10 Essential Priorities For Your Retail SEO Strategy

SEO is an effective way to attract relevant consumers to your online platform but the best SEO strategy helps you achieve your goals. Retail stores need to up their game. The technology could give them a significant lift.
 
Ecommerce is expected to reach almost 35% of sales by 2023, rising from 23% in 2019, according to Edge Retail Insight. Now is a great time for retailers to embrace the challenge of bringing technology and data together in the offline world.
 
Research shows customers are inclined toward a blend of online and offline shopping. Despite how the transaction is carried out, most of the customers use web search tools for discovery and comparison shopping.
 
That implies that whether clients are shopping in your store, on your website, or by means of social trade platforms, SEO is an area of opportunity that retailers can't afford to miss. SEO enhances your visibility online.

This implies that the more people see your website, the more your online traffic increases, and the better your opportunities to give your product or service to a large number of people.

Many SEO strategies work, but first, it’s important to understand a few key points before implying them. Here are 10 top key points for your retail SEO strategy.

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is extremely important for retail brands. Knowing what keywords consumers are searching for and how they are searching is important to improve your content strategy.

No matter where you are directing your content there are a few places where adding keywords is relevant. Page Titles Meta descriptions (the information that comes up directly on the search engine) Body Content Headers and Alt Tags (the text you can add to the photos on your page). Research the most relevant keywords. Whenever you're exploring, check how your page ranks and how your rivals' pages rank.

Take a look at every important keyword and track down approaches to naturally add them to your page. Ensure the website is positioned on the first page of the search engine wherever possible through continuous optimization.

2. Local Search

Local search marketing is all about placing your business on the map in local searches when customers are looking for a business like yours.

Make sure you are taking advantage of Google My Business(GMB), a tool that helps businesses manage their presence across Google properties, to share updates with your customers. It helps to bring customers to you. Today many people use Google Maps services to find places. To be on maps as a verified business helps to find your location easily.

Customers generally want to discover more and more about products and services. So, creating a GMB account is important. One major benefit of having a GMB is, it’s automatically SEO optimized.

Add photos to your GMB listings to improve the customer experience, add attributes so customers know what to expect, display your products and services, respond to Q&A, and also monitor and respond to the reviews.

3. Structured Data

Organized data can assist search engines in better recognizing your content and enhance visibility. For retail, the main structured data type is product schema.

Schema markup is a structured data vocabulary that helps search engines better understand the information on your website to serve rich results.

Thus, every product should be marked up with a product schema so Google and other web crawlers can distribute more information about your products and make it easier for search engines to identify what type of organization you are and what you do.

Other significant information types for retail businesses and local businesses are local business schema, which posts your location, ratings, reviews, website, geo coordinates, events etc.

4. Top Quality Content

According to content marketing strategists, it is always said that “content is king” and it’s very important for SEO. Thus, make sure that the category pages and the product pages of your website are filled with high-quality and unique content because research says 81% of retail customers go through an online search before purchasing.

With such countless clients doing online research, from which more than 70% of this exploration comes from cell phones, It’s important to optimize product review pages, as well.

Not having FAQ content on the classification pages and limited content on the product pages is not at all good for Optimized SEO and it will not let your website rank for upper funnel and transactional keywords.

5. Optimized Images

Without proper image optimization, you are not taking full advantage of a valuable SEO asset. People are extremely visual. It's relevant to optimize the images for both product and non-product-related keywords.

Image optimization makes many benefits such as better user experience, quick page load time, and additional ranking opportunities.

Here are 12 significant image optimization tips you need to know.

1. Choose The Right Format
2. Compress Your Images
3. Create Unique Images
4. Beware Of Copyright
5. Customize Image File Names
6. Write SEO-Friendly Alt Text
7. Optimize Your Page Title & Description
8. Define Your Dimensions
9. Make Your Images Mobile-Friendly
10. Add Images To Your Sitemap

6. Mobile and Core Web Vitals (CWV)

Core web vitals give you a sense of how people experience your website. They furnish you with specific, measurable data points to improve the overall user experience on your website. At this point, When users have a higher quality experience, they're more likely to return.

Since users are more likely to search and buy the products using their mobile devices. Therefore, brands need to make sure that their websites are fully optimized for mobile. Additionally, ensure the site is using simple-to-understand text, is user-friendly, and has clear calls to action.

You also want to ensure that the pages of the website load as quickly as possible, preferably under three seconds.

7. Backlinks

Backlinks are valuable for any SEO strategy because they represent a "vote of confidence" from one site to another.

High quality backlinks can assist to increase a site's ranking position and visibility in search engine results. The quality and quantity of your backlinks can help you rank higher.

But always remember that having too many accurate match anchor text links can be harmful to your link profile. Therefore, to obtain high-quality links, consistently ensure you have content that is helpful to end-users and solve their real problem.

Try to educate the customer. So, an individual would think about that as a supportive offer rather than a promotion.

8. SEO-Friendly Page Templates

The SEO-friendly template assists you to make a site that Google loves to prescribe to the clients. To be SEO friendly, the layout should be based on well-written code, that weighs light

Another significant element in an SEO-friendly template is, it must be speed optimized and mobile-friendly. Since the vast majority of the web traffic comes from mobile search, your website template should be mobile friendly.

The better the template is optimized, the fewer resources you will need to invest to improve your site’s SEO. So, always keep in mind the pointers mentioned below for SEO - Friendly page template -

• It should be light weighted and speedy
• The theme has to be up-to-date.
• URLs should be keyword-rich, semantically accurate, and succinct, providing a clear idea of what the page is about.
• Keep the URL as short as possible.
• Ensure that URLs are all lower case and structured properly.
• Incorporate CTA buttons, high-quality, compressed, upgraded pictures with alt tags to improve UX and all text on images should be crawlable/indexable.
• The heading of page and body content should line up with and serve both informative and business search intent
• Always include a Call to Action, but try to avoid sounding like an advertisement or too promotional.
• Use H1 to introduce the main topic/theme/title of the page and Use keyword-rich H2 tags for paragraph-type featured snippets in the SERP.

9. Strong Technical Architecture And Foundation

An optimized web page helps search engine spiders find and index all of the pages on your website. With technical SEO, you can help search engines access, crawl, interpret, and index your website without any problems. Until or unless your website has been crawled and indexed by Google, you can't stand in the race of ranking your website in Google. It tells Google your website's infrastructure.

If you want to make Google crawl and index your website always check for things like:

• Broken links on your site.
• Missing alt text or metadata.
• Thin and duplicate content.
• Missing HTTPS.
• That the site does not have an index and/or is not blocking pages that should be crawled.
• Google Analytics and Search Console are set up and verified.
• Each and every page of your website has unique and optimized metadata.
• Your site has minimal crawl errors, i.e 404 pages, etc.
• Website Speed
• Mobile Friendliness

10. Measurement

Monitoring your SEO progress is extremely important for measuring how your retail brand is performing over time because If you can’t track it, you can’t improve it.

It’s important to track everything from rankings and conversions to lost links and more to help prove the value of SEO.

Measuring the impact of ongoing refinement is important to your SEO success, client retention, and perceived value. It likewise assists you with turning your needs when something isn't working. Always monitor these important things mentioned below:

Conversion Rate - Knowing your conversion rate can help you gauge the return on investment (ROI) your website traffic might deliver.

Time on page - How much time a person spent on your page prior to going elsewhere. This could be back to the SERPs, to another page on your website, to a bookmarked page—anywhere

Bounce rate - "Bounced" sessions indicate that a searcher visited the page and left without browsing your site any further. Considering an e-commerce site, The homepage might have the highest bounce rate out of any page, because you want your visitors to stay on landing pages where they can make a purchase, like a product page.

Scroll depth- This measures how far visitors scroll down individual web pages. Are visitors reaching your important content? If not, test various ways of providing the most important content higher up on your page.

An optimized retail website can help you to build trust among a crowd of people searching for the products you sell. For the good growth of e-commerce business, focus on building and maintaining an SEO-friendly website that loads quickly. Create content that satisfies the needs of end-users and help your clients by solving their real problems.