Four tips to boost your retail website's SEO

Running a retail business is all about getting customers through the door. You need to do what you can to get more eyes on your brand and encourage people to make purchases. And the same applies whether you own a physical store or an e-commerce website, although the strategies involved may be different.

In order to drive sales on your retail website and get customers coming back for more, you need to first increase traffic to your site. And not just any traffic either.

You could get a million visitors to your site in one day, but if not one of them makes a single purchase then your efforts have been for nothing.

You need to attract the kind of visitors who are in your target market, are engaged with your brand and ready to make a purchase. This will increase your conversion rate and have a positive impact on your profits.

But how do you get these people to visit your site in the first place? There are several techniques for doing so, but one of the most effective is search engine optimisation.

Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is the process of making your website more likely to appear in the results when someone types a query into their search engine.

Let’s say you run a retail website for children’s clothes. If someone types “trousers for boys'' into Google, you want to be the site that appears at the top of the listings.

Search engines like Google use complex algorithms to determine which sites are the most relevant to a particular query, and therefore displayed at the top of the results.

This algorithm takes into account so many different factors, including certain keywords, site popularity, responsiveness, and page load speed. As a result, there are so many different things you can do to optimize your site for search.

Enhancing your SEO will increase the traffic to your site, as well as narrowing down your visitors to the ones most likely to make a purchase. To get you started, here are four great tips for boosting your retail website’s SEO.

Create content

The cornerstone of any successful website is content. Your site should be full of blogs, articles, videos and all kinds of information that provides value and entertainment to your target audience.

Avoid being overly self-promotional as this will not draw people in, and may in fact put people off. The best content keeps people reading for longer and will be shared among their networks, and Google will take this into account when ranking your page.

Establish your brand as an industry thought leader and help people to solve their problems. If you post great content on a consistent basis, the search engines will look upon your site favourably.

Use keywords

What are the common search terms people in your target market use? You need to work out how your customers are using Google and be there for them when they hit the search button.

Use Google’s Keyword Planner to research the most popular words and phrases and be sure to scatter these throughout your site. This tells Google that your site is likely to be the most relevant result.

Just make sure you use these keywords naturally and don’t force them in or Google could end up penalising you. 

Fill in metadata

Every one of your web pages and its contents contain metadata, which is information that tells Google what it’s all about. This is crucial for guaranteeing your place at the top spot of the results page.

Your meta information needs to contain important keywords and describe clearly and distinctly what each aspect of your site is about.

Improve your site speed

Modern consumers have very little patience, and if a website takes ages to load, it is only a matter of time before they close it down and find another, better site to fulfill their needs.

Not only will a slow site put people off, but Google will actively demote it in the rankings so you need to make sure your pages load at a rapid rate.

If there are serious issues with your site, you may need to contact the Wordpress Maintenance Service, but you might be able to fix the speed issue yourself.

There are so many ways to do this, many of which are quite technical but they include enabling compression, minifying your CSS, and optimising your images. For a more detailed guide on speeding up your site and improving conversion rates, take a look at this helpful article. 

These are just a few of the ways that you can improve your site’s SEO and drive more web traffic. There are a myriad of additional steps you can take, but following the ones above will provide an excellent starting point.