SEO Guide: Learn how to get more customers into your store
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is an essential tool to bring customers to your online store. While it can get technical, there are a few best practices that are quick and easy to learn. These will help you maximise your chances of putting the right customers in front of the right items – and ideally at the time they plan to purchase.
So what’s SEO in a nutshell? It’s all about finding keywords customers are typing into search engines and then using those keywords in your store to help them find you. The goal is for a potential customer to search, for example, for “Men’s black sneakers” or “Makeup brush set” and see your store at the top of the search results.
Because SEO works best when it focuses on the customer, you’ll want to:
Build store pages for users, not search engines.
Avoid trying to trick the search engine; pretend it doesn’t exist and that your only concern is the customer’s needs.
Make your content as original as possible (i.e. no copy/paste); that way there’s less chance of some other website coming up in their search.
There are keyword search tools everywhere online, and the more you search for keywords you have in mind, the more you’ll discover others that are almost the same, but just different enough to reach another corner of the market.
Just using the most common keywords in your content isn’t enough – and in some cases isn’t even a good idea. Commonly used keywords can also mean searches are vague and as such there’s a lot of clutter and competition there. Using Google search’s autocomplete feature is a good starting point to find different keyword combinations.
The more specific someone’s search, the more likely it is that they know what they want and are on the cusp of buying it; so even if it seems more niche, it’s worth your time to target keywords unique to your business.
How to optimise your store’s content
SEO should be everywhere; in the URL, headline, and body of your content. In all of these areas, the way you use keywords should be simple – succinct, natural-sounding, without ‘keyword stuffing’ (once or twice is enough for the headlines and URLs), and tailored to your audience.
Formatting your content so that it’s easy to read (with bullet points and subheadings, etc.) will make your copy stand out more, both to readers and search engines looking for results to generate.
When you set up your SumUp online store, you can put these SEO tips to use in your item descriptions, URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions. Think about what your customer is looking for, the kinds of features they want, and how your item fulfils those needs as you write.
