How To Use SEO and Content To Dominate Your ECommerce Competition

Are you an eCommerce business owner searching for an edge to help you gain a foothold in your industry? Something to help you dominate the competition and attract more customers? What if we said you already have two powerful tools to accomplish this task: SEO and content strategy? Still, knowing these resources exist is only half the battle. The other half is where our webinar, “How To Use SEO & Content To Dominate Your ECommerce Competition,” comes in.

In this post, we’ll share some top takeaways from our expert-led session, including why SEO and content are essential for eCommerce success, how to master eCommerce SEO fundamentals, and real-world examples of winning strategies. Get ready to transform your eCommerce game and leave the competition in the dust!

• ECommerce businesses are prioritizing SEO and content marketing now more than ever.
• Content marketing has evolved over the years.
• Search engines like Google are getting better at analyzing content.
• Search engines can be one of the best ways to bring new people to your website and find new customers — IF SEO and content are done right.

As eCommerce continues to grow and become more competitive, it’s becoming increasingly clear that SEO and content marketing are essential for success. Businesses prioritizing these strategies will likely see the greatest results, as search engines like Google evolve and improve at analyzing content. That said, it’s important to remember that success in this area requires a strategic and long-term approach, focusing on producing high-quality content that resonates with your target audience and using SEO best practices to ensure your content is discoverable by search engines.

What Is SEO?

“SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:

• Products you sell
• Services you provide
• Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience

The better your pages’ visibility in search results, the more likely you will be found and clicked on. Ultimately, search engine optimization attracts website visitors who may become customers, clients, or an audience that keeps returning.

According to Lumar, “Search engines work by crawling hundreds of billions of pages using their own web crawlers. These web crawlers are commonly referred to as search engine bots or spiders. A search engine navigates the web by downloading web pages and following links on these pages to discover new pages that have been made available.”

What key factors does Google look at when generating results?

• Meaning
• Relevance
• Quality
• Usability
• Context

SEO can be broken down into 3 main categories:

• Technical SEO
• Onsite SEO
• Offsite SEO

What Google gauges: Quality, Usability

Examples of technical SEO include:

• Website Infrastructure
• Content and product categorization
• Internal linking
• HTML Tags: Meta, Header, Alt Text
• Mobile-first responsive design
• Page Speed

Onsite SEO includes:

• Page content
• Product Content
• Blog

What Google gauges: Relevance, Quality

Examples of offsite SEO are:

• Social Media
• Guest Posting
• Product Reviews
• Links back to your onsite content

Content SEO refers to creating content that helps web pages to rank high in search engines. It includes everything to do with a site’s writing and content structure. This kind of SEO is important because search engines, such as Google, read your website, so the words you use on your site determine whether it ranks in results pages. Of course, your website should be well-designed with a great user interface, and all the technical stuff that makes the site rank in Google should also be covered. But without quality content, your business doesn’t stand a chance in search engines.
And quality content matters now more than ever!
According to Google’s 2022 helpful content update: “Google Search is always working to better connect people to helpful information. To this end, we’re launching what we’re calling the ‘helpful content update’ that’s part of a broader effort to ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, in search results.”
Here are some of the best places to implement content SEO on your website:

• Home page
• Category pages
• Product pages
• Landing pages
• Blogs and articles

And here are some ranking factors in content SEO:

• Keywords and keyword research
• Target audience
• Keyword optimization
• Anchor text and hyperlinks
• Content design and formatting

Now that you have a deeper understanding of content SEO and its nuances, it’s time to implement what you’ve learned. One good place to start is defining your target audience. Who are your customers? What words and phrases would they use in search engines to look for your product or services? Research to see which keywords perform the best. Keyword research is a major component of our next section: keyword optimization.
Keyword optimization, or keyword analysis, identifies and selects specific words and phrases people use when searching for content online. Then, you can strategically add those words to website content, meta tags, and other online materials to improve search engine rankings and increase organic traffic to a website.

Here are some quick, useful keyword optimization tips:

• Optimize every landing page, product, and blog post for a specific keyword
• Add keywords to titles and headers
• Use keywords at a 2% rate throughout body text
• Use keywords and keyword variations naturally, as we did in the pictured blog post to achieve results for our client Lux Lampshades

You can also use content SEO for anchor text and hyperlinks. For instance, one way to improve your website’s search engine optimization is to use internal linking, which involves linking to other pages or products on your website optimized for specific keywords. Another way is to use external linking, which is linking to relevant and high-quality sources on other websites. You can see an example of this best practice in the screenshot below of a blog post we wrote for our client Fenix Lighting.

Content SEO is beneficial for optimizing content design and formatting, too. For instance, you can structure your content to be easily scannable or quickly read using a clear font, large headers, short paragraphs, bullet points, and images or graphics. Below is a screenshot of a blog post demonstrating these principles in action.

While using these tips, think about search intent. Are people trying to find a specific piece of information or answer to a question? Either way, make it easy to find!

Combining SEO and content marketing strategies is essential for dominating your eCommerce competition. However, it’s important to remember audience should be your top priority. While optimizing content for search engines can improve your rankings and visibility, your audience will ultimately determine your success. By publishing high-quality content regularly and staying committed to your SEO efforts over the long term, you can expect steady growth in your search engine traffic and, ultimately, in your eCommerce sales.

For help implementing these SEO and content tips for your e-commerce business, turn to Boxwood. Our SEO services drive traffic to your website and help your online business thrive. Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and start dominating your e-commerce competition.