E-commerce sites that use dropshipping depend heavily on online traffic to get leads and make more money. It’s important to get enough traffic to keep your sales going, and search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the best ways to do that.
SEO is the process of getting more and better traffic to your website so that it shows up in relevant searches. But how does it work? We’ll talk about the basics of SEO for e-commerce and how it can help your dropshipping business in this article.
How Does SEO Work?
Search engines like Google and Bing use robots called “crawlers” to “crawl” web pages. These “crawlers” move from one site to another to gather information about each page and add it to an index. Algorithms look at the pages you’ve indexed and use thousands of ranking factors to figure out the order in which they should show up for every search query.
Google wants its users to have a quick and easy search experience. That’s why its algorithms are set up to give you the most relevant and reliable pages about what you’re looking for. By optimizing your E-commerce site, you can move up in the rankings and become more visible to the people you want to see it.
Here are a few reasons why SEO is important for E-commerce:
Long-term benefits. When you stop paying for pay-per-click ads, you stop getting their benefits. Even though it could take months before you see real results from SEO, the benefits will last for a long time. When your website ranks higher and shows up in search results, you’ll get leads and make money without doing anything.
Bring in traffic that is relevant and good. With good SEO, your dropshipping business will be seen by the people you want to buy from you. Customers will be able to find you when your website is optimized for the right keywords (more on that below).
Helps people trust and believe in you. For a dropshipping business to be successful, both potential and current customers need to trust and believe in it. People think that you are one of the best in your field if you rank higher on Google.
What You Need to Know About Dropshipping SEO
Now that you understand what SEO is and how it can help your dropshipping business, you need to learn the basics. What you need to know about SEO for E-commerce is as follows:
Keyword Research
You can’t move up in search engine results if you don’t know what to rank for. Keyword research is the process of finding out what your target audience types into Google when they want to find something. Once you have a list of keywords, you can use them in your content in a smart way to make it more visible online.
You can use tools like Soovle, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to find keywords. You can use the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension to find related keywords or long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are phrases that people are likely to use and that are more specific. For a more targeted result, you can also use long-tail keywords in your article.
Keywords Research on Competitors
Besides doing basic keyword research, it also pays to know the keywords your competitors are using. If they are working hard to rank for certain keywords, you may also want to find out what those keywords are. This is a very important part of your strategy for SEO for e-commerce.
You can easily find out what keywords your competitors are using if you use the right tool, like Moz or Ubersuggest. But if you’re just getting started with your dropshipping business, you don’t need to look at the keywords of Shopify or BigCommerce, which are two of your biggest competitors.
Research smaller competitors within your niche. So, the keywords you look for will be related to your dropshipping business. The next step is to copy and paste their domain into your keyword tool, which will show you the keywords they’re ranking for. You’ll know which keywords are best for your niche and which ones are not.
On-Page SEO
Once you know the keywords you want to rank for, the next step is to use those keywords on your website. On-page SEO is the process of improving a website’s search engine ranking by tweaking parts of each page. A good on-page SEO strategy makes it easy for search engines to understand what your page is about while they are indexing it. When Google knows what’s on your page, there’s a better chance that your website will show up in search results that are relevant to it.
Here are some suggestions for how to do on-page SEO right:
Make useful content for your visitors to keep them on your site.
Write long descriptions of products (about 1000 words) and include the right keywords. But don’t put too many keywords in your content or product descriptions.
Your pages should have all the information your customers need, like how to return items, your terms of service, shipping options, and so on.
Put the main keyword in the URL, alt tags for images, meta descriptions, and subheadings.
Content Creation
Creating high-quality, relevant content is important for SEO for e-commerce because it brings in organic traffic and builds trust and credibility in your industry.
The first thing you need to do is make content about your product niche. This can help improve your organic traffic, get you more leads, and increase the number of people who buy from you. It’s safe to assume that when your target audience wants to buy something, they’ll look for it on Google first.
If you have a lot of high-quality content about the products you sell, your site will rank higher for the people you want to reach. Inform users about how the product can help them, how to buy it, etc. If you give your website visitors high-quality content, they are more likely to become loyal customers.
You can start by writing 800 to 1000 words per week on a blog. Once you know how to write content, you can use the “skyscraper” method, which involves finding niche-related topics that do well on search engines and social media. You use the content to make something better than what already exists.
Content Marketing
After making content, the next step is to tell your target audience about what you’ve written. Joining groups on Facebook or Reddit is one way to do this.
Let’s say you sell skincare products. By joining Facebook groups about health and beauty, you can share your blogs with your target audience. But don’t send them a lot of your content as soon as you join. Building relationships with your audience is a part of content marketing. Spend some time getting to know people before you share your content.
Here are two ways to get the word out about your content:
Link Building
SEO and your search engine rankings are directly affected by how many links you have. Google thinks that a piece of content is good if it has a lot of good links to it. This makes the domain authority (DA) and rankings go up.
Some White Hat techniques you can use to build content are:
Broken link building
Get in touch
Guest blogging
Emails are used for content marketing.
Pay-Per-Click Ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a way to advertise in which you, as an advertiser, pay a fee each time someone clicks on your ad. PPC can be started the same day, which is different from SEO.
When their dropshipping store isn’t making any money, many marketers make the mistake of buying ads. To find the right targets, you need to know a lot about your customers, such as the pros and cons of your PPC campaign, the keywords your customers use, their demographics, etc.
Ask a few of your website visitors to take part in a survey. Update your survey and look at the results often, and you’ll get a sense of how people find your website over time.
Website Speed
SEO is hurt by a slow website because it hurts the user experience. Slow websites lead to more people leaving and less people buying. SOASTA Research says that your website’s bounce rate can be as high as 90% if it takes more than three to four seconds to load.
Here are some ways to make sure your site loads quickly:
Make the images on your website smaller and bigger.
Use Pingdom or Google Page Speed Insights to check how fast your website is.
Use a web hosting package that is fast and easy to use.
Use as few plug-ins, JavaScript, and CSS files as possible.
Don’t use redirects.
Dropshipping Website Structure
Dropshipping websites need to be set up in the right way for E-commerce. If your SEO for e-commerce strategy is right on, search engines will be able to find and index the pages quickly. It will also help speed up the site because a well-structured site needs less code.
Most e-commerce sites have more pages than other sites, so it’s important to set up the right structure from the start. If you don’t, it will be easy for your customers to get lost on your site. The three-click rule is one way to keep the attention of your customers.
The three-click rule says that visitors to a website shouldn’t have to click more than three times to find the information they need. This makes sense, since users often get angry when they can’t find what they want quickly.
Keep in mind that you need to put web pages that are already on Google into the right categories. Make sure your old URL has a 301 redirect to your new one. If it doesn’t, you won’t rank as well in search results and your Domain/Page Authority will go down.
The Bottom Line
Dropshipping is one of the most profitable businesses right now, especially since many people are shopping online because of the pandemic.
If you follow the advice in this article, you’ll be able to get the most out of your business by using SEO for e-commerce to expand your reach and make more money.
We have just one more piece of advice for you. You already know that if you want your dropshipping business to be successful in the long run, you need a supplier who can find you high-quality products and ship them quickly to your customers all over the world.