The word you may most often hear associated with SEO is patience. Starting an eCommerce SEO campaign requires a lot of patience. It can take several weeks for an SEO campaign to take shape and start to produce results as it establishes a presence with search engines.

This period of patience can become long and make you feel like nothing is happening. In times when you feel like action is needed, you want to jump in head first but need to restrain and let the campaign go to work.

So what can you do in the meantime? There are still ways you can keep working on your SEO campaign and progress towards a greater goal while doing nothing to the campaign as it actively goes to work.

SEO Planning

Set your plans and goals for the year or the month in your SEO campaign. What milestones do you want to reach? What is the outcome you are hoping for from the campaign? Use these questions as the basis and make a plan, highlighting the goals you have and the events you want to promote more as the time comes. You can always start to get ahead in your planning while you wait for the campaign to take action and start working.

Prioritize Your Web Pages

If you have extra time and are just letting the campaign go to work, you can always think about the pages on your eCommerce website that need to be optimized. Consider the terms you are targeting in the campaign and the pages that are most closely related. You want to focus on the pages that will be in the highest demand, the ones that get searched more often than others.

You may be starting with a small list of keywords and you want to give the campaign time to let those words go to work, but you can always keep doing keyword research to see other areas where you could try to capitalize and gain more organic traffic. During your keyword research, you can find the demand data that highlights the pages you should optimize.

Link Authority

Another area you can work on is building link authority or reclaiming it. Pages that return 404 broken link errors take away from your credibility and stop driving authority. When entire sections of your website are removed or if you have recently had a website redesign completed, you may have a lot of 404 broken link errors on your website, which search engines ignore naturally.

Your search performance, however, can suffer as a result. While you let your SEO campaign go to work, you can use some of the additional time by finding and fixing as many 404s as you can. You can also look to improve other technical errors that are common to the website like server errors.

Browse Search Engines

Have you ever thought of looking at search phrases and terms that you should be ranking for from the customer’s standpoint? Take a few of the long tail keywords you want to rank for or feel you should be ranking for and see that the results appear as they should. Look for things like rich snippets. Click a link and see what the landing page is like. Do you go to the right page on the website to make the purchase? Browsing other search results can give you an idea of how to improve your own.

Research Competitors

Whether you are in the early stages of planning out an SEO campaign or in a waiting period as your first keywords start to go to work, there’s always a good reason to scout out your competition. See what their results look like, what the features on their website are, and any new ideas you can generate for optimizing your own website.

Every result that appears along with your own website in search results is a competing website, even if they use different business models, and you can learn from those results. See if other competitors display in the position zero answer box on Google or in the “people also ask” cards. See if these competitors have more content marketing or are more optimized than your website. Check these websites for navigation and link structure to see if they are doing something different.

SEO requires patience and taking the time to step back and make observations about what is working and what is not working. You can always be looking into your own keywords, looking at competition and trying to figure out ways that you can improve.

With Genius eCommerce, we are here to help with the latest in eCommerce SEO trends, tips, and advice. This is who we are and what we do. Continue reading our blog for more on how you can maximize your eCommerce SEO.