Most dropshipping store owners don’t know how to market their stores and get more people to visit their website in the beginning. They have no idea where to begin. SEO marketing comes into play here.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a great marketing tool that helps customers find your website by making it rank higher in Google searches. On-page SEO and off-page SEO are the two parts of SEO. On-page SEO is all about how your website is set up, while off-page SEO is all about what you do outside of your website.
For people who are new to dropshipping, it is best to start by focusing on on-page SEO, which they have full control over. It also helps build a strong base by making all of the things that come from your website better. This article will show you some important on-page SEO practices for eCommerce that will help you get started on the long road to SEO.
Optimization of the Title and Description Tags
The way your website shows up in Google search results comes down to the title and description tags. They are a very important factor that could have a big impact on how well your SEO works.
The title and description tags determine how your website shows up in Google’s search results. They are a very important factor that could have a big effect on how well your SEO works.
In the Title Tag
Most of the time, a title tag has two parts. These parts are different depending on what type of page the title is, and they have different tips.
The title of the home page should include the name of the company and a phrase that describes what the company does. For better brand recognition, the brand name should be at the beginning. For SEO, the next phrase should include keywords from your business.
But you should do something different for product pages. To match what people want to find, your product name needs to be at the top. This time, your brand name is on the back. In this case, you don’t have to put in your brand name if you don’t want to. Instead of putting their company names on their websites, many webmasters choose to put call-to-action phrases or features of their services. It works fine either way.
For the Tag Description
The description tag, also called the meta description tag, is like a small piece of content that gets people to click on the link. It can be anything you can think of to convince people on the web that you can give them what they need.
The first thing you need to remember is that the description tag does not have a maximum length. However, if it is too long, Google may cut it off because it only shows the first 920 pixels of your meta description. That is not something you would want to happen. We recommend that you keep your description to between 160 and 200 characters. Even a short description won’t help.
Optimization of URLs
URLs are a very important part of your SEO campaign, but most people don’t give them the attention they deserve. Search engines figure out what your website is about by looking at the URL, meta tags, alt tags, and web content.
An SEO-friendly URL is one that can be read by search engines and should follow these tips:
Make it easy to read.
By “readable,” we mean that a person should be able to understand the URL. Search engines read URLs in the same way that people do. It doesn’t know how to read URLs that are made up of random text.
Also, since the URL is the first thing people see when they go to your website, making it easy to read helps a lot with getting people to visit. If you want to buy a washing machine, which of the URLs below would you click on?
http://homeappliances.com/washing-machines
http://homeappliances.com/index.php?=1648524=t84=?p=354B
Included the Keyword
By putting a keyword in your URL, you tell Google that this URL is about that keyword. This is a well-known and useful tip. It should work best for product or blog page URLs, since it might be hard to add a keyword to the homepage URL.
Separate words with hyphens.
Between the words in your URLs, you should use hyphens. It separates words in your URLs so that people and search engines can read them better. Compare these two, and decide for yourself which one is more interesting.
http://homeappliances.com/mini-washing-machine
http://homeappliances.com/miniwashingmachine
Some people might say that they would rather use something like an underscore instead of a hyphen. But Google recommends that webmasters use hyphens, so you should keep doing it.
Keep It Short
Keep your URLs as short and easy to understand as possible. Customers and search engines are often confused by long URLs with long IDs that are made up at random.
But even if you make your URLs easy to read, they may still be too long. Most blog page URLs are like this because webmasters just put the blog title into the URL. In this case, try to shorten the URL by taking out words that don’t mean anything and replacing clauses with noun phrases. Here is an example:
http://blog.com/what-is-seo-and-how-it-can-help-dropshipping-business
We cut it down to: http://blog.com/seo-to-dropshipping
The shorter one looks much better, don’t you think?
Write a detailed description of the product.
Once you have managed to attract web users to your store website, the last thing that stands between them and the decision to buy is your products. They need to know if what you have to offer is what they are looking for. That’s why you need to describe the products. A good description of your product tells customers what they need to know about it and makes them want to buy it.
A product description might be a small part of your website, but if it’s done right, it can have a big impact. Check out this article of ours for tips on how to write good descriptions of products.
Image Optimization
Image optimization is a key part of making your website work well. If you do it right, it can help your page load faster, which gives your customers a better experience. Search engines also look at your images to learn more about your site, which could help you get a better rank. Now, let’s talk about how to make the most of your pictures.
Make sure your images have ALT text.
ALT text is a text version of your pictures. It lets people who can’t see and use screen readers know what your pictures are about. Just think of it as the description of your image. ALT text is also useful for people who don’t use HTML. If the images on a website don’t load right for some reason, the ALT text will be shown for them to read.
Search engines also read these texts to learn more about your content, which helps you rank higher in Google Images.
But you should only add ALT text to images that have something to say. Adding ALT text to images that are only there for decoration will only annoy readers who can’t see. You should just leave the ALT attribute blank for these images. They will be skipped over by the screen recorder on their own.
Pick the Right File Type
There are four formats for images that are usually best for a website. Each has its own benefits, which I’ll list below.
A popular eCommerce platform called Shopify recommends that its users only use the JPG and PNG formats for their stores. JPG is best for product images because it strikes a good balance between quality and file size. On the other hand, PNG is better for decorative images because it is large and has a high quality.
If you own a Shopify store, you should try the SEO Booster app to make sure that all of your SEO elements are working well.
Figure out the right rate of compression
Most likely, you’ll need to shrink your image to make it fit on your website. To do this, you have to try out different compression rates to find the best one. The goal is to get the best quality out of your image while keeping its file size as small as possible.
You could use tools to help with this to save time. Many tools for optimizing images have an option that makes it easy to automatically fit your images to your website. You can try Kraken, Adobe Photoshop, or JPEG Optimizer.
Put in a Favicon.
A favicon is a small icon that makes it easier for people to find your website when they have several browser tabs open at once. Most of the time, it’s just a smaller version of your brand’s logo. A favicon can show up next to anything on your site that represents it. Here are a few places where a favicon can be found.
- The tabs in the browser
- In the highlight
- In the web browser’s past
A favicon can also show up in many other places. That will get a lot of attention. On paper, favicon doesn’t seem to help your SEO directly, but it does indirectly. Let’s look at how this little icon can be useful:
Favicon makes a website easier to use for its visitors. Its main goal is to help people find the website they need on the web faster.
The number of clicks on a website goes up when it has a favicon. It gives you that extra visual, which makes your website look better to people who visit it. Users are more likely to visit a website with a favicon than one without one, even if both sites offer the same thing.
Branding is helped by the favicon. It gives customers more chances to see your brand logo. When a brand is seen enough, people will remember it. That means that when a customer thinks of a product or service that your brand is linked to, they will think of your business.
Conclusion
SEO marketing is a great way for dropshippers to find new customers. But business owners should never forget that SEO is a long-term plan. To get the results you want, you have to put in time and effort.
These on-page SEO tips will help you set up your online store and get the first SEO effects. But there are still a lot of SEO techniques that have yet to be used, and that doesn’t even count off-page SEO. To get the most out of dropshipping, store owners should always be upbeat and willing to learn. As long as you keep working hard, it will pay off in the end.