What happens when you try to rejig your brick-and-mortar store into an online one? Do your current customers automatically start following you on the web? Do you get scores of new customers along with your old ones from day one? Is it a nightmare because you have to update your inventory in two places? What happens to the marketing?
These are obvious questions that any passionate entrepreneur will ask when it is time for them to jump onboard the digital train. We can help you find the answers to all those questions, but before that, you will have to decide what kind of a business you run. Very simply speaking, you can be a large-cap business, small business, microenterprise or a start-up. Defining your presence in the commercial landscape will help you understand the kind of marketing service you need.
The moment you set foot on the world of online marketing and e-commerce, you will feel the need of some serious guidance. Unless you have some prior experience with websites and search engines, you will have a rough start. That is why many small businesses opt for SEO services while setting up (online) shop. The SEO service can take care of your website optimisation, online presence, social media marketing among other things, while you can do what you do best – sell stuff!
Here are the top four reasons you might want to consider hiring SEO experts to help you –
Content research
What is a good website without great content? To be popular among visitors and to remain relevant on search results, you need to optimise your site content. A lot of people believe that content research involves many tools and technologies. Contrary to that, sound content research requires plagiarism-free writing, smart choice, and application of keywords. A great looking website with a weak content-game usually has a tough time finding a place in the top ten results of the Google SERP.
You can write the blogs, articles and product descriptions on your own as well. You will need a reliable keyword research tool like WordStream or Moz to lead the way. You need to find out its search volume, competitiveness, and relevance. Then, find the synonyms that you can work into your content to enhance your site's visibility.
On-page technicalities
Finishing the work on the content is a huge deal, but it is not enough. Apart from the quality of topics and language, there are quite a few on-page SEO factors that will influence your ranking. The headings (H1 through to H6), URLs, schema markup and keyword placement, will affect the way any leading search engine like Google and Bing will see you.
The norm is to include your target keyword in the H1 once and in the SEO slug once more. Optimization does not escape images and videos. Apart from the Alt tags and descriptions, you will need to compress them to keep the web pages snappier. However, these are facts that every competitor knows as well. Therefore, you need a touch of expertise that can give you the edge over the competition. Optimization of on-page elements is tricky and opting for the SEO experts is the best way to go about it.
Link building (off-site)
Link building is a part of off-site SEO that boosts the visibility of the website. Links are one of the top three ranking factors as per the declarations from Google. These contain the internal links connecting one product page to another within your domain. They also include inbound links and outbound links that signify the authority of your site. Links are another reason why building value-adding content is imperative for your website. If you want to link your content to a high-authority page, they might have similar expectations in return. It takes time to build authority, but garnering high-quality content improves your chances of getting more frequent high-authority links.
External links are more significant ranking signals. Their domain authority speaks as powerfully as their quantity, but you cannot make up for the lack of quality external links by garnering hundreds of unscrupulous ones. Today, buying links or utilising link farms are strictly illegal. Google imposes hefty penalties on sites that try to take the shortcut. The only way to collect them is through rigorous marketing practices and guest posting. Social media posts are links as well, but Google does not speak about their weights openly.
Technical SEO audit
So, you have on-site SEO and off-site strategies in place, but do you know which ones are giving you the most ROI? Do you know why your bounce rate is not decreasing over time? Is your website generating the maximum revenue it can? Maintaining e-commerce sites is not easy, and you need to keep eyes on several KPIs at the same time to understand current market trends, profits and website performances.
Performing a technical audit for an e-commerce site can be arduous due to the complexities in their navigation options. For most entrepreneurs, the professional SEO audit is one of the most expensive SEO services they have opted for in a while. However, it will give you an idea about the broken links, 404 errors, 301 and 302 redirects, security threats, missing updates, sluggish plug-ins, slow pages, unoptimized URLs and everything else that can affect your online presence.
These are the four precise reasons business owners choose SEO experts to take over their sites. Additionally, there are threats from negative SEO and black hat SEO. These are malpractices that can tarnish the reputation of innocent bystanders and eliminate competition. Search engine optimisation is a highly heterogeneous domain that demands the presence of expert teams that can handle sudden emergencies and stay up-to-date with the evolving trends. Google releases two updates per day and staying on top of the best practices at all times is impossible for an entrepreneur, who has to manage multiple fronts. An expert SEO service relieves them from the burden of monitoring and safeguarding the online front.
Guest post courtesy of Sujain Thomas