Having a beautiful online store or one with integrations of the latest technologies does not mean that it will become, overnight, a conversion or sales machine.

And there are many companies or businesses that think that the aspect of web design is the only reason why they do not get traffic. Or they think just the opposite, that by making a large investment in the design and navigability of a website they will attract large volumes of traffic and conversions.

However, the reality is very different. Although there is no magic formula for a store to become, as we mentioned before, a sales generating machine. Yes, there are a series of practices that must be implemented to be able to start boosting conversions.

It is not about focusing on a single aspect, such as design. The key is to focus on a whole, on a set of methodologies that help achieve this momentum. SEO, CRO, Design, UX, Email Marketing... are all areas that, in order to achieve a greater impact on your application, should be applied as a whole, since, although they are different fields, in practice many of them are related. or the development of one causes effects on the others.

Today we are going to talk about one of those areas, SEO.

What is SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is about the study and application of improvements in an online store to achieve the best positioning in Google search results .

Although SEO can really be applied to improve positioning in any search engine, be it bing, yahoo, etc., it is generally referred to as Google because it is the most used. In a periodic study presented by the Statcounter page, we see that so far in 2021, 91.86% of internet users use this search engine.

But why is SEO important for my online store?

To answer this question, let's first look at how a search engine works.

• First we open the search engine that we are going to use to carry out our search. This can be google, yahoo, bing…
• The keywords or keywords will be what the search engine uses to know what to look for and what type of response to offer. For example, the same results will not be offered to: “ museums in Madrid ”, as for “ best museums in Madrid ” or “ cheap museums in Madrid ”.
• Once we have clicked on search for our query, the search engine will return the SERPS, acronym for “Search Engine Result Pages” or in Spanish “Search Results”. This will be the list with the best options that the search engine considers to respond to the search made.
• Although they are listed in the order that the search engine considers best, whether due to different technical or content aspects. The user will be able to choose whether to select the first result or the last. The user's visit to a page will help Google, for example, rate it and improve its positioning.

Although it seems so easy, the truth is that it is not. We must keep in mind that there can be thousands of results for a single search and that users generally do not go beyond the first page of results . It is even difficult for them to end up clicking on the last positions on the first page.

SEO is in charge of working on this part, studying a website in depth both in its technical and content aspects, to generate a series of proposals for improvements or implementations in our online store. In this way you can start competing for those first positions that everyone wants.

SEO strategies for an online store

In general, organic searches represent one of the largest sources of traffic in an ecommerce. Although it depends a lot on the type or brand, whether it is well-known or little-known.

The less well-known a brand is, the more important it will be to work on SEO for it.

One of the most basic strategies that any online business that wants to improve its SEO should start with is: a technical audit .

As its name indicates, this type of audit will be responsible for carrying out an analysis of all the technical aspects of our website.

Google offers a series of recommendations and good practices that every online store or any type of website should take into account in order to improve positioning.

However, these recommendations are not conditions or guarantee to appear in the first results. Google's recommendations will help the crawling bot analyze and better understand the structure and content of a website.

In technical audits we will take into account aspects such as:

• • Indexing a website
  • Correct development of robot.txt and sitemap.xml
  • 404 errors
  • 301 and 302 Redirects
  • Correct https protocol implementation
  • Tags hreflang, canonical…
  • Technical part of content. Such as the meta title, meta description, Hn tags...

Main problems that we can detect in our online store

When it comes to an online store we must take special care when studying its technical aspect. An ecommerce does not have the same conditions as a normal website.

An ecommerce usually presents problems mainly with the large volume of pages due to the number of products it offers. This can cause indexing problems, problems with canonical tagging, paginations...

The structure of categories and subcategories can also be a factor to take into account. Is it being categorized well ? Are the correct keywords being used ? Should all categories be indexed ?

We must also be careful with duplicate content , which usually occurs when there are variations of the same product or because many websites offer the same product. And also with poor content , that which is not enough to get a good position.

The popularity of a website

Once we have carried out the technical audit of our store and the solution to all the potential improvements offered by the audit has been executed with its in-depth study of the website, we can move on to study the popularity of the page.

The popularity of a website can be translated into the importance or relevance it has in the eyes of Google to position it. In other words, if the information it offers is relevant to the user, Google will take it into account.

This part answers questions like:

• How is the website positioned in search engines?
• What keywords are we positioning for?
• Through what search are we receiving traffic?
• Do we receive any backlink that is giving us popularity?

On the other hand, it is also important to generate a content strategy that allows improving positioning.

There are many businesses that generate a large amount of content, important and interesting content, which surely has a large audience or niche to reach. However, they do so without following a strategy or structure.

Google really likes the organization, since it translates into greater ease for the user in both understanding and navigability of a website. For Google, pages must deal with a specific topic and respond to a unique search intention.

“Content is the key”

And anything farter from the reality. There are many cases where even having an ugly page, it has positioned itself in the first search results. This is because, although for Google the technical aspect is very important, since it makes it easier for Google to understand and crawl a website more effectively. It is more important to offer better quality content that resolves user questions in the best possible way.

Google has been positioning websites that offer better content better for some time, since this will make a user spend more time on your website and interact and navigate on it. This in turn will make the website achieve better popularity, which will result in better positioning.

A content strategy is mainly based on offering the information that the user wants. This means that we must study the way in which the user searches for what we offer. In this way we can adapt our content to your search intention.

In this part it is very important:

• Do a Keyword Study. It is likely that the keywords we use to offer a product or service are not the same ones that a user uses to search for that information. That is why it is important to do this keyword study and see which ones users use.
• The user's search intention will also be important. We can differentiate different search intentions: informational, comparative, transactional... hence the importance of adapting our content to the different search intentions.
• Correctly optimize meta title and meta description with the detected keywords.

Conclusions

As we have seen, SEO is going to be responsible for putting our online store in optimal conditions so that search engines are able to analyze and position it. However, we must take into account the content that we are going to offer. This has to comply with the search intention that the user performs.

With all this we must not lose focus on the fact that this process is part of a whole, and that it has an objective. Get more conversions. Therefore, we must create a route to optimize strategies that are focused on achieving that objective. This is detecting and solving problems that result in an improvement on the website and that helps conversion. As well as generating content strategies that boost conversions on our website.

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