Ruhani Rabin
10 min readJul 11, 2021

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How to Make the Most of SEO Best Practices for Your Online Business Featured Image

Investing in SEO requires time, diligent efforts, and practice and trust in the person managing your initiatives. While some of us may link our passion with our business, it is undoubtedly true that every business owner wants to generate a profit from their investment and transaction in a company. Consistent business growth is what one desires. However, it requires a lot of intelligent effort to achieve the same. In this article, you will:

  • Learn about the critical Search Engine Optimization practices that give you higher traffic
  • Learn the SEO best practices for your e-commerce store to enhance turnover

Taking your business online is an important thing you must do to leverage the comprehensive benefits of investing in SEO. Optimizing SEO will help you earn more and get more significant growth in your business. Hiring SEO services India will help you get affordable SEO services from your website’s most proficient SEO experts. If you’re wondering about the right SEO services, you can talk to me.

Coming on to our topic, 20 % of the businesses fail in the first year itself. And you can guess how hard it is for companies to sustain in the market and generate desirable profits. Just 30% of the enterprises across the decade mark in existence. That is why taking the right step for improving the value and profitability of the company counts a lot, especially in the digital marketing scenario. Read further to learn more about various ways SEO can help you get more significant traffic and get higher traffic.

Monthly recurring traffic

Having reliable traffic and adequate new sales every month requires that you get monthly recurring traffic. The regular monthly traffic comprises qualified traffic and targeted prospects. One can quickly scale and make use of such traffic. This is one of the benefits of SEO. Monthly recurring traffic gives insight to you about the SEO input and output. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and MRR growth are some of the most crucial business metrics.

Recurring Traffic Graph
Recurring Traffic Graph

When you get a good number of visitors on your website daily, you are likely to get consistently new sales. In a business SAAS model, you will get better options to grow your business. Recurring traffic is more likely to give higher business growth.

Though it may seem that getting higher growth and more business is very easy, the fact is that optimizing your website with the right SEO can be challenging. Having recurring traffic from SEO requires diligent effort. It requires consistent practice and a lot of hard work goes into the same.

Why?

It is because of Google’s algorithm. It is not easy to unravel what lies below the hood of Google. There are several correlations and complicated ways of discovering Google’s algorithm. When black hat SEO is used for increasing website rankings, the search engines will counter the same.

Hundreds of factors to pay attention to

In the realm of SEO best practices, there are more than 200 ranking factors to focus on for search engine optimization. So, where do you place your focus? Several factors determine a website’s ranking. There are various published findings whereby SEO can help to learn about the most heavily weighted SEO factors for a website.

High-ranking SEO practices have to change consistently due to the changes in Google’s algorithm. Website optimization is a continuous process, and it evolves with the evolution of Google’s algorithm.

It can hard to measure the ROI

The customer journey can be non-linear. Therefore, you have to channel your leads or purchases from multiple channels. SEO becomes a more holistic endeavor if you take the help of multi-channel attribution.

Long life cycle experiments

You have to find the SEO initiatives and give the required time for planning, execution, and measurement. The experimentation cycle is long in SEO because of the inherent long-term nature of SEO.

It can be hard to isolate the variables.

SEO generally helps multiple initiatives in one go. You might find it hard to understand which variable leads to enhanced traffic. This is because SEO does not have a controlled environment like labs to determine the variables’ effect.

The zero-sum game in SEO

You will be losing position if your competitor wins the first position and gets the second for money keywords. The best approach to an SEO strategy is to think of the end in mind and then plan the game.

Set the right goals and KPIs

You can reverse engineer to find your starting point if you set clear goals and KPIs. You have set accountability to reach these goals. Think in the long term.

Remember, SEO is an investment-based strategy, and you have to think in years rather than months. You have to work as a fund manager and consider your budget allocation. Consider if link building should be 25 % or 75 % of your budget allocation? Similarly, determine if constant generation should be 20 % or 80 %? If you do not go for proper distribution of funds, things may go haywire in the wrong areas. Remember that focusing on a few critical factors will drive your traffic more than anything else.

Every situation or website is unique, and one has to consider that certain general principles from thought leaders may not apply to you. Trusting a practitioner or data above the best practices can cost you a lot. Several factors are considered in Google’s ranking factor, but most experts believe the following factors as the most important.

  • Authoritative backlinks
  • Keyword clustering-based optimization
  • Long-form and helpful content
  • Technical factors
  • User experience or satisfying user and intent

Aligning with Google

Keep in mind that Google’s primary goal is to send traffic to the website. The more you are aligned with Google’s mission, the greater are your chances of success. When searchers can find what they are looking for, Google rates it as an excellent user experience. With a user-focused mindset, you can get a higher rank on Google and future-proof your website from Google’s algorithm updates. You can get better results and get a higher ROI with time. Optimizing for Web Core Vitals is the latest parameter for improving your website’s user experience according to standards presented by Google.

Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals

Ways to gauge if you are getting an increase in your ROI

You can find out if the tactics you were using were suitable for your business. Firstly, you must track the metrics. Metrics will help you to attribute if the sales are coming from SEO. A multi-channel attribution will be able to get a sense of the genuine customer journey. It also improves your understanding of how SEO can work alongside other avenues like brand awareness, retargeting and direct visits.

Again, it is vital to understand the real journey of the customer. You have to determine the customer who found out about your business. The time they took before they made a purchase and the channel they took to make their purchase. These are essential factors for determining if RoI is getting increased with time.

If you are an eCommerce business, you can use specific parameters to increase your sales by 100 %. In an e-commerce store, SEO holds the key to better business. In an e-commerce store, SEO can breathe life into your online business based on organic traffic.

Why is SEO so important for an online store?

The first page results on Google enjoy a CTR of 71.3%, which lowers by 5.59% for the subsequent pages. It would help if you ranked on the first page or your money keywords. However, optimizing an e-commerce website is more complicated than a regular website. Check these items below:

  • Firstly, there are way too many product landing pages.
  • There are a large number of headings involved.
  • It would help if you also had multiple CTAs on each product page.
  • You also have to take care of the negative keywords alongside other factors.

The various best practices that will double your sales fall into three major areas:

SEO Audit

SEO audit determines where your website stands at present. Also, it determines how you or your outsourcing partner must proceed for SEO. A comprehensive SEO audit will be pointing to the page vulnerabilities on the website. The various tools used for SEO audit include:

  • Ahrefs
  • SERanking
  • SEMRush
  • Screaming Frog

The SEO Audit tools crawl your links and carry out the following checks:

  • Checking for duplicate links, duplicate content, title tags.
  • Highlight missing tags and descriptions.
  • Internal linking reporting
  • Keyword stuffing
  • It was spotting the other missing factors that are pulling down your ranking.
  • Technical auditing also checks for page loading speed errors and more.

Keyword Planning and Research

Keyword research and planning help list the high-quality keywords that you can use to generate better quality traffic.

What matters during target keyword search?

Use keywords that have

  • Sufficient search volume
  • High in demand
  • High in ranking
  • Less competition
Keyword Ranking Factors
Keyword Ranking Factors

However, there is a great significance of using these keywords in meta descriptions, page title headers, and other significant places. This is important to attract more users searching for these similar phrases. At the same time, do not ignore the long-tailed keywords wherever feasible. It is necessary to match with the right search intent that users will use during their searches.

Competitor analysis

Ensure that you review and analyze the competitor’s website to find out the keywords they are using to optimize their SEO strategy. This way, you can evaluate how to maximize your page ranking. Additionally, you have to focus on the semantics used for the keywords and the keyword placement on the landing pages.

There are other SEO areas that you can use to immediately rank your website at the top of the Google search engine.

Search Engine Optimization Best Practices for E-commerce Website

The initial things to do in e-commerce SEO, as discussed above, are

  • SEO audit
  • Technical SEO audit and fixes.
  • Competitor analysis
  • Keyword planning

Following these, you have to go for on-page optimization and fixing technical issues if nay techniques, and you will be finding excellent outcomes immediately.

Curating unique heading tags for products’ pages

The heading tags you must use must be specific for your pages. Following this, every product page should be optimized for heading tags and description content to draw maximum attention to the search page.

Use of long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords have a higher probability of matching the accurate description of the users’ search inputs or semantic search. Pages optimized with long-tail keywords have better chances of being found by the users. If your product page is optimized for a particular product, the users will find the product directly using long-tail keywords using a long-tail keyword.

Mobile-friendliness

According to Shopify, more than 50% of the traffic originates from e-commerce websites. It means that your e-commerce store should be designed for mobile devices, allowing users to spend more time in your online store. Google rewards you with a default higher ranking if you have a higher average time spent on the website.

Get more customer reviews

Customer reviews will generate cost-free organic traffic for a website. Having user-created and submitted reviews embedded with ample keyword density lets the search engine crawl the same, optimizing page ranking. Additionally, you must get a transparent view of your business efficacy, reviews, and more excellent search engine ranking.

Optimizing page loading speed

According to Kissmetrics, nearly 47% of online shoppers want an online page to load in 2 to 3 seconds. Slow performing website can hit your SEO ranking as well as your profitability. You will lose conversions in each second of delays. On top of that, Google includes page loading speed as a vital factor in page ranking.

Having product-rich snippets

Snippets are 40–60 word long descriptions that appear beneath every search result. These explain what a page contains and help the users understand if they are related to their query. Many snippets include star ratings, viewership statistics, and also reviews in several cases.

SEO Best practices - Product Rich Snippets

Create search engine optimized permalink structure

Google comprehends what the page is about as it crawls the permalink structure. Thus, it is essential to create permalinks that are self-explanatory for the search bot. It is necessary to develop page-wise URLs which will be relevant to the content-related page. The ideal link structure that follows towards:

  • Product category page
  • Subcategory page
  • Product page
  • SSL certification configuration

E-commerce website security

Website security is one of the best signals for your page’s ranking. Websites configured by SSL are HTTPS and are considered safe for browsing on Google. Websites that Google does not encrypt are considered insecure. Secure websites naturally get more visitors as well as more conversions than insecure websites. Having an SSL certificate gives several other benefits like PCI compliance, improved brand image, secured data, and more.

With these best practices for your e-commerce website, you will indeed be increasing your website’s ranking and getting more conversions for enhanced ROI.

The Takeaway from SEO best practices

Adopting the right search engine optimization strategy is a must for your online business or store. Carrying out the SEO high-grade practices for your e-commerce store, you can make the most of all the SEO best practices for your online store. You must focus on three criteria:

  • Think of long-term results.
  • Pay attention to budget allocation.
  • Take care of tested practitioner experience instead of conventional advice.

The experts at Backlink Monks will tell you more about how consistent SEO is essential to ensure that your SEO practices follow the current Google algorithm. With a well-planned SEO strategy, you can get tremendous growth in your e-commerce store.

Originally posted at RuhaniRabin.com. Click here to subscribe now

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Ruhani Rabin

Ruhani Rabin being a tech and product evangelist for two decades. He was VP, GM, CPO for various digital companies. Obsessed with Generative AI now.