Using SEO to build your beauty business? The quickest way to make it if you are just starting an eCommerce business is either to be rich or be famous; you know, like Rihanna, Kylie Jenner, Beyoncé and other celebs who are now running giant e-commerce businesses. But where’s the fun in that?
Actually, there could be a lot of fun. However, most of us have to work for it. The key is in working smart, more so than working hard.
How else would You gain some foundational knowledge and skills most e-commerce business owners gained from starting small?
If you’re Not rich or famous and you’re looking to build your e-commerce business, SEO is available to help you build the needed foundation. This article will introduce you to SEO and how you can use SEO to grow your e-commerce site.
Search Engine Optimization involves a set of practices that you, as the website owner, can use to enhance your website. These practices are necessary in order to improve how your website performs on search engines and on the internet in general. The ultimate goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your e-commerce site and increase sales.
One of the reasons you, as new e-commerce site owners often put aside SEO at the early stage of your website, is the assumption that only professionals understand SEO. On the other hand, some of you underrate the influence SEO can have on your e-commerce site and instead focus on social media marketing and paid Ads.
What you don’t know is that SEO generates the highest return on investment (ROI) for e-commerce marketing. While SEO can be done by just about anyone, with consistent study, it doesn’t require special training. You only have to be consistent with your efforts and you will see your eCommerce site grow.
I was sharing this information with a new client and out of her mouth comes: “I have to create content?” Yes, quality content.
When starting, most of you as new e-commerce store owners, assume that you don’t need to have a blog section. However, this assumption does more damage than good, especially for new e-commerce sites that don’t have a reputation yet.
Having a blog section can be a chance for you to create a community of potential buyers. Create quality articles that offer your site’s visitors great value for their time, be it pleasure, information or education that is related to the subject of your site.
Gradually, your site will gain more awareness among internet users and will become an authority in your industry. You can also rank on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) if you create quality articles and include good keywords.
So, start creating quality articles regularly to teach potential buyers how to use your products/services, be creative with it. Keep in mind that most consumers prefer to learn about a brand from a blog post instead of through official announcements like press releases.
Link building is a way to inform Google’s algorithm that your website has a good industry reputation. Your website will be scored based on the number of authoritative websites that link back to your site. If many high-quality websites link back to your website, that means your site is in some way reputable as well. Also, those back links can drive traffic to your site.
Imagine a website such as Forbes.com linked back to your website, your site has a chance of getting traffic influx. You most likely won’t be able to get highly reputable sites to link back to your site, especially in the beginning. It doesn’t matter, start small. Reach out to sites in your niche industry for link building so that you will get potential buyers who are interested in your products/services. You can manually search for similar sites or use tools to search for websites that might be willing to exchange links. You can also guest blog on authoritative websites. They will publish your blog post if you write quality content that is relevant to their audience.
This is a set of SEO practices that involves strategies that can make your site more locally prominent. Start by creating a good profile on Google My Business for your e-commerce site. Use local search keywords, for example, ”Best aesthetician in Atlanta” or whatever your city is, on your content. You can launch ”Near Me” marketing campaigns. Another useful move is to get buyers to review your business on Google map.
Although you’ll have your main business set up online, some of you might choose to wholesale to small boutiques. Using local SEO tactics will help perspective clients find your products in stores. There they can experience them by seeing what they look like, what the smell like, how they feel and how well they moisturize your skin.
It appears that the world now has a reduced attention span. We are no longer patient. In the e-commerce industry, this means that your website has two or three seconds at most to load, or potential buyers will leave your site for sites that load faster. Additionally, one of the deciding factors for ranking on SERPs is loading speed. Another thing with speed is that it can affect your bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to how quickly visitors leave your site. If they leave too soon, your bounce rate will increase and it’s a bad thing because it is also considered when ranking a website for SERPs.
To improve your site’s loading speed, use simple designs and
themes, and don’t complicate your site’s navigation or paging style. Make sure
you host your site on a good web hosting plan that offers at least 99% uptime.
Google is now mobile-first, and this is because more than 50% of internet activity takes place on mobile devices. Simply put, there are more people using their smartphones and tablets to access the internet than the people using their desktop. Hence, you have to cater to mobile users as much as, if not better than, you cater to desktop users.
Page loading speed is one of the factors that can affect how your site will operate on mobile devices. Mobile users are more impatient than desktop users. Use themes that are compatible with both desktop and mobile devices.
You won’t be able to monitor all your SEO practices and performances. You have other important aspects of your business to focus on. Therefore, you should make use of quality SEO tools. There are several SEO tools that you can integrate with your e-commerce site to collect data that you can use to improve your SEO strategies.
We’ll talk in detail about SEO tools at another time.
There are many more strategies we didn’t highlight here. However, what you should take from this is that SEO should not be pushed to later. Start immediately producing content before you even launch your e-commerce beauty site.
That’s it for this week. As always ….
Dedicated to Your Success,
Juliette Samuel
