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Magento SEO: Eight Important Considerations

Magento is a powerful, open-source platform that can be used to build very successful eCommerce websites. It offers a lot of options for customizability to its users, but to get the most success from the platform, it requires an in-depth knowledge of how it operates. When you’re running a business online, you have plenty on your plate as it is. If you need to ramp up your traffic and get your website in front of the eyes of more customers, you might want to consider a Magento SEO campaign, and here are some very important things to consider.

Focus On Keywords And Key Phrases

There are so many different factors at play during a professionally crafted Magento SEO campaign that it can be very difficult to focus on just one. However, perhaps nothing is as important to the success of a campaign at the keyword research that precedes it and the keyword strategy that defines it. Almost all of the following advice we offer would be impossible to use or ineffective without a keyword strategy to guide it.

A keyword strategy will help define all of the content you produce, both in the form of short and long-form consumables as part of your marketing efforts and as descriptions on your pages, page titles and more.

A Magento SEO campaign will need to begin with keyword research to understand what words consumers are using in their searches and why; what information and content they find valuable; what sites get traffic, and what keywords they are using for success.

When you have identified a list of keywords and key phrases that you will use as the foundation of much of your search engine optimization initiatives you can then progress into content product and optimizing much of the rest of your Magento website.

Create An Optimized URL Structure

One of the most basic improvements you can make to your Magento website to increase its search engine optimization is to clean up the URL structure of your site. Once you have developed a keyword strategy, developing a simple and effective URL structure can become much easier.

In practice, a team of skilled developers and designers can take a look at the overall structure of your site and help you identify areas for improvement. Generally, optimized URLs contain the right mix of keywords that are relevant to the page itself and are as short as practical. Long URLs with lots of nonsense letters and numbers tend to generate their own issues. Where they can be avoided, they should be. There’s no sense in letting something as simple as a URL hurt your Magento SEO.

Creating an effective URL structure won’t just make it easier for search engine algorithms to recognize and rank your site, but they’ll offer value to visitors as well. A URL structure that contains basic information on the contents of the page will help search engines put those pages in front of the people searching for those words in the first place. The effect is twofold.

Use The Right Default Titles: Optimize Titles And Meta Descriptions

This is another really simple way that a Magento website can miss out on a lot of potential. When something as simple as meta tags for categories or something like a title tag is hurting the optimization of your website, it’s time to fix it.

As with URL optimization, optimizing your meta titles and meta descriptions starts with the foundation of a solid keyword strategy. With respect to your titles, they should be specific, make sense, be easy to read and be relevant to the page. They should also be short – in fact, they should be as short as is practical. This will once again prove value to the search engine evaluating it and any customers that happen to read it.

Focusing on and optimizing the meta descriptions of your pages provides plenty of opportunities to offer value to your potential customers and improve your click-through rate. Provide relevant information in the meta description for what is contained on the page into which you want the viewer to click through. It should be short, but it should also be enriched with keywords, provide some insight into the page and where possible include some sort of call to action or incentive. Once again, this is valuable to search engines that view it as well as any human eyes that read it. Don’t miss a chance to optimize these portions of your web pages.

Add A Blog Page To Your eCommerce Platform

Adding a blog page is an excellent way to provide value to your customers and to increase your Magento SEO. Make no mistake about it, if you don’t have a blog page to organize your written content and you aren’t regularly publishing, you are not giving it your all to drive visitors to your site.

As with the opportunities we’ve explored so far, regularly publishing a variety of content to a blog page on your website will offer value to visitors to your site as well as provide additional positive metrics by which search engines will rank it.

It is essential to provide written content intended for your visitors to consume for a variety of reasons. First, it gives visitors something to read that will provide relevant value and insight into the products or services you sell. The higher the quality of the content, the more likely you will be to have repeat visitors. Sessions on your pages will be longer as visitors consume your written content, which is another thing that search engines look out for and use to evaluate your site. In addition, high-quality valuable content is likely to be shared by readers, which will build backlinks to your site – another critically important process that will improve your SEO and alert search engines to your website as an authoritative source that customers trust.

Search engines will evaluate your site based on how customers interact with it, and if they are spending plenty of time reading what you have to say and sharing your links, they will rank you more highly. There are a few components to this, but the two most important are the subjective quality of the content from the perspective of a reader, and the objective value of your content based on its keyword density. Again, this goes back to the keyword strategy, but it also requires skilled and informative content production. That is another component of what goes into making a Magento SEO campaign effective.

Eliminate Duplicate Content

Speaking of creating a blog and regularly publishing high-quality content brings up the importance of eliminating duplicate content on your website. Duplicate content can take many forms and isn’t limited to anything in your blog posts, so it’s worth exploring what this means and why it’s important to get rid of it.

Duplicate content is just what it sounds like. Any content, in basically any form, that appears on your website and appears somewhere else in the exact same for. That means on and off your website. Allow us to explain.

First, you’ll want to eliminate duplicate content that appears on your website. It will make your site more navigable and won’t confuse search engines, or readers for that matter. You don’t want blog articles that say exactly the same thing, but you also don’t want to use the same image file multiple times or the same page titles, for that matter. It’s damaging to your user experience and your optimization.

But there’s more. It’s an unfortunately common practice for site operators to find information on other sites and publish it to their own, either because they appreciated the content or couldn’t come up with their own. Don’t ever do this. Not only is it plagiarism, but search engines will recognize it as duplicate content and will penalize your rankings as a result.

Along with the other benefits that an experienced team of technical experts can provide, they can make it easier for you to eliminate any duplicate content that exists on your site as well as providing you with fresh, engaging content to post.

Optimize The Internal Linking Structure Of Your Site

An optimized internal linking structure is not only critical to the manner in which visitors interact with your website and navigate it. It will also affect the rankings that search engines give to your website. Just like everything else investigated so far, the value of a well designed internal linking structure is multifaceted.

A well developed internal linking structure makes it easy for visitors to your site to find what they came for. Generally, it should only take a couple of clicks for visitors to find the product pages they came looking for in the first place. This is valuable because it will minimize the risk of users becoming frustrated or “lost” on your website. As we’ve explained previously, a website that is difficult to navigate offers a poor user experience and damages your chances at repeat visits – and your conversion rate.

At the same time that a well developed internal linking structure provides value to visitors, it also enables search engines to crawl your site structure more readily. The more logically your site progresses, the more highly search engines will rank your site. Therefore, by creating an optimized structure, you can generate higher organic traffic to your site, which has its own benefits.

External Link Building Is Important

While you don’t necessarily directly build external links, they are an important part of a Magento SEO campaign. External link building will start to develop naturally if your website offers fresh, original, informative and engaging content. As users interact with your site and consume your content, they will share it on social media or elsewhere. Any links they post that direct traffic back to your site are called backlinks and they are an invaluable resource for convincing search engines that your site is an authoritative source and most importantly, a source trusted by visitors.

Backlinks to your website are an invaluable component of an SEO campaign and are another indispensable in driving traffic to your site. Nothing says that your site is trustworthy like a reader who asks other readers to take a look at what they found on your site. Understandably, the quality of your content and the success of your content marketing will have a great impact on the backlinks you are able to generate, so that is just another way that all of these components of a Magento SEO campaign are intertwined.

Optimize Your Site For Speed

Here’s another component of an SEO campaign that sometimes takes an unfortunate backseat. Your website should be optimized for speed. As with some of the other considerations to account for during an SEO campaign, a site optimized for speed will have a few effects on the success of the initiative.

The first is that the process of optimizing your site for speed will have a positive effect on the structure of your site and eliminate any fluff that might be present on your website. Streamlining your site design for speed will make it easier for search engines to crawl your pages and analyze the navigational flow and hierarchy of your web store. The first effect here is that it will make it much easier for search engines to recognize your site as a trustworthy source and afford it the rankings you want.

The second effect that will result from optimizing your website to make it faster is that you will improve your user experience significantly. All of the changes you may have made to make your website faster will probably make it much easier for users to navigate your site and find what they were looking for. Even if the changes you made were invisible from a user level, the fact that your pages will load faster cannot be underscored enough. Most users will bounce off of a page if the load time is over three seconds. In other words, online shoppers have no tolerance for web pages that load too slowly. Optimize your site for speed and you can prevent these unfortunate circumstances.

It’s time for you to optimize your eCommerce store, and here’s why. With a free SEO audit by Genius eCommerce, you can see where your web store stands. If it’s healthy, you have nothing to lose. If you could make any improvement, any changes you make today to improve the visibility of your website online and increase its rankings will pay you back in the long term.

And not only can you get a free SEO audit from Genius eCommerce, but we can handle your entire SEO campaign as well. We have years of experience streamlining clients’ websites to help them generate more traffic and boost sales. There’s no need to wait – give us a call today at 888-982-8269 or contact us at info@geniusecommerce.com.

February 14, 2020

Michael Esposito

Ecommerce, ecommerce platforms, eCommerce SEO, Magento
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Take Advantage Of eCommerce SEO: Grow Traffic and Enhance User Experience

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can seem like an intimidating and confusing buzzword to many owners of online stores. It might seem like a mystifying collection of practices that requires rare and exquisite technological erudition to unlock. In reality, it’s a lot less lofty than that, and it can have a real impact on the organic traffic to your web store and on the quality of the user experience it offers.

Taking advantage of eCommerce SEO does require experience and a fair amount of technical expertise, but it’s far from magic. What you need if you want to bring in some of the benefits associated with eCommerce SEO is a team of professionals like those at Genius eCommerce.

Through their keyword research, statistical competitor and industry analyses, content production and web design and development, they come up with an eCommerce strategy for you to optimize your online presence and offer you more business and your users a better experience more in line with their expectations.

An Optimized Site Will Be More Visible

The first benefit that an optimized site will offer your business is that it will be more visible to online users, and the ultimate result is higher organic traffic to your site. Through a combination of content product and link building, optimizing category pages, headers and tags, an in-depth look at the layout and design of your website and if necessary repositioning efforts, the team at Genius eCommerce can revamp your website to make it optimized to drive organic traffic

What this means for you is that your ranking on search engine results pages will steadily grow over time, making it easier for potential customers to find your site and thus your products or services. When more potential customers can find your business based on an organic search using targeted keywords, it gives you a much higher chance for conversion and will have a net positive effect on the growth of your online business.

An Optimized Site Will Be Faster

Oftentimes a part of an SEO project involves the removal of duplicate content and pages from your website and efforts to make your site more crawlable. In these ways and others, your website will experience a shift in load times to make it much faster. The intended effect is to improve your search rankings, but a faster site has much more value than just being more agreeable to search engine algorithms.

A fast website will have a serious impact on how customers view your company as a trustworthy and reliable source of information. Not only will they view your site more favorably, but they’ll be less likely to bounce right out of your site out of frustration. Since visitors to your site need to stay on your site to be customers anyway, this is a win-win situation that results from an eCommerce SEO project.

An Optimized Site Will Get Visitors In Front Of What They Want

An optimized site won’t just be faster, it will get visitors – potential customers – in front of what they want much faster as well. The sooner visitors can find what they’re looking for, the sooner they can become customers.

Having optimizing search capabilities is another component of advanced user experience and it will also help with conversion rates, but this is concept is even more basic. Since an optimized website will be ranked more highly by search engines and thus be more visible to the denizens of the web, it will put clients in front of what they want much more naturally.

For example, an effective keyword strategy will link up clients with your website based on what they were looking for in the first place. Customers will treat the organic search results much more favorably and will be more likely to engage with your site.

Quality Content Can Result In Link Sharing

The production of quality content is the cornerstone of an effective eCommerce SEO campaign. Not only does quality content strengthen your brand image and awareness of your products, but it can also be particularly valuable to your readers – here’s how.

When visitors to your website read your content and are interested, entertained or informed by what they’ve read, they’re much more likely to share it. Sharing your content builds links back to your website pointing to you as a valuable source that people should look to. It’s one of the best ways, if not the best way, to engage customers.

An effective eCommerce SEO campaign can have all of these benefits for your organization, but it is likely to have many more, and all with the end results of getting more potential customers involved and engaged with your online store. All it takes is to partner with the right organization, with the right skills and experience to put together an unstoppable SEO campaign to get you those results, and we here at Genius eCommerce have the grit and the experience to help you make those gains. If more traffic to your online store is something you’re not entirely against, visit our site or contact us at info@geniusecommerce.com.

January 30, 2020

Michael Esposito

Blog, eCommerce SEO
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Steps You Can Take for Higher SEO Rankings

For many eCommerce business owners, SEO seems like a complicated endeavor. You are told to be patient with the results. You are told that it takes extensive research. You are told about the importance of search engine optimization and the things you should update for better optimization.

As complicated as it seems, SEO is not a hopeless endeavor. It’s quite the opposite in fact. You know that you want to improve your SEO rankings, but just need the guidance to take the best practices to get you there.

There are five things that you can do, or find a digital marketing agency to complete, that will help you be set up for SEO success. Check out these steps with us here at Genius eCommerce. This is who we are and what we do.

Coding – One of the most important parts of SEO rankings is the behind the scenes work that coding does. Having a good code to your website does not achieve rankings alone, but if your code is not in order, it can prevent you from reaching the success you want even if everything on the surface is being done well. Technical SEO is an aspect that you simply cannot overlook.

Content – Your content still rules overall. After all, Google reads words first and foremost and looks for the ways it is relevant to search terms. For better Google rankings, you want to have a content marketing plan that focuses on specific keywords and carries some meaning. Relevant and meaningful content helps to boost your domain authority and quality content connects with people who will be reading.

Link Building – A piece of advice you hear a lot when college students are preparing for graduation is to make connections and start networking. Essentially, that is what link building is to your SEO efforts. Building links is making new connections and increasing your domain authority.

Social Shares – Social media has no direct effect on your SEO, but it does go hand in hand with building domain authority and backlinks. Creating connections helps increase your relevance and authority as a leader in your industry. The more shares you can get by promoting your content on social media, the more people will see it organically. This, in turn, helps build up your brand and give it a recognition, which can help you get more clicks from results in search engines because of recognition. Because people may already know the brand from social media, your bounce rate could go down with people visiting having an idea of what to expect from you. That can only improve your conversion rate, establishing that trust in people.

Keyword Ranking – A key part of SEO is choosing keywords that can help improve your overall rankings. The problem is that far too often, SEO clients choose to keep it basic and target words that are broadly searched. With so much competition for the top spots for these keywords, you can easily get lost in the shuffle. That’s why the best way to start your campaign is to do extensive research on keywords where there is an opportunity to achieve the top ranking spots. Using keywords that are more specific to your goals can help you get to the places you want to rank.

With SEO, there are no guarantees or shortcuts to achieving success. It does take patience and research to get the results. With that in mind, having the right team to guide you along the way with the research and strategy can put you on the right track. Taking these steps may not be the easiest thing to do, but it is the most effective in the long run, and that is ultimately what will allow you to achieve the success you desire.

July 25, 2019

admin

Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, eCommerce SEO, Latest eCommerce
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BigCommerce and Your WordPress Site

WordPress is an amazing option for businesses that are just starting out with their online presence. The WooCommerce plugin allows businesses to easily add eCommerce functionality to WordPress websites. Since late 2018, there has been a new option for WordPress users to dip their toes into the eCommerce world. Businesses no longer have to choose between WordPress’ flexible platform and BigCommerce’s proven eCommerce engine. For WordPress-based entrepreneurs wondering if they should consider adding BigCommerce to their site, here are some factors to consider.

Your Content and Your Commerce

If you have a well-established WordPress site, you undoubtedly have built a network of content related to your business. While migrating that information to a new platform is possible, it is a time consuming and sometimes risky procedure. If you have dedicated time to building your brand through WordPress, the BigCommerce plugin is a great way to add the checkout options your business needs. 

Increasing Your Scalability

If your business is growing, adding BigCommerce’s functionality is a great option. As you start to do more business on your site, the increased activity can drag down your page’s performance. Letting BigCommerce handle the eCommerce side of your business will leave your content pages running smoothly as your user interactions grow. You get all of the advantages of your WordPress site and BigCommerce’s powerful eCommerce platform. 

More eCommerce Options

Choosing BigCommerce for your WordPress site means WordPress developers can quickly add a huge array of eCommerce options to your site. For example, with the BigCommerce plugin, you have access to 65 payment gateways and seamless access to all major global carriers for your shipping needs. Shopping carts developed through this BigCommerce platform can easily integrate sales and discount codes from your website and make the user experience quick and easy. You can also use this BigCommerce plugin to expand your business’ sales across multiple popular platforms like Facebook, Amazon, and eBay.

Additional Security 

Adding BigCommerce to your WordPress site means that you can use their secure checkout service. Working with BigCommerce means that your checkout process is PCI secure out of the box. You will not have to worry about securing your customer data as your business expands. 

 

If you feel like your business is growing beyond your WordPress’ sites current capabilities, adding BigCommerce’s plugin might just be the perfect way to handle your checkout process. If you’re not ready to move off your established site, but you need to broaden your eCommerce horizons, this plug-in is a perfect way to get the best of both worlds. 

Here at Genius eCommerce, we are dedicated to helping your eCommerce business succeed. To stay up to date on the latest eCommerce news and tips, check back in with us for regular updates.

 

July 01, 2019

admin

BigCommerce, Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, ecommerce platforms, Latest eCommerce, Uncategorized, Website Platforms
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Three Valuable eCommerce Features that Require Development

When you partner with an eCommerce platform, you gain the suite of development options offered by that platform. While these options are often more than sufficient for setting up an eCommerce site for any business, there is no way for platforms to offer all of the features their clients would like. When developing your eCommerce website and comparing it to other sites in your industry, you might quickly develop a list of features you would like for your site that are not baked into your platform.

In order to add these features to your website, you need a webpage developer who can physically code them in. By hiring a development team familiar with your eCommerce platform, customization is virtually limitless.  Web development can greatly improve the appearance and function of your website, leading to greater user retention.

Mega Menus

Mega menus are an amazing feature for your eCommerce site. Unlike a standard drop-down menu, these menus often feature categories and subcategories so your customers can browse a wider range of options at a glance. While standard menu options are a standard feature for all eCommerce platforms, they do not include options for creating these comprehensive menus.

Developers can easily create gorgeous mega menus with any of the options your business needs. Whether this includes several subcategory options or the inclusion of images with your menus, almost anything is possible with the right coding.

Search Features

Another common feature that requires development is custom search. Most eCommerce platforms come with search features that allow for faceted search. This allows users to customize their search in terms of brand, size, color, and other common facets.

If your business requires a more specific facet, you’re going to need a custom search. For example, if you run a business that sells plants, you might have customers who want to search your products by how much light they require. This functionality will be valuable in assisting your customers to make purchases, but no platform is going to have a “light level” facet built into their search functions.

Auto-completing search terms are another feature that customers appreciate. Several developers are able to add coding to your search features to include auto-complete and recommended search features. Features like these make it easier to navigate your site and add a professional touch that users appreciate.

One Click Purchasing

Another valuable function that many platforms do not include is one-click purchasing. Made popular as a feature for Amazon Prime, the eCommerce giant now offers this to all of its customers. Rather than adding a product to a cart and then moving to checkout, one-click purchasing takes the customer straight to checkout.

For sites that link customer payment data to account, this can even be used for instant purchases with no further steps. These tools are extremely valuable for cashing in on impulse purchases and streamlining the purchasing process. Having customers view their cart before checkout can lead to indecision. The faster you can allow a customer to go from the initial desire for a product to purchase, the less chance that your customers will reconsider.

 

To learn more about features that will improve your eCommerce site’s performance, turn to Genius eCommerce. Our experts are here to keep you up to date on the latest tips and news in the world of eCommerce.

 

June 26, 2019

admin

Ecommerce, ecommerce platforms, Latest eCommerce, Website Platforms
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Choosing a Design Theme for your eCommerce Site

The web design theme you use for your eCommerce site can have a major impact on your business. Whether this is positive or negative depends on how much research you put into your decision.

Consider your users: The number one criteria when choosing a theme is your user base. Many businesses that are trying to appeal to a young and trendy audience will have the most success with modern minimal templates. This style is currently in vogue and does not provide an abundance of distractions from your call to action. Flat themes typically feature light backgrounds and darker text, making your content really pop off the page.

A full-width template is a great option to achieve a very contemporary look. For a more traditional design, a boxed width design is another great choice. These templates include a border around your content and tend to be perfect for websites marketing to other businesses.

No matter what theme option you choose, you will have some empty space on your page. While it might be tempting to fill that negative space, it’s important to avoid over-saturating the user. If you have a lot to say, consider a simple link to another page where you can go more in-depth.

Choose the right header: A strong header sends a strong message. As soon as a user lands on your page, the header should be the first thing that draws their eye. A bold, bright image is truly worth a thousand words. You can tell an entire story about your brand with the right combination of graphics and text at the top of your page. If that story appeals to your user base, it will leave them hungry for more information.

You also want to be sure that your header leaves enough space for users to want to continue their journey through your site. A header that takes up half of your page might make your website appear underdeveloped.

Instead of extending your header vertically, you might want to extend its width beyond the rest of your content, guiding users from the literal big picture to the important details about your business. The right balance between the “curb appeal” of your header and the substance to back it up will be what keeps users interacting with your website.

Check out your competition: If your business has competitors with a successful website, take some time to navigate them. It’s never a great idea to use the exact page template as a competitor, noting their successful layout features will help you improve your own site.

Does your lead competitor place their menu above or below the header? How do they lay out their links or organize their products? All of these factors can contribute to their success and might be a huge help when deciding what your customers want to see for your business.

You should also consider the inverse, what does their site lack? Are there clunky or unnecessary features on the competition’s website? Avoiding their mistakes is a great way to give your site a superior layout.

Menu designs: Your menus are your user’s travel guide to the rest of your website. You need menus to point users towards your products and more information on what you offer as a brand. Whether you feature a simple dropdown menu or what a custom designed mega menu, making your site easy to navigate is key to retaining users and increasing visit durations.

Factors like whether you want to include subcategories to your menu can affect the ease of use for your website. A challenging menu will lead to increased bounce rates, but having too many subcategories can be confusing to users. Be sure to test your own menus and make sure they serve as an efficient gateway for visitors to understand you and your product line.

Branding: What is more important to you, your brand or your products? The idea of your brand is important, and how you feature it on your site will send a message to users. You definitely want your pages to prominently feature your brand logo so visitors will see and remember it.

If your brand is the focal point of your business, you will want that logo front and center. This works well for businesses that are selling a “lifestyle” that goes with their products. For markets like footwear, sometimes having a popular brand of shoes is more important than having shoes in general to consumers. These businesses will want to display that brand first and the products second.

If you want your products to speak for your brand, placing your logo off to the side or in a corner might be a better choice. This placement will give visitors an idea of who you are, while still maintaining your site design’s focal point to display your products. For businesses that want customers to display their product’s utility, or do not have powerful brand recognition, this product fronted design will focus visitors’ interest on what you have to offer.

 

Keep your business up to date with Genius eCommerce. Our experts compile news and tips on every facet of eCommerce so you can always find new ways to improve your site and your business.

June 19, 2019

admin

Ecommerce, ecommerce platforms, How-To, Latest eCommerce, Website Platforms
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eCommerce Migration and Your SEO Campaign

Sometimes you need to migrate your eCommerce business to a new platform. If you need your website to feature functionality your current eCommerce platform doesn’t offer or you’re overpaying for features your business doesn’t need, it might be time to consider a migration

One important consideration to make when you migrate your business is how it will impact the efficacy of your SEO campaign. SEO campaigns can last for months to years and often involve an extensive network of links. Moving your platform means all of that work and link equity might be placed in jeopardy.

Protect your Links

If your migration is going to affect your URL structure, you will need to implement 301 redirects to your old links. Without doing this, your SEO backlinks from offsite content will no longer direct to your website and Google will no longer associate your business with them. This can quickly drop your Google search rankings.

For internal links, be sure to physically actually change them rather than using more redirects. Too many redirects will slow your website down and negatively impact the user experience.

A new platform will also mean new SEO options. Making sure your SEO data is compatible with your new platform is crucial. If you know that search engines will analyze your new pages differently, you will have to adjust your strategy to match.

Use a Sandbox

Sandboxes exist for a reason. Before you implement your migration, test the new website and make sure all your links work properly. Generate a migration checklist and ensure all your concerns have been addressed before you pull the trigger. By testing your links before you move, you can make sure that your migration doesn’t affect the SEO equity you have spent months building.

A sandbox is also the perfect place to test your new website’s functionality. Making sure your website maintains all its features will ensure that the work you’ve put into your SEO pays off in high visit durations instead of bounces.

Check and Double Check Everything

If you want to avoid significant content errors, it’s important to index your website. A thorough analysis will help find any broken links or duplicate content before you migrate your data. Migrating is the perfect time to take care of these problems so they don’t follow you to the new site. Too many broken links can negatively impact user experience and Google’s opinion of your site.

You will also want to check your analytics before you implement your migration. Knowing factors such as average traffic rates and keyword rankings will be crucial once you migrate. Comparing your pre and post-migration analytics will be the basis for determining any adjustments your SEO strategy might need.

You will likely notice at least some drop off during migration. This is completely normal and is no reason to panic. You are migrating for a reason that will help your business, and your traffic will increase as long as you continue to execute an effective SEO campaign.

At Genius eCommerce, our goal is to keep vendors up to date on the latest in eCommerce. Check our blog to find more information about SEO strategies and tips to help your business succeed.

June 11, 2019

admin

Ecommerce, ecommerce platforms, eCommerce SEO, Latest eCommerce, Website Platforms
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Measuring SEO Success: The Metrics You Should Know

Achieving SEO success takes time and patience. One way to stay on track in your approach to SEO and stay the course with your strategy is to know that it’s working, even if on the smallest level.

How can you measure your SEO success? There are so many different performance metrics you can track, so you should know which ones you need to focus on and understand so you can accurately track your progress. Today, we will look at the metrics you should know.

At Genius eCommerce, this is who we are and what we do. We aim to be a guide for you through your eCommerce SEO efforts, informing you of trends, tips, and tricks to achieving SEO success.

Organic Traffic – A strong indicator of SEO success is in organic traffic. If your SEO campaign is working well, you should be seeing more organic traffic and conversions. If you don’t see much of an increase or very little early on, don’t let that discourage you. SEO takes some time to go to work and the early metrics can give you some insight on what is working. For example, if organic traffic is increasing and conversions are not, you may need to look at the keywords you are using and see if there is a better fit for your business. If your organic search traffic isn’t increasing but conversions are, you have likely improved the quality of traffic reaching your website.

Conversions from Organic Traffic – Conversions are the real measure of success in eCommerce. In Google Analytics, you can see the revenue, transaction, and eCommerce conversion rate under the eCommerce tab. These are the numbers that show how your business is doing. Compare these results to the results you got before starting SEO to get an idea of how your SEO campaign is working. SEO is designed to bring more visitors to your website, but conversions are the number that really matters.

Bounce Rate – Are you getting clicks to your website and then having people leave right away? This is what the bounce rate measures, the number of people who reach your website and then leave almost immediately for whatever reason. If your bounce rate is dropping, it can mean two things, that you are getting more relevant traffic to your website or that visitors are spending more time browsing the website and looking at multiple pages. Usually, a decreased bounce rate can come with an increase in conversions.

Time on Site – In a similar way to bounce rate, the amount of time people are spending on your website is an indicator that more relevant traffic is finding its way to you. The longer people stay on your website, the more likely they are to make a purchase. If the average time on site is increasing, it means more visitors are finding a way to stay engaged and active on your website.

Rankings – When you finalize a list of keywords, the goal is to improve your rankings. The higher your rankings are, the better the campaign is performing. It can be easier to start by targeting tail keywords, keywords that have more than one or two words so that you are targeting things that are more specific and have a lesser search volume. These keywords tend to be best because they are more specific and cater to the visitor who knows what they are looking for and wants to be directed to that right away. There is a better chance that these keywords give you more qualified traffic. While rankings are an indicator of SEO success, it is not everything to SEO. You don’t want to get so caught up in the rankings that you start to try to produce content specifically to improve rankings and not offer anything relevant to the customer or show your authority or expertise in your industry.

Now that you know the areas you should be familiar with when it comes to analyzing your SEO success, it’s time to get out there and start to improve your eCommerce business with an SEO campaign. At Genius eCommerce, you can get the best tips, tricks, and trends to stay updated on the best practices of SEO throughout your campaign. This is who we are and what we do.

Continue to read the Genius eCommerce blog and check back for more updates.

June 07, 2019

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Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, eCommerce SEO, Latest eCommerce
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Best Practices for Effective Multilingual SEO

Optimizing for search engines is already a difficult task that requires a lot of patience. You have to carefully choose your keywords and implement a content strategy that helps you build trust with the customer, create authority and boost your rankings. Doing this for multilingual businesses can be even more of a challenge.

If you have a business that offers products internationally or specifically want to target consumers in foreign countries, you need to cater to them. In fact, 90 percent of searches are done in the native language of the user, showing you how important it is to reach this target audience.

When making an effort for better multilingual SEO, even the smallest things can make an impact. That’s what we will focus on today at Genius eCommerce, the best practices for successfully building multilingual SEO.

Optimize for UTF-8 Characters – Foreign languages can often feature characters that are not part of the English language and may not mean much to you but mean quite a bit to someone else in their own language. Make sure that your website can support these characters. If the website is not able to support these characters and the characters become corrupted, it can prevent your website from being crawled properly. Also make sure that your title tags, image alt tags, and keywords match the target language and are translated properly with the accepted characters.

Choose the Right Keywords – You probably already have a list of target keywords in English and you may think that it’s easy to just translate them to multiple languages and put them to work. It’s not that simple. Translations can have different meanings or may not be the terms most likely to be used in another language. People are going to search for terms that are familiar to them and their language. It’s also important to conduct this translation for everything on your website, not just keywords.

Get to Know the Search Engines – Google may be your search engine of choice, but in other countries, there are other search engines that may take precedence that you need to be optimized for as well. In Canada, Bing is a popular choice. Some countries, like Korea, even use their own search engine called Naver. You can get new customers by targeting specifically to Google, but you could be missing out on your full potential if you don’t explore the search engines your international customers are using.

Have a Focused Strategy – There are some differences to multilingual SEO and trying to optimize your website for a different language. One thing that stays the same is the importance of having quality content. You should always consider where your SEO strategy is going and how you can keep up with the evolution of search engines.

URL Structure – Have you ever visited a website that looks like this: www.domain.com/en/about? The “en” in the middle of that indicates the language and that there may be other translations available. Each translation of your website should have its own domain for that country or a subdomain or subdirectory with the language and country information. Any keywords that are in the URL structure should also be translated properly.

Hreflang – Hreflang tags are part of the coding of a website and another way to inform search engines of the language a website is using, helping to increase the ranking for different languages that you are targeting.

The goal of SEO is to generate traffic and to make sure that the traffic you are generating is the right traffic for you and your business. If you have a business where you sell a product that can have an international benefit and generate interest around the world, you want to make sure your website is optimized for those countries that bring more to you in return.

Through all of your SEO efforts to make your multilingual website, remember to get help from a translator or a language service so you can be certain about the translations.

Keep reading Genius eCommerce for more updates and trends in the eCommerce world and how you can be prepared to take your SEO to new levels. This is who we are and what we do, and we want to help you with tips like these to build a campaign that delivers results.

May 30, 2019

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Digital Marketing, Ecommerce, eCommerce SEO, Latest eCommerce