eCommerce Marketing SEO Mistakes
While it isn’t recommended that an eCommerce store rely solely on search traffic, a good percentage of your store’s customers will come from your search engine optimization and marketing campaigns. SEO will bring most of the initial traffic you can expect to receive IF you do proper keyword research and optimization.
Traditional SEO
Traditional SEO tells us to target high volume / low competition keywords for the best traffic. While this approach works well for internet marketers just trying to get traffic, for ecommerce marketing,g you need to be a bit more selective. We aren’t trying to cast the biggest net and then throw back everything we didn’t want, not yet anyway.
Unless you have found just an amazing niche with good volume and no competition, your SEO efforts will be better spent going after very targeted keywords and phrases. Picture your store’s products and offerings as a pyramid. At the base, we have the broad category your store fits in. Next up, we have subcategories that your products are grouped into. Then we have the actual products themselves. And finally, we have the super-long-tail, product, type, and attributes listing.
Using that image, let’s look at what an e-commerce store retailing athletic clothing would look like. First, we have the broad category: athletic clothes. Then we have the basketball jerseys category, which has the option of men’s or women’s. Finally, we drill down to size and color to end with the long tail of “women’s blue basketball jersey size 2″.
Marketing SEO
This is where you should start your SEO marketing. Perhaps not THAT granular, but you get the idea. If you focus on ranking for women’s blue basketball jejerseysthen picking up traffic for the next level will be easier. Any competition will be less stacked for such a search term.
Now, this isn’t to say that you should disregard the broad category. You would still want to slowly build links to this example site for the term “athletic clothing,” but a good rule of thumb is to keep it split 50/50 between long categories and the broad terms.
Another positive effect of this is that your site will get more natural backlinks over time,e pointing to your internal pages as well as your homepage. Over time, as your ecommerce site starts to dominate thesubcategoriess you can shift your focus to a broader search.