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There’s no doubt that ranking at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs) is a must. However, if you don’t know how to get your e-commerce website to the top, you are losing potential customers to your competitors.

Whether you have just launched your e-commerce store or are looking to improve your existing E-commerce site, in this SEO guide, we share some useful tips and tricks to step up your SEO game.

Begin with Keyword Research

The first step is to carry out keyword research to identify the target keywords you want to rank for. Without keyword research, you are essentially throwing stones in the dark.

Moreover, it’s important to get this step right. If you don’t, you will be targeting keywords that are practically impossible to rank for and/or you may rank for keywords that do not generate much traffic.

When choosing keywords, the most important factor to keep in mind is buyer intent, which means how far along a user is in the purchase journey.

Here are three places to find the right keywords for your online store:

1. Amazon
2. Competitor websites
3. SEO tools such as Ahrefs and Ubersuggest

Get the Site Architecture Right

Once you have a list of keywords you want to target, it’s time to put that information to good use. This begins with your e-commerce website’s architecture.

Site architecture refers to how your website is structured. Essentially, it is about ensuring users can find the information they are looking for easily and quickly, with a view to drive conversions.

A great website structure follows the following rules:

• It is simple and scalable
• Getting from one page to another shouldn’t take any more than three clicks
• Use your keyword research to create extremely relevant page URLs and subdirectories.

Identify Problems that Need Fixing

Now it’s time to audit your website for problems that need attention. Here are some of the most important aspects to look into:

1. Site errors – Use Screaming Frog to find website errors. This free tool will crawl your site’s images, links, script, apps and CSS from an SEO perspective. It will then deliver a report of problems including redirects, errors, missing header tags, duplicate pages, etc. Some of the biggest issues you’ll want to fix are:
   1. Redirecting any 404 pages.
   2. Updating duplicate content, meta descriptions and meta titles.
   3. Replacing 302 redirects with 301 redirects.
2. Find your website speed – Your website’s load speed is an important SEO factor. If your visitors have to wait too long for your website to load, they are likely to head back to the search results to look for a faster site – in other words, your competitor. Use this tool from Google to find your website’s load speed. Here are some things you can do to improve your load time:
   1. Minimise HTTP requests
   2. Defer JavaScript loading
   3. Improve server response time
   4. Choose a reliable hosting service
   5. Enable browser caching
   6. Enable compression of files
   7. Reduce image sizes

On-Page Optimisation

Although off-page optimisation (link building) is important, so is on-page optimisation. On-page SEO involves all the steps you can take on your own website to improve its rankings in the search engines.

On-page SEO is completely in your control and that gives you a whole lot of power!

It’s time to optimise the pages and blogs on your website for the target keyword. To optimise each page, you must ensure the keyword is present in strategic locations including:

• URLs – URLs should not be user-friendly, meaning they must include real words and not a lot of gibberish and numbers.
• Meta title and description – This is the title and description that shows below your URL in the search engine results. Make sure not to make your meta title and description too spammy by stuffing them with too many keywords. They shouldn’t sound gibberish or have nothing but your keywords. They must read like an ad as the higher your CTR (click-through rate), the higher your ranking in the search engines.
• Page title – This is the title of the page that shows at the top of the browser. Keep it short, real and user-friendly.
• Headers – Headers are an important part of every page. It tells in few words what the page is and the relevancy of your page to a given search query.
• Subheaders – Subheaders are like icing on the cake. They complement your headers. Here, you can add your secondary and related keywords to strengthen the SEO prospects of your page.
• Paragraph copy – This is the body of your page. Be sure to keep the content engaging and user-friendly, providing lots of value. If all the reader sees is a bunch of keywords slapped together, they are unlikely to engage with your content; instead they will head back to the search results and go to another page that offers better value. So when optimising your paragraph copy for your target keywords, don’t forget about offering value to your readers.
• Image file names – The search engines can’t see an image, so they rely on the data in the image such as the image file name and the alt tag to “see” it. Be sure to include your keyword in the image file name so search engines can understand the subject matter of the image.
• Image alt tags – The alt attribute adds strength to your message and helps the search engine spiders better understand your relevancy, whilst imp00roving your website’s accessibility. Every image on your website should have a suitable alt text. Not only for SEO purpose, but also because visually impaired and blind people can’t otherwise decipher what the image is all about.

Conclusion

There are many more strategies and techniques to improve the SEO of your e-commerce site. Follow these essential techniques to get your online store’s SEO off to a good start. Should you need more assistance or a proactive SEO campaign, our SEO specialists would be happy to help.

Contact us today for a free consultation.

Search engines place those websites on the top of the results that they find the most relevant on the subject/theme for a given search query. Therefore, the main objective of SEO is to make improvements to a website so that it’s relevant not only to targeted keywords but themes matching those particular keywords.

Usually, a website is a disconnected web of different topics without a central theme. Such websites have to settle with poor search engine rankings for their target keywords.

Creating a silo structure will establish your website’s topical relevance and put in place the building blocks for higher rankings in the search engines. It’s an essential part of search engine optimisation but is often regarded as an advanced topic.

Implementing a silo structure for your business website can be a formidable task, especially for organisations that offer multiple products/services, service a variety of industries, have multiple locations or even blog posts.

When not implemented correctly, search engines won’t be able to understand your website. In the end, SEO authority won’t flow across your pages and the search engines will have a tough time indexing your pages. That’s the last thing you want!

However, when you correctly organise your website’s content, you will benefit from several benefits including:

• Faster indexation of updated and new pages
• Parent pages will have a lot of authority
• Your website will benefit from better user experience and behaviour flow
• Authority will travel to important pages that are difficult to build backlinks to
• Your website would become more relevant to the topic, thereby ranking higher

What is a Silo Structure in SEO?

An SEO silo structure is the best way to organise content on a given topic. Creating a silo structure will ensure search engines and users can navigate your website easily.

A silo structure is essentially a deep website architecture that is locally organised. The site’s hierarchical structure is identified by topics and subtopics. This means that closely related topics are structurally close to each other. In short, silos are a way to categorise your site’s content into different categories.

So related pages are grouped together either through linking or structurally, to create the website’s keyword-based themes. So you can create a silo structure for your website to differentiate the various content themes so that search engines clearly understand what your website is about.

This means search engines will be able to crawl, index and rank your site efficiently. A case study conducted by Moz found that Google gauges the quality of a site’s silo structure to rank pages within that silo.

Creating a silo structure for your website helps improve the relevance of your webpages for your target keywords. The more topically relevant you publish in a silo, the higher are the chances of Google finding your website to be more topically relevant. So if Google has ranked a website at the top of the search results, it means the website has covered all the major search queries.

Instead of letting the website to be considered as a disorganised mix without any focus in terms of keywords or topics, an SEO silo structure divulges what the website is actually about and helps position your site as a leading source on relevant topics.

Internal Linking

Coming back to the idea that a website is split into separate sections of topically relevant pages, internal links are usually not considered in a blog. Typically, blogs link out to service/product pages, but those pages don’t usually link back to the blog.

This practice of one-way linking is not an ideal practice, but nevertheless, it’s a common practice.

When you silo your website, internal linking will become a lot easier to implement. Essentially, each silo will link to same and lower-level pages, as well as upper-level pages, given that the topics are in the same category.

Internal linking across your silo structure will deliver stellar SEO value. Internal linking will extend authority to other pages show the search engines that your website is extremely relevant for this particular topic.

Keyword-Rich Content

Content is at the heart of SEO. However, just about any content won’t cut it. Your content must be written with specific aspects in mind to achieve the standard that Google and other search engines expect today.

It must meet several guidelines before it’s considered useful.

The very first step in the process of content creation is to identify how much content must be written in order to achieve top rankings. This will pave the way for creating keyword-rich content.

Although content alone won’t suffice to improve your search engine rankings, having adequate content is important to take your website to the top of the search engine results.

How to Create an SEO Structure for Your Website?

Here’s a brief look at the process of creating an SEO silo structure for your website.

• Step 1 – Identify the common theme for your website. What content do you already have and plan to publish, and what is the overarching theme?
• Step 2 – Select your silo strategy. It’s time to decide how you’ll implement the website structure that identifies the themes clearly – virtual siloing and physical siloing or virtual siloing only.
• Step 3 – Plan the linking structure. Assess the link structure and identify how to connect the pages. You will need at least 5 supporting pages to build a silo theme.
• Step 4 – Build the silos. Write and publish quality content that’s optimised for your target keywords for each themed silo.

Conclusion

Siloing your website is the perfect way to organise your content. Although creating an SEO silo structure is an uphill task, it can have far-reaching benefits – search engines will be able to crawl, index as well as rank your site better.

Creating a page that’s dedicated to a topic and other pages with other supporting content will establish to the search engines your relevance to the topic and will help improve your search engine rankings.

Internal linking in a silo structure can further improve the SEO juice of your website by spreading authority across the pages.

Need help creating an SEO silo structure for your website? Get in touch with us for a free 30-minute consultation to see how we can create a silo structure for your website.

CRM, short for, Customer Relationship Management, is a programme that gathers all the data about your customers in one central place. A CRM solution can help your business organise communication, interaction and relationships with your customers as well as prospects.

With a CRM software, all the data relating to your customers (both current and future) is centralised, so your team can keep on top of their tasks. Customer service agents can log accounts of customer calls, purchases, chats, emails, support tickets, etc. This way, you can maintain all the details of a customer’s relationship with your business.

You can choose a CRM programme to suit the size and budget of your business; from a simple SaaS-based model to an enterprise solution. So why does your business need a CRM? Let’s take a look at some of the things CRM can do for your business.

Streamline the Sales Process

If you find yourself inundated with new leads coming your way but can’t find the time to keep up with the flow, a CRM can come in handy. A smart CRM system can help you sort and prioritise your leads in no time so your salespeople can follow up with your leads promptly and efficiently.

The CRM system will accompany your sales executives at every stage of the sales funnel, from lead generation and conversion through to repeat sales, cross-selling and upselling.

If you want to ensure your sales team is better organised and works as a cohesive unit, a CRM programme can help. If your sales executives work as a group on a specific project or if some members take care of different parts of the sales process, coordination can be an uphill task.

A good CRM system allows you to programme customer-centric tasks and assign them to different members of the sales team. This way, all sales executives know what their role is, what their objectives are and what’s expected of them.

This means that no sales opportunity goes wasted, and no one in the sales team is left clueless.

Locate Your Customer Data Easily

Email, spreadsheets and sticky notes could have worked well for you when you started your business. But as your business grows, those tools will quickly become a bottleneck, impeding your ability to quickly make informed decisions.

That’s where CRM can help, giving your company a centralised location to store and access your data that you can leverage to drive conversions as well as customer retention.

In addition to giving you an organised, centralised location to store all your customer information, a CRM offers a complete picture about each customer – how you acquired them, when, where, what and how they buy from you or interact with your business; and from this, you can find out how to keep your customers coming back.

From contact details and social media activity to purchases and previous interactions, a CRM keeps a record of every interaction your customers have with your business.

Offer Stellar Customer Experiences

Winning customers is a tough task but retaining them is even tougher. One poor experience is enough to put them off and you can lose customers forever. If your customer service agents are spending more time reacting to consumer complaints rather than anticipating their needs proactively, a CRM system can provide all the answers.

By effectively managing case flow and providing a unified view of each customer, a CRM system will enable your customer care team to provide an unmatched experience for your customers whilst ensuring that they come back to you for more.

With intelligent CRM solutions, customer service agents can share their learnings with each other, thereby ensuring they can answer questions quickly and efficiently. Moreover, they can even route cases to the right representative.

That’s not all. With a CRM, you can even create a self-help community where your customers can go to look for answers to frequently asked questions on their own, allowing your agents to handle tougher complaints and requests.

Seamless Integration with Marketing Tools

You can effortlessly integrate your CRM with marketing tools including email marketing, messaging, social media, telephony and live chat to stay on top of your customers’ minds.

By integrating your CRM with your email marketing software, you can create a personalised message to ensure a high level of engagement.

By combining CRM data with a messaging service, you can connect with your audience, providing them a service they expect. You can send automatic reminders to customers about upcoming events and offers. You can send people a text such as product tracking information, discount codes to further grow your sales.

You can bring efficiency to your company by integrating your CRM software and telephony software. An integrated CRM enables you to make calls quickly thereby increasing the reach to your audience. Agents can take detailed, accurate notes that could be used to provide stellar customer service as well as in converting leads into customers.

Increase Your Brand’s Reputation

A CRM system ensures you have all the information you need to provide prompt responses to customers without any delays and provide unmatched service.

Imagine the impact of a stellar customer experience on your brand image. Consumers will consider your company as a highly efficient one in the market. Your team will be considered the best.

Reduce Cost

Another important benefit of a CRM programme is that it helps reduce your costs. When you reduce the time spent answering customer complaints, you are able to put your employees’ skills to better use – in delighting customers and increasing sales.

When your employees can find the information about your customers at a moment’s notice from anywhere, it results in improved efficiency.

With time, as you and your team understand how to make use of CRM to suit your requirements, your daily tasks will become a breeze and won’t take much time either.

Conclusion

If you can relate to any of these advantages, it’s time to take the plunge and invest in a good CRM for your business. A CRM system will help you generate more leads, close more transactions, keep your customers happier and connect your entire business – putting your business on the path of growth and stupendous success.

SEO in 2019

SEO requires continuous work to ensure you maintain your existing rankings and to improve your position in Google search. What are the things you should be thinking about and acting on in SEO in 2019? Here are eight of the most important.

The Advance of Mobile

Overall, a huge percentage of people search using mobile devices rather than computers. While the results are different industry-by-industry, all business owners need to focus their efforts on improving the experience of mobile users.

Remember as well that Google is increasingly prioritising mobile. For example, it has adopted mobile-first indexing. This doesn’t mean it ignores desktop websites, but if your site is mobile friendly, it will look at that first.

Content is Still King

All three of the most important factors about your website from Google’s perspective will be covered in this blog. One of the three is the content on your pages, particularly the text.

Put simply, you must ensure the content on your website is as good as possible. It needs to be sufficiently long (without being repetitive), and it needs to be helpful and engaging for users.

This is as important in 2019 as it has ever been.

You Gotta Have Speed

Another element about your website that remains crucially important is page load speed. Google has been focused, almost from the day it launched, on speeding up the internet. That focus continues in 2019. So, if your site takes too long to load, your priority this year should be to speed it up.

Security Can’t Be Ignored

Security is now important for all websites, not just those where users or customers send personal or sensitive information. Even if the only place you ask people to enter information on your website is a contact form, Google wants you to make your website more secure.

This means adding encryption by getting an SSL certificate. This is a fairly straightforward thing to do, so your website developer or SEO provider will be able to sort it out for you quickly. It’s not costly, either, so should not be ignored.

Evolving Your Backlink Strategy

In one of the above points, the fact that Google has three main ranking factors was mentioned. One of those three is links. In fact, links are arguably the most important of the three big ranking factors.

If you want success in SEO in 2019, you need to continue building backlinks to your website. This involves creating fantastic content that people want to link to, having a good social media strategy to ensure as many people see your posts as possible, and sharing your content in as many other different ways as you can.

There are two other things you should think about in 2019, however, if they are not already part of your strategy:

• Targeting your competitor’s backlinks – this is a simple concept but is one that can produce excellent results. It involves researching the websites of your competitors to find out where they are getting backlinks from. Your SEO provider can give you this information, plus there are plenty of tools on the internet that will give you a backlink profile of almost any website on the internet. You can then devise plans and strategies to get links from the same or similar sources that your competitors are getting them from.
• Increase mentions to your website – links are one option that websites have when including a reference to your business. The other main one is by mentioning your company name, brand, or product without linking back to your site. This is called a mention in SEO and, while it’s not as beneficial as a link, it still helps.

Focus on Search Intent

This point is absolutely crucial, particularly if you have a fairly advanced SEO strategy in place already. This is because search intent is one of the main priorities of Google at the moment, as you’ll see in the next point below.

Focusing on search intent means thinking beyond a keyword, instead thinking about why people use that keyword when they search.

The most important keywords are those that have a buying intent, i.e. where there is a chance you can get the person into your sales funnel. This covers everything from someone using a keyword for initial research on a product or service right down to a person who has decided on what they want and is ready to make a buying decision.

Many of these will be long tail keywords. If you don’t yet include in your SEO strategy long tail keywords that have buying intent, 2019 is the time to start.

Get Your Head Around RankBrain

RankBrain is the third of three main factors that Google considers when ranking websites on search results pages. It is something that hasn’t had much focus in SEO, particularly with small and medium-sized businesses. It is becoming more important, however, so this year is a good time to start getting an understanding of what RankBrain is.

In very simple terms, RankBrain is a machine learning algorithm. Its main job is to help order search results for keywords that Google has never seen before (which is about 450 million a day). In other words, RankBrain tries to understand the intent of the user so it can display search results that don’t include the keyword used in the query the person typed into Google.

Start Adapting for Evolving Search Patterns

The way people search on the internet is changing. Of course, Google is still the dominant search player. However, there are other things you should be aware of that could influence your SEO strategy in 2019. At the very least, you should be thinking about the following:

• Increasing use of voice search – the use of devices like the Amazon Echo is increasing. When people use these devices, they use a more conversational tone than they do when typing.
• Siri and Bing – Siri, the personal assistant in iPhones and iPads, uses Microsoft Bing to answer search queries. Most companies, however, focus only on Google when thinking about SEO.
• Amazon search – according to research, people looking for a product will search in Amazon before they look anywhere else, including Google.

Setting Your Priorities

All the above points will be important to SEO in 2019, but you need to focus on those that are both relevant to your business and likely to generate the best return on investment. This will help you improve your position and the results you achieve.

SEO Pagination and its Best Practices

Pagination is a necessary feature on many websites, particularly if you have a large number of articles (an active blog section, for example), or a large number of products on your website. How does pagination impact SEO and what should you do to optimise pagination on your website?

SEO pagination is an advanced area of SEO, but for many it is important. Let’s start at the beginning, though.

What is Pagination and Why Do Websites Have It?

Website developers add pagination to websites to improve the way the website displays information. An example will illustrate this best.

Let’s say you sell products on your website, with 1,000 products over 10 categories, with an average of 100 products per category. One of the options you are likely to give users on your website is the option to view all the products in a category.

How do you display that information? Do you put all 100 products on one page? Or, do you paginate the category, putting 10 products per page with links for the user to scroll through the pages?

Most websites choose the second option, including large websites like Amazon. One of the reasons they do is the fact that putting 100 products on a page would have a detrimental impact on page load times.

So, in summary, the most common usage of pagination is to make it easier to display large amounts of information.

Before moving on, though, there is another usage of pagination that you might have seen on websites – pagination within an article. In other words, a single article split over multiple pages.

This is a very different usage of pagination. Instead of helping users, website owners use this option so they can show more ads to visitors, i.e. as the user clicks through to each new page in the article, they see a new set of ads.

In this blog, however, we’re going to focus on the more common usage of pagination – to display large amounts of information.

Types of Pagination

• Article pagination – as mentioned above, a single article spread across more than one page
• Gallery pagination – where each image or gallery item as its own page
• Forum thread pagination – where a single forum thread has multiple pages
• Category pagination – where each category has its own page, like the product listing example mentioned above
• Infinite scroll pagination – where the website adds new information to the page whenever the user scrolls

The Impact of Pagination on SEO

The primary concern of most website owners when considering SEO and pagination is the fact that Google can, and probably will, index multiple paginated pages. In other words, it will index page two, three, four, etc in a paginated series as well as page one.

This is an issue for two main reasons:

• Most website owners put the most relevant information on page one of a paginated series. Therefore, they want users to see page one first. A Google search, however, might return page two in the paginated series, for example, or any other page.
• Depending on the size of your website, you might run into crawl bandwidth issues. In other words, the Google crawler will only spend so much time on your website indexing pages. If it gets stuck indexing multiple pages in multiple paginated series, it might not crawl other, more important pages.

The second point above is compounded by the fact that modern website Content Management Systems often add strings to URLs. This could result in not only lots of paginated pages in Google’s index, but also lots of variations of paginated pages.

Outdated Solutions

One method that some website owners use is to noindex every page except for page one in a paginated series. They do this in an attempt to force Google to prioritise page one.

This can have unintended consequences, however, including the fact that Google will stop following internal links on the other pages in the series. As internal links are crucial to SEO, this method of optimising pagination could have a detrimental impact on your website’s overall SEO, so it’s not recommended.

This means you should let Google index all pages in your paginated series.

Pagination Best Practices

Let’s first recap on the objectives of optimising the pagination feature of your website. There are two:

• You want Google to understand that it has found a paginated series on your website. Furthermore, you want Google to know which page is page one in the series, so it knows that, from your perspective, it’s the most important page.
• Secondly, you want to eliminate the variations of each paginated URL in Google’s index.

Two different link elements are the solution.

The first is:

• rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

You should apply this to the “Next” and “Previous” links that appear on pages in your paginated series. Often these links appear at the bottom of each page.

Obviously, page one in the paginated series will only have a rel=”next” link element. Google will understand this means it is page one in the paginated series.

All other pages will have both link elements, and the last page will have just rel=”prev”.

What about the second objective – limiting the number of pages in Google’s index to only clean links in the paginated series, i.e. eliminating all the other links created dynamically by your CMS?

The solution to this is the rel canonical link element. Specifically, on each page in your paginated series, you should add a canonical link to itself.

What About Duplicate Content?

One problem with pagination that website owners often highlight is duplicate content warnings. In other words, the pages in your paginated series are likely to have duplicate content, so you may get warnings.

The simple answer to this one is you don’t need to worry. Google understands that not only is pagination a fact of the internet, duplicate content on pages in a paginated series is also a fact of the internet.

So, while duplicate content warnings are important everywhere else, on paginated pages, you can ignore them.

Optimising Your Paginated Pages

The above may sound complex, but your website developer will be able to put in place solutions that automatically apply the rel=”next”, rel=”prev”, and rel canonical link elements to pages in a paginated series. Doing this will optimise them for SEO.