SEO is a crucial ingredient in growing your store traffic long-term. Working together with PPC, SEO helps generate a steady flow of organic eCommerce traffic over time, making it crucial to your online business survival. Although achieving peak SEO can seem like moving the goal post, it isn’t as complicated as it may appear and can be accomplished using good DIY SEO hacks. The secret? Being strategic while consistently creating a great shopping experience. Opting for white-hat long-term strategies and building a relevant, authentic plan over time is important, yes. However, it is also vital that you continually review, optimize, and tweak as the markets, your potential shoppers, and the competition change. Often, this can seem very daunting, but it doesn’t have to be.
So how can you master organic eCommerce traffic without the need for expensive agencies? We’ve got just the hacks for you! This week, we go through 8 DIY SEO tips to help you build and maintain your traffic growth strategy—step 1. Become a Data Wizard If you don’t have a good knowledge of the metrics, you can’t optimize. Your analytics are an essential part of your DIY SEO strategy. In fact, having a good understanding of how to hack your data beforehand will not only help you set your strategy but help you to become a data expert, allowing you to make quick tweaks. To start, you want to make sure you have installed and set up Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics. Here are some of the top metrics you want to familiarize yourself with:
Overall organic traffic Bounce rates Landing page reports Internal site search It’s not just Google Analytics that gives you valuable data you can use. With tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools and Ahrefs. Pro Tip: Set up Google Analytics email reports to get essential metrics to your inbox and use Google Analytics Intelligence to ask the right questions. Step 2. Study Your Target Shopper Sure, SEO is about optimizing for search engines, but it’s humans doing the searching. Therefore, to truly master SEO, you need to get into the minds of your potential shoppers. Sure, this means looking at usual demographics such as location and age, but what’s most important here is having a deep awareness of their needs. This doesn’t just mean keyword research to find out what they are looking for; it means hanging out where they are, in forums like niche-specific Facebook groups, or hopping onto Reddit or Quora. This will help you understand what kinds of pain points your target audience has and find a way to answer these with your content, meta descriptions, and product data.
Step 3. Stalk Your Competitors Once you know which metrics are important and what your shoppers are looking for, your next step is to study your closest competitors. Such as: How they are doing within SERP pages What blog content categories they have and the post engagement their content is getting How their pages rank (using tools such as Check PageRank) Study their website structure, user-friendliness, and keywords This will show you what you’re up against, give you insight into other popular brands and products that your target audience likes, and give you your SEO benchmark—step 4. Become a Keyword Research Pro Once you know what you’re up against and who you are talking to, it’s time to build (or review) your keyword lists. Good keyword research not only helps you understand what your target shopper is searching for but how they are searching for it. In other words, you want to find popular searches that your target audience is making. Here are some keyword search hacks to get you started.
