Right now, there is no better way to attract dedicated customers to your business than with eCommerce SEO. The reason for this is simple: search engine optimization is built around the idea of tailoring your website to meet the exact needs of your users.
In the case of an eCommerce storefront, those users are potential customers who are searching for specific solutions to their problems. If you can deliver that solution efficiently and with a high degree of quality, not only will Google reward you with higher search rankings, those users will keep coming back for more.
At its core, eCommerce SEO is about making a connection between your products and the people who might need them most. If you are able to optimize your website properly, your products will reach more potential customers and the more your website meets their needs, the greater the likelihood that you will get their repeat business.
The Makings of a Customer Base
How is a traditional customer base formed? In most cases, through consistency and quality. Your customers are looking for a certain level of quality that meets their needs, and they want to be able to have a reliable means of obtaining this quality whenever they need it. You attach great branding to this concept and you have the basic ingredients for a successful business.
The only thing that changes online is your method of communicating with your customers and customer acquisition. Search engines have revolutionized the way we connect with brands and purchase their products. All you have to do is ask a question into Google and the search engine will provide you with the best answer to your question based on numerous highly specific factors.
Through eCommerce SEO, you are able to tell Google that your products are worth viewing and buying and that they deserve to be at the top of the rankings. If this is true, Google will continuously serve your product listings to the users who need them, which in turn creates a digital customer base that trusts you and is willing to invest in your brand.
This is how you create a customer base in the digital age. By fine-tuning your product listings and designing a powerful and efficient website that attracts the right users and converts them to customers by addressing their needs without hassle.
Investing in eCommerce SEO for your Business
If you want to bridge that gap and connect your products with your customers, you need to look into proper SEO tactics that will make it happen. Just as with brick and mortar marketing and outreach, great customer relationships don’t simply happen on their own or fall out of the sky. They are meticulously cultivated.
The same holds true when you are running a digital storefront through platforms such as Shopify and Bigcommerce. You still have to lay the groundwork that builds a thriving customer base by optimizing your website to meet today’s rigorous search engine requirements, something that doesn’t happen by accident.
When approaching SEO for your eCommerce business, you want to deep dive into the needs of your potential customers. It is their questions and issues that will ultimately draw them to your product listings. A user won’t always search for a specific product by name, especially one from a particular brand. In most cases, products are found when users are looking for answers to problems they have. It is here that you have to learn to think differently about business if you want to succeed.
Addressing the needs of your potential customers is vitally important if you want your business to excel. SEO is the process that not only includes addressing those needs but also letting Google and the other search engines know that you have succeeded in doing so. There are several ranking signals that Google looks for in a website, and without them, your site will have a very slim chance of ranking for anything.
This is why it’s crucial to invest in eCommerce SEO if you want to really make that connection between customer and product. In today’s age of high volume online sales, competition is fierce. Search engines are constantly fine-tuning their algorithms in order to pick only the best of the best to rank on page one. Without utilizing proper SEO conventions, implemented by a professional team of SEO experts, there’s very little chance that you will rank high, and this means you’re not likely to make that connection that will generate a loyal customer base for you.
Here at Genius eCommerce, we specialize in helping businesses connect with their ideal customers by implementing the best possible SEO practices. If you are interested in addressing the needs of your customers and ranking higher in Google to increase your traffic and sales, you can reach out to our team at 267-225-1946.
How Facebook Advertising Services Can Impact Your Business
The social media landscape is rapidly changing, but it’s still clear that Facebook is a powerhouse when it comes to advertising. There are still tens of millions of people that use Facebook every day, which makes Facebook advertising services an extremely lucrative tool for any business if you know how to use them.
The problem is, in an increasingly competitive market, it’s becoming more important than ever to understand the ins and outs of Facebook advertising services before you begin to use them yourself; otherwise, you stand to sink a lot of money into the platform and not see anything in return.
With more competition comes the need to optimize and refine ads, target your potential customers better, and ultimately grasp the platform on a deeper level than your competitors. There are thousands of stores and businesses on Facebook each using ads to gain the attention of users and hopefully convert them to customers.
If you don’t know the platform, however, you’re not going to make those conversions. There are certain concrete steps you have to take with Facebook in order to see proper returns on your investment. It’s not like Google where you simply pump money into a certain keyword you want to rank for. Facebook as a platform is far more focused on connecting your ads with the proper audience, to reduce poor user feedback and engagement.
It’s one thing on Google for a user to ignore an ad; an improperly targeted ad is just search result noise and doesn’t really bother people all that much. However, a spammy or improperly targeted ad on Facebook can not only get your post flagged by upset users who don’t want to see your content, but it can also put you on the outs with Facebook itself and your account may receive a temporary suspension or ban.
Though the prospect of learning and using Facebook advertising services may seem somewhat daunting, this guide will clear up your misconceptions and help you understand the basics of the platform so you can start connecting with your customers and making sales.
Facebook Advertising Connects You With Your Customers
The most important thing to know about Facebook as a platform for advertising is that it’s a way to truly connect with your most potentially loyal and valuable customers. Your goal is to establish a connection with the users most likely to appreciate and purchase your product once they are introduced to it. This is the exact opposite of traditional advertising, which often has a much wider net to catch anyone who is potentially in earshot and convert them through sales tactics.
It’s not a great idea to strictly “sell” to people on Facebook if you want great results. As a rule, people online down like to feel like they are being sold to. They don’t want to read ad copy and are typically suspicious of ads and posts that come off as being too salesy.
If this is the case, how are you supposed to gain a user’s trust and bridge that gap?
The key to making your advertisements work is all in the targeting. It’s here that you will bridge that gap and connect with the users on Facebook that are most likely to respond to your ad and possibly even give you a sale. This is done through a combination of matching product to behavior and interests, and strong knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in terms of imagery, video, and text. Once you have these elements down, crafting the perfect ad is much easier than you think.
What you have to keep in mind throughout the entire process of building your ad is to keep everything simple and focus on making that connection. The real human element of your ad is what will go the furthest toward making it work.
You obtain this human element by having a deep understanding of the behaviors and interests of your potential customers. Where do they live, what kind of income do they have, what is their gender, what are their hobbies? All of this information can be targeted on Facebook and even refined further if necessary. You can niche down with Facebook advertising, and this is why it is such an amazing tool for any business, especially if you are in eCommerce and have a digital storefront.
If you aren’t yet fully aware of the interests and overall behavior of your potential customers on Facebook, start making a list and doing the necessary research. Search for products and pages in your niche, and take note of who is interacting with those pages. Look at the ads of your competitors and study the interests and behaviors of everyone who likes and comments on them. This might seem tedious but it is extremely useful knowledge that can have a direct impact on your business if used properly.
Through studying user behavior, you can get a sense of what works and what doesn’t on Facebook in general. Many marketers fail on Facebook because they assume that just because they know how to run an ad, that they are going to make money. At the end of the day, the highest converting ads on Facebook are the ones that look the most like ordinary relatable posts. It stands to reason then that if you are going to create an ad that converts, you have to gain a better understanding of how to make a great Facebook post in general, not just as an ad.
Pay attention to what your competition is doing and what their customers are doing on Facebook, as well as the users that interact with your page. All of this information can be put to good use once you start building your ads.
Once you have a better idea of who you are targeting, the next step is to acquaint yourself with Facebook’s ad creation tools. There are several ways you can run an ad campaign on Facebook, from advertising single posts to creating massive multifaceted campaigns using the Facebook Ad Manager.
Rather than diving into the deep end and going over the myriad points of interest and complexities of the Ad Manager, there are much easier and effective ways to get into Facebook advertising services, especially if you are trying to get a firm grasp on the platform.
How to Easily Jump Into Facebook Advertising
If you are looking for an easy and efficient way to get your product or service in front of more eyes, and specifically in front of targeted users, all you need to is locate the Boost Post button on any one of your Facebook page’s posts.
This simple button is your gateway into the core of the Facebook ad experience. It allows you to access the fundamentals of Facebook’s advertising tools without bogging you down with features and options.
For the best experience, create a tailored post for your Facebook page that you want to promote and treat like an ad, publish it, and then click the blue Boost Post button when you are ready to begin.
This will take you to the boost post screen, where you will see an array of options for advertising your post. If you aren’t familiar with boosting Facebook posts, there’s really only two parts that you have to think about: the audience targeting and the ad parameters.
You can access the targeting options under the “Audience” section, by clicking Create New Audience. This will bring you to the area where you can edit your audience, which is where all of the information you gathered during your user research comes into play. Here you can input all of the interests, behaviors, and demographics of the users who best represent your potential customers. As you type into the field, Facebook will even give you potential and related matches, which can help bolster your audience.
Ideally, you want to narrow your audience down until it is in the middle of the green area. This means that you are targeting a healthy number of users without being too broad, and will give you the best chances of maximizing your ad spend.
Once you have crafted your custom audience, you want to set the duration and budget of your ad. This is as easy as it sounds, and only requires you to set the amount of days you would like your post to be boosted, and the amount of money you are willing to spend per day.
Here you will also be able to see the potential amount of people your post will reach. This number can of course vary depending on the quality of your ad, and how well you are targeting users in your niche.
It’s at this point where you can hit boost and allow Facebook to approve your ad. Yes, running an ad on Facebook can be this easy, and it can still have a dramatic impact on your business and generating potential sales.
As long as you do your homework beforehand, this simple method of running Facebook ads can be extremely effective. Though you are not using the full power of Facebook’s advertising platform, you are still taking advantage of their most essential tools.
With these kinds of simple boosted ad posts, you can drive targeted traffic to flash sales, specific products and offers, your mailing list, or even a recent blog post. If you are running an eCommerce business on Facebook, it can be useful to boost posts to encourage likes on your page or traffic to your blog, because it’s that human connection you’re after. The more people interact with your brand without feeling like they are being sold to, the better success you will have on the platform.
The Power of Professional Facebook Advertising Services
Of course, you can take your Facebook advertising efforts one step further by hiring a professional agency to help you utilize the full power of the platform.
Facebook has been making strides toward simplifying their advertising services, but the fact is that the Ad Manager is extremely complex and is designed to be utilized by agencies, not individuals. Facebook comes equipped with a full range of high level advertising features and tools that can be used to run impressive and meticulous ad campaigns that span weeks and months, with specific targeting and options per ad set.
If you are interested in running simultaneous ads or a more sophisticated ad campaign, you are encouraged to use the Ad Manager. This almost always entails utilizing some level of professional expertise to make sure you are not only targeting the right users per ad set, but that you are also running your ads correctly in general. The number of options and settings available to maximize the efficiency of your ads means that the Ad Manager is not something you can just casually approach.
This is where the knowledge, skills, and expertise of a professional agency comes into play. We here at Genius eCommerce take Facebook advertising seriously, and know what it takes to optimize your ads and get them in front of your specific audience. Facebook advertising is simple on the surface, but underneath it is a powerful and complex tool that is only effective in the right hands. You need the right strategy and a team that will work closely with you to understand the particular needs of your brand and audience.
Trust in an agency that can get you the results you need to positively impact your business and generate traffic and crucial sales for your store. Our team has perfected the art of connecting users with products through meticulous niche research and laser-like targeting, to produce amazing results.
Interested in taking advantage of the full power of Facebook for your business? You can get in touch with us by email here at info@geniusecommerce.com or by phone at 267-225-1946. Our experts are waiting to help take your business to the next level.
Improve Your Search Engine Optimization with Our Shopify SEO Services
There’s no shortage of reasons that you might want to consider using Shopify as a platform around which you can configure your online store. There are a load of user-friendly features that can almost make it easy for you to build an online business from the ground up.
In many ways, Shopify is the ultimate eCommerce platform. While every software has its benefits and drawbacks, with Shopify there’s almost no limit to how you can customize your store. It’s a great overall solution for online merchants who are looking to build an appealing store that integrates a lot of features.
While you can go your own way with your branding in the layout and design of your site, you’ll probably also be drawn to the fact that you can integrate tons of applications into your Shopify site that offer your visitors and customers additional functionality and engagement.
Shopify is also secure and offers some of the best uptime available to eCommerce entrepreneurs. As digital security becomes one of the main concerns – both for online buyers and sellers, you’ll appreciate the fact that Shopify has some of the best available security features available. Then there’s the fact that Shopify offers its users practically unlimited uptime, so that you don’t have to experience headaches and lost sales associated with downtime and customer complaints.
In short, Shopify offers a few solutions for online businesses with varying needs. The thing is, almost regardless of your marketing strategy, your business will face a lot of competition from other sellers online who are offering similar products and compete on similar or the same keywords to get in front of customers. In many cases, though your products might be different, your target markets might be the same.
How do you get in front of your customers before the competition gets in front of them first? How can you ensure that your page ranks sufficiently to be visible to those in the market that have an interest in, even a need for, your products or services?
You get in front of them with our Shopify SEO services. Here’s how.
Invest in Keyword Research and Develop A Strategy
One of the most significant ways to make changes to your website is by addressing the layout of your website, but that will take on many facets, so bear with us. We’ll start with the importance of keyword research and strategy.
In order to rank your website, there are a number of things that search engines must be able to identify as they crawl your site’s pages. It can be tough to find a place to start since all of the different factors affecting overall SEO are interrelated, but the way your site is laid out and the keywords it contains are a great place to start.
Let’s consider a keyword strategy, as a solid keyword strategy will affect both the way your site’s structure is addressed as well as nearly everything other aspect of your SEO endeavors. It all starts with taking a look at the greater market and conducting research into what keywords customers are searching for.
We’ll look for high volume keywords that search engines will be looking for when they crawl your website. In-depth keyword research entails understanding the relationship between customers’ reasons for searching for those keywords as well as what they expect to find.
Customers have a need for searching for keywords that drives that intent. While it’s impossible to read the customer’s minds, we can see what keywords are being searched for repeatedly as well as how competitors within your market are using those keywords to their advantage and ranking well for them.
If a competitor is successful at driving traffic to their website with a specific high volume keyword, then you can start to develop confidence that that website is offering some value to those who enter that word – that word might be a good word to target for your own use to try to grab some of that business – particularly if you offer similar or superior products.
Yet that is only one keyword, and keyword research will uncover a laundry list of words and terms that might be valuable to chase down. We’ll investigate their volume and relevance and come up with a list that will be effective for your business based on several indicators.
Once we’ve compiled a list of keywords for you to target in your efforts, we can get into your site structure, content production and garnering links to your website to gain authority for you.
Optimizing Your Site Structure
Optimizing your site structure is one of the primary ways that our Shopify SEO services can help you build more targeted traffic to your website, and some of that starts with the keyword research we hashed out above.
Before we get into the specifics of some of the many ways we can help to streamline and optimize your website, there’s some really good news in all this. Optimizing your Shopify stores for search engines won’t just help to generate more traffic to your site and help you boost conversions. It’s actually married to user experience. Know that as you develop an effective design that catches the attention of search engines, you will create a better user experience and interface as a by-product, so investing in SEO is a win-win for your business.
A large part of making your site structure more effective is tied to making it easier for search engines to crawl your website in a logical progression, which, as we stated, will also make your website easier for customers to navigate, another win-win scenario. The internal linking structure of your website must make sense, and not be overwhelmingly convoluted or circular.
Laying out your site structure in a basic fashion that only requires a few clicks to get to the page on which you want the ultimate conversion to occur is a pretty basic and effective design. It shouldn’t be counterintuitive or productive to find your products, services, sign-ups or anything else you want your customers to find. Think of it this way – if it’s hard for thinking customers to get there, it will probably be that much harder for an unthinking algorithm to do the same thing.
That’s a bit of a metaphor, but if it puts things in perspective, it’s worth it. There’s more to it than that, but that’s where our expert Shopify SEO services come into play. We handle the technical work so you don’t have to.
There’s so much more to optimizing your site structure than just the internal linking, though. Consider also the fact that our experts will take a look at your page titles, meta titles and meta descriptions, for example, to ensure that they are optimized as well.
Remember we stressed the importance of keyword research and strategy above? Here’s where it starts to come into the picture. What are your page titles, URLs, meta titles and meta descriptions made of? What are your category pages titles and descriptions composed of? All of the content, on and off your site that takes a written form, is composed of words.
So when we look at your site structure, we’re not just looking at the internal linking and hierarchy of the site. We’re looking at the keywords and phrases that appear in your meta titles and descriptions and on your category and product pages. This starts to enter the realm of content production as part of an SEO campaign, though we’re not entirely there yet.
Ultimately, we will address all of the titles and descriptions associated with your site to ensure that they are rich with keywords that will drive traffic to your site and ultimately to those pages. We don’t lose any opportunities to enrich your page titles and descriptions with keywords and phrases that customers are looking for to help generate traffic to your store. We also eliminate duplicate content in those titles and on those pages that can do more than confuse search engines and visitors to your site. It can even result in a penalty, but we’ll get to the dangers of duplicate content in a bit.
We Can Create A Responsive Design
As part of developing Shopify websites that are SEO friendly, our Shopify SEO experts can help your business develop a responsive design that will be adaptable to the small screen. This can and will have far-reaching benefits for both your SEO efforts and your customer friendliness.
If you need convincing on this front, know that M-commerce is rapidly growing and that every year, more and more online transactions take place on mobile devices. Shoppers are turning to their phones and tablets to research products, read reviews, communicate with other users and then ultimately make their purchase decisions. Over the course of 2020, mobile transactions are expected to surpass the halfway mark – that is, they are expected to account for over half of all online sales.
What does that mean? A website that doesn’t scale to the device to offer a flexible user experience will be left in the dust. If your desktop website is stellar, that’s grand. If it doesn’t fit the device, showing up as text-heavy, curtailed or disproportionate on a phone’s screen, that’s bad news.
We don’t feel the need to dive further into why this will adversely affect your conversion rate, but we will do you the service of elaborating on its impacts on SEO. Google has begun mobile-first indexing, which means that it will first evaluate a website on its mobile design and then on other factors. That means a responsive design is becoming more and more important to how your Shopify store will rank in search results. A user-friendly, engaging mobile site is just one more thing our Shopify SEO services can offer you.
Use Content Production to Your Advantage
Content production is more than just a component of your marketing efforts. Content can be used directly to optimize your website for search engines and it can even be used to generate backlinks to your website to gain your business referral traffic.
Content production is also, obviously, tied directly into the keyword strategy that we develop for your business. One of the aspects this takes on is on your product and category pages. We will conduct an analysis of these pages to investigate the content they contain, as this is one of the main areas in which businesses are guilty of offering duplicate content.
Category and product pages with duplicate content aren’t just boring to customers. Search engines will immediately recognize it as duplicate and defer to the original source as the authority, which will rob you of traffic. It can be tempting to take a manufacturer description but don’t fall prey to that trap.
As part of our Shopify SEO services, we will craft original, keyword-rich content for your category and product pages to drive customers looking for those keywords to those pages. Sounds effective, right? That’s because it is. You’re basically placing the solution right before the person with the problem.
We will also create content for your site’s blog to entice readers with valuable information on your company, on the solutions your products offer, and other engaging topics, and you guessed it, it will be original, keyword-rich, and highly targeted to your audience. But posting original and informative content on your website to engage readers and drive traffic isn’t our only strategy. We will create similar content and post it elsewhere on highly authoritative sites directing traffic back to your website indicating you as a reputable source. It’s genius (see: Genius eCommerce) and effective.
Of course, this is a highly simplified overview of the efforts we take as part of an SEO strategy to generate long term organic traffic to your site and craft the ideal user experience for your customers, but they all work together to achieve results. To learn more about our processes and see how we can impact your web design for the better, reach out to us at info@geniusecommerce.com or at 267-225-1946.
