You’re a savvy eCommerce business owner. You understand that the key to increasing your sales is to make sure consumers can find your product. You know the first step toward increasing your site’s visibility is by improving your search engine rank. You know how important keywords are, and you’ve even compiled a list of keywords you’d like to use.
But do you know how to incorporate those keywords so that they actually bring consumers to your site? Here are some of the best ways to use SEO keywords on your eCommerce site.
KEYWORD PROMINENCE
Where a keyword appears on your page is just as important as how often a keyword is used.
Placing a keyword in a prominent position on your page tells search engines that this keyword is important to this particular page. Titles are the most prominent place on a page for a keyword to be located and tell a search engine immediately what a page is about.
A simple key to keep prominence in mind is to remember that the most prominent place for a keyword to be is at the beginning. If your keyword is at the top of a page, it’s more prominent than if it were placed at the bottom. If your keyword is at the beginning of a sentence, it’s more prominent than if it were placed at the end. Mindful keyword positioning will help search engines learn what your page is about.
AVOID OVERSTUFFING
You might be tempted to start filling your website with pages of content featuring your keywords. The more times a keyword is featured on a website, the further it will move up in a search engine’s ranking, right? Not exactly.
It might seem counterintuitive, but using a keyword too many times can actually decrease your page’s ranking. Search engines don’t like it when a keyword features too heavily compared to the rest of a page’s content. For example, if you have 300 words on a page and you mention your keyword ten times, that’s a high keyword density compared to the rest of your content. On the other hand, if you have 1,000 words on a page and your keyword is only used once, that’s not enough to make search engines take notice. The ideal keyword density is around 1-2%, and figuring out the density of your own pages is a fairly simple formula:
Number of times the target keyword appears / Number of words on a webpage x 100 = Keyword density
A good practice when writing content for your website is to write for your readers first. Once you’re finished, use the above formula to figure out how many times your keyword should be used. Then insert your SEO keywords where they make the most sense. Doing so allows you to maintain readability while still improving your rank.
ANCHOR TEXT
Anchor text is a clean piece of reader-friendly text that contains a link to other pages. Common anchor text includes things like “click me” or “click here.” These anchor texts are great for letting users know where you’d like them to go next, but they’re not descriptive or relevant to the page that is being linked to. Using your keywords strategically in anchor text is a great way to improve your search engine rankings. By using your keyword in your anchor text, you tell search engines exactly what your page is about, as well as the page that your anchor text is linking to. It’s a two-for-one bonus!
BACKLINKING
If the keywords you’re targeting are very competitive, it can take many, many pages worth of content to get a search engine to take notice of your site. Instead of building dozens and dozens of pages for your website, you can use your keywords to create a backlinking strategy. Backlinks are pages hosted on another webpage that link directly to your own. Often, websites will use backlinks to further explain a subject or to act as an endorsement. By using backlinks effectively, you can position your eCommerce site as a trusted resource for the products you offer. Unlike keyword stuffing, you can never have too many backlinks. The more external links you have pointing to your web pages, the more important search engines will believe your site is to the keywords in the backlinking content.
These are only a few of the many, many ways you can incorporate keywords on your eCommerce website. As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate already when it comes to day-to-day operations. Why not let a professional digital marketer help you capitalize on all of your hard work? A digital marketing agency understands how to prioritize page optimization, where to naturally include keywords, and what some of the best practices are for improving search engine rankings beyond keywords. If you’d like to see how a professional digital marketer can help increase your sales, schedule a free consultation with Boxwood!
