Essential tools for an SEO expert

The sphere of eCommerce and delivery of goods has risen well because of the coronavirus. If you just started to promote your eCommerce, this article is for you. We analyze five main tools that should be included in your promotion strategy: contextual advertising and SEO. These five tools will help you build a strong sales funnel.

Contextual advertising to promote your online store

Contextual advertising is a way to promote your online store in Google advertising systems. With its help it is possible:

• quickly put the first lead on a new site or draw attention to the fresh promotions;
• hook up with already “warm” users looking for something specific.

Before setting up advertising campaigns in Google Ads, you need to set up the analytics for the site – to start Google Analytics accounts and connect the site there. Then accounts for advertising and analytics should be connected.

Advertising in search

It’s a hunt for warm leads, who have an emerging demand. For example, a person wants to buy a car and types in a search query “Buy a Chevrolet Camaro in Denver”.  If you promote a car showroom and set up an ad with such a keyword and a Denver target, then your ad will appear in one of the advertising blocks in the search results – at the top or bottom of the page.

Also note the third block, with product cards on the right at the top. These are trading campaigns – a specific format of Google Ads, which is great for promoting your eCommerce store. To create them, you need to have an account in the Google Merchant Center and link it with an account in Google Ads.

You need to understand that paid advertising in the search – does not guarantee that people will see it. To request about Camaro may fit not only your ad, but also 20 similar from competitors. In this case, the advertising system will arrange an internal competition:

• will determine which ads best fit the characteristics of the user;
• look at the quality of sites to which the ads refer;
• will take into account the maximum price click you set in the settings.
• The ads will be distributed as a result of this contest. Winners will be at the top, losers will be at the bottom or will not be included in search results at all.

You don’t have to spend huge budgets and compete with the giants of the market to get to the top. To do this, you need to work more narrowly – try promotion on low-frequency keys, create ads based on their characteristics: geography, price category, some unique features. Do not forget about working on the quality of the site. You definitely need great staff to cope with task. Other things being equal, the search engine will prefer the user-friendly site, which is quickly loaded and regularly updated.

How to promote an online store with SEO

SEO is a comprehensive work on the website of your online store. Its main goal is to get organic traffic from the search, which is to show up on the front pages of the issue for free. I will tell you how to promote your online store step by step using SEO technologies.

• Determine the competitiveness of the topic.

There is a risk that your topic is too competitive, and you should not invest a lot of resources in SEO, because it will not be possible to get to the first pages of the search.

If the topic is really competitive, do not give up. Make an emphasis on other ways to promote the eCommerce store: try to work with low-frequency keys and narrow targeting in contextual advertising, start a social network, ask your customers to tell about you to their friends.

• Gather a semantic core

Semantic core is a collection of all words and phrases that users will hypothetically look for you. You collect this selection, distribute it into groups, and groups – on the content of different sections and pages of the site, that is, place in the text of articles, descriptions and tags to products. Thus, search engines understand whether the user request to give a specific page on your site.

• Build a site according to the semantic structure

Use the created semantic core to create a website structure or modify an existing resource. Develop a structure according to clusters and place collected requests on the appropriate pages.

• Work on website usability

Search engines have not ranked pages filled with sheets of SEO texts for a long time. Take a look at the top of any search query: there are likely to be convenient, clear and useful sites.

This “humanity” of the site is measured by the term “usability”. The easier and more convenient in your online store to find the right product and place an order, the higher usability.

• Use the micro layout

The micro layout is a way to make your site more structured and understandable for search engines. These are ordinary tags that are written in the HTML code of the site and tell the search engine where the information is on the page.

For SEO promotion of your online store, you will need to master its Offer, Product, Review, Rating and SearchAction tags.

There is another type of micro layout – OpenGraph. You need it to make links to your site look attractive in social networks, then they will be more often shared and transitions will be more.

• Get rid of doubles

Duplicates are the same pages on different addresses. If the site has duplicates, it blurs the picture for a search robot: it is difficult to determine which of the copies to index. This leads to problems with indexing and possible sanctions by search engines.

You can find duplicates for free. Try Screaming Frog SEO Spider – it will give you a list of all URLs of the site and mark where Title and Description tags are repeated. These pages will be the expected takes.

• Check the site for errors

Errors are technical problems, including indexing. For SEO promotion of online store, indexing is important, so such problems must be found and resolved. They can be detected by the free tool Google Search Console. You can see all the existing problems in the “Coverage” report.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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