(JEMSU) an eCommerce SEO Agency

It is easy to get left behind in the fast paced e-commerce world if you don’t have a comprehensive e-commerce SEO and digital advertising strategy.  A well thought out SEO strategy for your ecommerce store will assist your business in rising through organic search rankings.

E-commerce SEO is designed to increase brand presence and drive qualified traffic to your online store by improving your position in the search engine result pages for each product.

Consumers have been migrating from traditional retail stores and to online storefronts to purchase products.  Even when a consumer plans to purchase a product in-store over 80% will go online to research the product first.  To ensure the longevity of your business, e-commerce SEO should be a key focus in your digital marketing strategy if you want to grow and exceed your sales goals.  Global e-commerce retail sales are projected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021.

Google vs Amazon

Selling your products on Amazon.com will cost you from 6% to 25% of sales.  Selling your products directly from your website to consumers saves you 6% to 25%.  As an advertising agency we recommend maximizing all digital channels to enhance your product sales, however, SEO is absolutely critical in protecting your brand, driving traffic and saving you money from paid advertising and CPA (cost-per-acquisition) channels like Amazon.com

Product Keyword Research

Comprehensive product keyword research is critical aspect of ecommerce SEO.  Often terminology that is used by industry members is not the same as what consumers use. The information gap can lead to organizations optimizing for keywords that may not be relevant to the audiences they are looking to target.  Our careful selection of target keywords ensures you are identifying user intent and engaging with customers at the purchasing part of the conversion path.

Competitor Analysis

Nothing is done in a vacuum especially not marketing. Understand how your competitors are optimizing give you an understanding of overlooked opportunities or areas to compete.

On-Page Optimization

Establishing a comprehensive content strategy plays an essential part in making your site easier for search engines to read and more user-friendly. Moreover, a comprehensive content strategy that contains clearly delineated page elements also improves site relevance.

Off-Page Linking Strategy

Link building is still a very important part of proper SEO. Google thinks of links as “votes of confidence”; a vote that the site being linked to is an authority of higher value than the site being linked from.

Site Speed Optimization

Users want a snappy responsive site. Not only does a well performing site convey a positive brand image but assists in convertibility and possibly search engine visibility. Performance benchmarks are widely believed to be incorporated into SEO ranking algorithm. We will analyze load times and page elements to ensure your site loads as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Product Category Optimization

All too often product category pages are littered with boilerplate content. Content that is often shared by hundreds of sites. Aside from the duplicate content issues, often this content isn’t optimized to pull in parallel keywords.  We review category pages identify shortcomings in content and look to augment this content with SEO rich content that is optimized for both the crawlers and users alike.

On-Site Search Analysis

Retailers are always looking for information on customer needs. This information is often directly in front of them if they knew where to look. Analyzing on-site searching behaviors often show short-comings in product portfolios wheres users needs are not met, whether it be an emergence of exotic sizes or newer product styles, skus or selection. We will analyze the on-site search behavior to uncover these useful user nuggets.

Site Usability

Have you ever been on a site that despite have the products that you are looking for is atrocious to navigate? Whether it be menus that are not logical or areas of the site that are disconnected,  inaccessible or difficult to reach. More and more search engines are becoming aware of on-site behaviors, whether it be time on site or pages per session, these metrics are becoming progressively more important to search engine rankings. Having an optimized site architecture is beneficial for both SEO and convertibility.

Driving eCommerce Traffic

Online retailers need to maximize their digital marketing budget to provide the most effective short and long-term returns on their Investments(ROI). Ranking a set of relevant keywords that have high search volume will maximize the e-commerce traffic to your site.

Consumers have become very savvy when shopping and use brick and mortar stores more like showrooms before going online. Customers often Google the product to get the product cheaper or in the color or style they want. This increases the importance of ranking each product category and product on the first page of Google.

JEMSU is a full-service digital marketing agency with the ability to integrate long-term SEO strategy, while in the short term ensuring client visibility.  Our proven e-commerce SEO strategy will get your product ranked as quick as possible in Google, Bing & Yahoo search.

Pro tip:  The most successful e-commerce clients are able to leverage multiple services to get the quickest ROI while paying for SEO.

Top Channels for Driving Consumers to Your eCommerce Website

SEO: Increase the quality and volume of shopping on your website from search engines like Google.

Social Media: Build followers & Engage them on social media platforms to drive existing clients and their friends back to your site.
Google Ads/PPC: Drive qualified traffic straight away by paying to be at the top of search engines like Google with highly targeted campaigns.
Google Shopping/PLA’s: Get your product to show on Google and let your product images do the hard work.

Target Market, Customers & Buyer Personas

With the immense amount of online products available, making sure your business shows up in front of your target market is vital to online success. When creating an effective marketing strategy, it is important to identify your target marketing, target customer and even create multiple buyer personas. This helps to ensure long terms success and growth in the ever-growing e-commerce retail environment. A well researched and implemented SEO strategy will maximize your sales and brand exposure online. If implemented correctly an E-commerce SEO strategy will allow your website to quickly gain visibility in the search results of Google, Bing & Yahoo.

eCommerce Competitor Analysis: What Should I be Looking At?

  • Focus Keywords
  • User Flow
  • Content Quality
  • Industry & Product Authority
  • Category Listings Page
  • Product Listings Page
  • Product Details Page
  • Cart Pages
  • Check Out pages
  • Overall Rankings

Completing an e-commerce competitor analysis can identify the quality and benchmark comparison of pages like homepage, Category listing, product listing, product details, and cart pages, set by top-ranking competitors. You are able to identify keywords and opportunities that may not have come up in the keywords research and mapping of the e-commerce SEO strategy. It’s important to match or exceed the benchmarks set by competitors already in top positions of the Google search results to qualify for top positions and rank as quickly as possible.

Keyword Mapping and Research

Keywords are the lifeblood to any successful SEO strategy. In the absence of demographic information, users are targeted via intent.  Keywords are proxy for intent because after all, users have different keywords searching tendencies based on the stage of the purchasing funnel. To research and identifying the most effective keyword is paramount. Of course, not all keywords are the same.  Users earlier in the funnel utilize keywords that are more informational. These keywords are often more general which serve the purpose for information gathering. As customers/users are more ready to make a purchase their keyword selection changes.

As an E-commerce business, we want to target the customer when they have reached the purchasing stage of the funnel.  A custom tailored SEO plan for your e-commerce site, will create a top-down align for product and category pages and map keywords to the most relevant page for that search query.  Understanding the nuances of a purchase user journey and the respective keywords will say your business time and money. We will identify these opportune keywords and keyword map your site as to ensure your pages are not competing for the same keywords.

Site Architecture Analysis & Optimization

Site Architecture is important we need to distinguish the different category and product pages. These pages serve separate purposes so the keyword strategy should reflect that.  Capitalizing on specific keywords for each product will allow your business to lead search engine results for each specific product you offer.

Many of the principles of merchandising a physical store are very much applicable to a website. In a physical location, there are clearly delineated sections of the store. Supermarkets have individual aisles. The aisles contain specific product and are arranged in a logical shopper-centric format. The distinctions among the areas make the store easier to shop giving each section specific purposes. Similar to a physical location your website should have individual pages that serve specific purposes.  Pages should be targeting specific keywords and have specific purposes. These principles make your site more user-friendly ultimately improving the convertibility but also increasing site engagement metrics. The secondary notion is utilizing this principle should minimize the possibility of individual pages competing for the same keywords. When multiple pages compete for the same keywords all the pages lose.

In addition to using targeted keywords to escalate the SEO viability of your product, writing long descriptions of your products will also help.  When researching competitors, it also helps to look at similar items on large scale internet retailers and mimic their descriptions. For example, a simple item like a blender might have well over a thousand word description attached to it.  Results might show that this blender then has a higher search return rate and subsequently a higher purchase rate over similar products that have lessened or more lackluster descriptions on their respective retail sites.

User Experience & Optimization

On-site user experience has a large & growing influence on SEO.  Your website is representative of your business. You can not expect users to make the intended onsite actions if your website is not logically structured or laid out. Consistent sessions with low onsite engagement will inevitably negatively affect your site rankings & visibility.  Additionally, problematic user experience will affect your bottom line. Recent studies have found 55% of users will abandon your site If they can’t find what they’re looking for. Having pages with a clear purpose will allow you to progress users down your conversion funnel. Business pages must be succinct (say what you want to say but no more), valuable (don’t weigh your page down with irrelevant content), and clear call to action (guide the user).  A web page that is confusing, poorly designed, or has ineptly described products will quickly fall to the bottom of the search results and thus only succeed in losing business to competitors.

Client-First Strategy

When building or optimizing a site we like to use a technique we refer to as client-first strategy. The principle behind this is throughout our processes we remain cognizant of the end user and its usability.  A common pitfall when developing a site is developers are so hyper-focused on aesthetics or what they prefer layout wise that they fail to acknowledge the user’s needs. We take a systematic approach utilizing prior testing results, analytics and usability best practices.

  1. Analytics gives us data as to what pages receive the most engagement or are more problematic.
  2. Testing gives us real-world datasets where users are directing what changes to make and not one person’s opinion
  3. UX best practices coupled with a heuristic analysis allows us to make changes that are based on tried basic usability principles.

Denver eCommerce SEO Company

Here at JEMSU, we are aware of the abundance of marketing firms. What differentiates us is our holistic and data-centric approach.  From developing an overall strategy to implementing site layout our decisions are guided by close analysis. We maintain a close relationship with our clients and understand our success is intrinsically tied to your success.  Our familiarity with individual channels gives us an understanding of how to efficiently achieve success and ultimately gain a return on investment. With over 10 years experience in SEO, our Denver e-commerce SEO company provides measurable results. JEMSU is more than capable of tackling any e-commerce platform no matter the size, complexity, or industry.