customer.
3 Social shareability.
Social media activities have a direct impact on how much money you make. Online Marketing survey has shown that social media marketing is the hottest tactic. 52% of marketers currently see stable positive ROI from social media activities.
96% plan to increase their social media marketing budget or keep it the same, and 65% believe social media will become more important in the next 5 years.
Over 90% of participants actively use Facebook as a marketing channel with just over half listing Facebook as their most positive ROI social media channel.
Encourage people to share your content, give them a reason to follow up with information they got from you. How-to posts or tutorial videos usually work really good because visitors want to share it with their friends, families, or coworkers. Identify the true value that your brand can offer and determine how you can present that to your users in a way to make it relatable to their everyday realia. Include statistics in your social posts as it is a wonderful method of boosting sharing. Practice proves that content which includes quantitative data gets shared more frequently, so relevant data drives clicks and increases engagement. Use vivid images in your posts, it captures user’s attention and increases the likelihood of reading your content and sharing it with others.
4 Video content rules the world.
Latest studies shows that video content is outperforming practically every other piece of content. It drives high engagement of target audiences and moves them to purchase products and services. Forrester Research demonstrates that video is worth 1.8 million words per minute of text.
Video content becomes a new gold standard as a content marketing tool for marketers to build brands, demonstrate expertise and sell product.
- Video’s impact is exponential, video ad sharing has multiplied over 63 times in the past decade.
- 195.6 million Americans watched digital videos last year, notes Statista;
- 84 percent of Internet traffic will be video content by 2018, says Cisco;
- People watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube daily, generating billions of views; and
- Getting a page one listing on Google Search increases 53 times with video, finds Forrester Research.
Video became more accessible. Its’ production becomes cheaper. You can implement your video marketing ideas in many ways: shoot reviews, brand stories, customer testimonials, show product or service in action, use cases, tutorials, show some backstage activities (your team work, production process, new initiatives), showcase content from events where.
How video can make benefits for SEO?
There are two types of video SEO:
** Create a video and post it on YouTube. Google ranks YouTube higher than other content options. Rising views of your video content on YouTube moves up your search engine rankings. Also the call to action in your video will attempt to direct traffic back to your website. ** Host the video on your site (i.e., not YouTube). In this case your video and supporting text will help the page itself to move up the ranking pages.
5 Mobile optimization. It’s eCommerce mantra of nowadays.
Mobilegeddon Google update in 2015 significantly decreases ranking of websites that did not have a mobile version by April 21, 2015. Folks will easily find mobile optimized websites being relevant, high quality search results adopted for their devices.
Google literally hates and avoids mobile-unfriendly web stores. Year by year Google has been making penalties for such sites harsher.
Google accepts 3 types of configuration for mobile site:
Mobile is on the rise. M-Commerce grows day by day.
Worldwide mobile commerce revenues amounted to 96.34 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 and are set to surpass 693 billion U.S. dollars in 2019.
Google research shows that 90% of multiple device owners switch between screens to complete tasks online. Mobile sessions make up more than half of all site traffic in 2015. To lure mobile visitors, your web store should be mobile-optimized. The use of responsive design will create a smooth mobile experience that boosts conversions and sales. If you still haven’t optimized your store for mobile devices we have good news for you, it’s not as complicated as it used to be even several years before. Most of the new website themes have a built-in mobile scalability. If you run the store on Magento, find more details on our guide How to Make Magento Mobile Friendly.
