Optimise your online shop: improve your Google ranking with SEO

Since many users search for desired products through Google and other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo, search engine op­tim­isa­tion (SEO) helps broaden a web store’s clientele. The higher your store ranks in the search results, the more customers you will acquire. You don’t need to have pro­gram­mer knowledge or be a marketing expert to optimise your store for Google. We reveal what you need to pay attention to in order to improve your online store with SEO.

Google is by far the most popular search engine in the UK, gen­er­at­ing 88 percent of all search queries as of January 2017 (Source: https://www.statista.com/stat­ist­ics/280269/market-share-held-by-search-engines-in-the-united-kingdom/). This fact alone demon­strates the im­port­ance of op­tim­ising your online store for Google. It is best to rank as highly as possible in the search results for specified keywords. Your website should then be clas­si­fied by Google as being relevant. If you want to optimise your online store, you should make yourself familiar with Google’s criteria and adhere to them when creating your website.

Google has developed a working system that can auto­mat­ic­ally detect good sites from bad. It doesn’t just rely on the pop­ular­ity of a website to make its decision. The search engine can even judge the quality of a text: the gram­mat­ic­al accuracy, taking things like easy read­ab­il­ity and keyword density into account. A text that is stuffed with potential search terms will be clas­si­fied as dubious. A well-struc­tured, in­form­at­ive text can help to improve a site’s ranking by Google. Google tweaks its rating system in regular intervals in order to further optimise the search results. There are still so many other aspects for ranking a website. Through SEO you can improve your online store’s Google ranking; the next steps show you how.

Always make sure your product texts contain keywords. Carry out a keyword research and check which phrases that are relevant to your store are searched for the most. The Google Keyword Planner from AdWords is a helpful tool for this task. You can use the auto­com­plete function (Google Suggest) to find out which keyword com­bin­a­tions are fre­quently searched for. Multiple keywords (e.g. “shoes women sale”) aren’t as com­pet­it­ive as single words (e.g. “shoes”). It also helps to orientate your store to that of your com­pet­i­tion. Check out the site of an online store that sells the same product as you. You can recognise a search engine optimised text since a keyword and different vari­ations appear at regular intervals. You can choose the same keyword as your com­pet­i­tion, but never copy their texts since Google can identify duplicate content and will penalise it. Compose your own in­di­vidu­al product texts and add your keywords in a natural way. Keywords should not make up more than four percent of the text.

In order to optimise your online store, you have to invest a bit of work. Since this increases your chance of at­tract­ing new customers, it normally pays off in no time. Moreover, the measures needed to make your store SEO-suitable are by no means just for experts. Even beginners can use the tools to make their online store SEO-ready. There are numerous online store con­struc­tion kits available that allow you to optimise your store for Google. It is def­in­itely worth using SEO in e-commerce - every online store owner should carry out the necessary steps.