Selling online is easier now, but it’s harder to make your products stand out. Many people can sell, so you need to find a way to market your items well.
At Fisher Tech Solutions LLC, we have built many e-commerce sites, including our multi-vendor ecommerce site, My Community Made.
Most of our e-commerce work is through WordPress, but we also have experience with e-commerce sites built on other platforms. For example, Farmer at the Door is a multi-vendor ecommerce site built entirely through Wix. Much of this advice will be relevant to all e-commerce sellers, regardless of technology, but a few of our solutions are WooCommerce centric.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of creating and designing your content in such a way that increases the likelihood that your business or website is recommended by search engines like Google or Bing for a specific user’s query.
The reason that so many companies invest so much into SEO is the high impact that it can have when done correctly. Unlike social media, SEO is intent-driven, meaning that your product or website is being shown to users who are actively looking for information related to the products or services you sell.
Technical SEO is crucial for e-commerce websites as it ensures that search engines can effectively crawl, index, and rank your site. This involves optimizing various backend elements, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data, which directly impact user experience and search visibility.
Technical SEO involves enhancing a website’s technical elements to boost user experience and help search engines comprehend your content. It generally covers these topics:
Core Web Vitals ensure users are able to quickly load your site and that your site is stable once loaded. If it takes a long time for your page to load, or once loaded there are numerous popups (CLS) that may register as spam to the user, then your site will score poorly for Core Web Vitals. Utilizing proper caching methods, having a good webhost, and ensuring your site is clean of malware can help maximize your core web vitals score.
Reducing dead links on your site, or reducing ‘broken’ links on your site, is critical for maintaining the crawlability and enhancing the user experience of your website. For example, if you eliminate a category from your page, but you have links pointing to that category within your blog or on other pages of your site, you will see a reduced SEO score for your website.
Implementing structured data (schema markup) allows search engines to better understand your products, potentially leading to rich snippets in search results that can increase click-through rates. As your e-commerce site grows and you start to collect important information like user reviews, this structured data will help to communicate to searchers how popular your product has been with previous customers.
Additionally, Google and Bing will use some information included in your structured data, like price, shipping time and shipping rates to provide additional content to the customer from the SERP screen. Having better structured data than your competitor can make all the difference in your SEO success.
A Note About Security
There are a large number of hackers constantly trying to hack WordPress sites. It is critical to keep your site secure and implement tools to prevent fraud on your ecommerce store.
Having your site get hacked, can not only have a negative effect on your SEO, it can also increase the cost of your PPC adverting, as Google does not want to risk recommending a site that may not be safe for users to utilize.
Keyword research is tricky for many users, and the topic is complex enough that entire books are regularly written on the subject. The basics that small business owners should keep in mind are the following.
Every Keyword has a Difficulty Score and typically, that score is based on how complex the keyword is and how many other websites are also trying to rank for that keyword. For example, if I want to rank for local web development services, I might try to rank for the keyword “web development”. This seems like an obvious choice, but to do so, would be a mistake for the following reasons
Instead, I should put myself in shoes of my potential customer, and by doing so I will be able to develop a more targeted long-tail keyword that is highly relevant to my target audience.
For instance, since I specialize in building WordPress sites, and I am based in Massachusetts, a much better keyword for me to target would be, “WordPress developers in Massachusetts”. This keyword will be much easier to rank for than our first keyword, but it can be improved even further by getting even more specific. For example, maybe I should pick a specific industry to target, or a specific problem or need. For example, “Massachusetts based WooCommerce help”. By focusing on just WooCommerce, the popular WordPress e-commerce plugin, I am limiting my competition further, making the keyword easier to rank for.
Keep in mind, highly specific keywords are likely to receive much less traffic, but for the user that types in that search query, I am much more likely to show up, and if they click on my website, I am more likely to make the sale as well.
Ensuring your site is responsive, meaning that it is easy to use on both mobile devices and desktop devices is crucial. You may not be a mobile user yourself, but your customer may be, many business owners forget to optimize their websites for devices that are different from the devices they use themselves.
At the bare minimum, you should be sure to test the following
Additionally, be sure to use tools like Pingdom to test how fast your site is loading. A slow loading e-commerce is not fun for customers to shop on, and it can also lead to reduced SEO page score, due to not meeting the standards set in Google’s Core Web Vitals.
If you are having trouble getting your website to load quickly, be sure to contact us, we would be happy to help incorporate enhanced caching or migrate you to our top quality webhosting service.
User Experience also refers to the factors of how you find products on your site. If you have a large number of products it’s crucial that you make use of proper categorization, tags and provide features like search to make it much easier to find your products.
All sites should utilize email marketing, but it is even more critical for ecommerce sites. If you’re not currently using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool like Klaviyo or Mailchimp, then you certainly should be!
The purpose of the CRM is two-fold
If you don’t already have a CRM, we recommend setting up a free Klaviyo account. Klaviyo is based in Massachusetts and we utilize their CRM to power My Community Made. Unlike Mailchimp, Klaviyo is primarily focused on ECommerce, so their tooling is focused on quality product recommendations and predictive intelligence.
While offering free shipping always leads to more sales, that isn’t always possible. In cases where you need accurate postage rate calculations, you can utilize API’s provided by each of the leading carriers to create automated postage calculation.
For our e-commerce sites, we typically utilize USPS Postage API’s to calculate the cost of postage ahead of time, that price is then automatically added to the customers checkout. These automations can be difficult to get right, so don’t hesitate to reach out to us, or another web development company to get that functionality up and running.
Similar to postage, you absolutely need to consider automating sales tax collection. Luckily, the solution to this problem is a bit more straight forward. You can use tools like TaxJar to easily handle the collection of sales tax and to track your Nexus requirements for each state your customers purchase from.
Google Merchant Center, is a free service provided by Google. You can use a plugin like Product Feeds Pro to automatically publish your products directly to Google Merchant Center after they are uploaded to your site.
If you have trouble getting this integration working, don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we will help you get it all set up! You can also consider publishing your listings to other sites as well. For instance, you may want to list your products on Pinterest and Facebook/Instagram as well.
