How to attract visitors to your store through SEO - 10 tips from the experts from Optymistica

With rare exceptions, we believe that the vast majority of businesses have realized something very important in recent years - an online presence is almost a must. And if you want your business or online store to grow, then you need to do everything you can (if you don't already have one - create your online store here), to be discoverable online.

On the topic of online presence, we can focus our attention in two directions - the paid online presence and the free. Firstly, for the paid option - here you have various options to bring visitors to your site, the most popular way at the moment is through the use of paid advertising (often referred to as PPC marketing). We'll cover this topic in a series of blog posts, but it's important to note that with each passing day, paid ads become more expensive and in some cases less effective.

Today, we'll focus on "free" traffic and the expert advice our partners at Optymistica share. Free is not exactly free because organic (its other name) traffic comes after a serious amount of optimizations, time, and effort. Despite these investments, organic traffic generated by a well-executed SEO strategy is a very valuable asset.

This stems from the fact that it does not require additional financial investments, and is often very high quality. It's no secret that every online business dreams of getting positioned on the first page of Google and as high as possible on the results page.

Actually, this is not some mirage, with the right approach it is quite possible, but in order to make any progress, you first need to identify the optimization level of your site and then create the right SEO strategy. In fact, that's what this article is dedicated to, and before we continue with the practical tips, let's identify...

What exactly is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is the origin of abbreviated version "SEO". Search engine optimization is done through various strategies and over an extended period of time. The simplest division of strategies here is into on-page and off-page optimization.

A curious fact to mention is that the search engines themselves are evolving quite rapidly and for a long time have the ability to recognize the meaning and intent behind every search. It's no longer enough to optimize your store solely on keywords. There are more and more variables, so it's good to have a good idea of the current trends (and of course the ones that will always be relevant).

Luckily, our partners at Optimystica recently released the sixth edition of the "First place in Google in 2023" book, you can review it here. Now let's look at specific tips from the book that you can implement right away.

Start with the most important one - SEO revision of your website

‍"You can't improve what you don't measure" is a quote by the famous Peter Drucker. We can assume that this idea applies to many areas of our lives and businesses, but for SEO, measuring is a fundamental concept.

Before you do anything, first, make sure you are headed in the right direction with your SEO efforts. To do that you need to find out where your site is currently positioned. You can look at this as a kind of SEO revision.

Here are the basic factors you need to analyze to create a successful SEO strategy.

‍🛒 Establish your page positions

We start with the first and one of the most important steps for the SEO revision of your website or store, namely the use of an SEO analysis tool. There are a lot of paid options, fortunately, there are also excellent free tools available. These tools will give you detailed information about your site's ranking, its authority, which keywords the search engines rank it for, whether there are links to it, and generally everything you need to get a handle on your organic ranking.

‍🛒 Research the keywords that are important for your store or website

Finding out the important keywords for your project is very important. Here, again, you can use the SEO tool of your choice, but there are many alternative tactics. For example, it's a good idea to use Google's so-called autocomplete. Most simply explained - you start typing in a keyword and watch for the suggestions that Google (or another search engine)will give you.

With keywords, especially for a new project, there is a peculiarity - you may find a keyword that is particularly relevant to your business, but there is a chance that many other businesses are competing for it. In this context, it's also a good idea to target less competitive words (also called longtail keywords) in the beginning. This topic is quite vast, but one thing is for sure - proper selection of targeted keywords is essential.

‍Pro tip: 

Our partners at Optimystica recommend setting up a test campaign in Google Ads, which after 1-2 weeks will give you an excellent idea of the important keywords.

‍🛒 Put Google Analytics to work for you

The fascinating thing about Google Analytics is that it's a free tool, and it provides a lot of useful information. Some of the most significant reports you can use in your SEO are bounce rate, time spent on the site, which sites visitors came from, what keywords they used to find your site, and much more. A must for any SEO strategy is setting up Google Analytics, so don't waste any time and create your account.

‍It's important to note that at the time of writing this article, Google is introducing the final GA4 (Google Analytics 4). A version that is much more powerful than the previous one and allows for much more precise measurements of user behavior etc.

‍🛒 Google Search Console registration

Signing up for Google Search Console is a good idea. With this tool, you can get information on which keywords are bringing visitors to your site, which items are ranking for in search results, as well as information on the state of your site, pages indexed by the search engine, etc. The most important thing about Google Search Console is that it gives alerts about problems with your site's indexing process. Often these errors significantly affect your rankings and should be addressed immediately.

🛒 Check for bad incoming links

In general, inbound links to your website or store are a very good thing. Often they are a signal that search engines interpret positively and rank the site higher. Of course, there are exceptions. You can use Google Search Console to check if your site is linked to from low-quality or "spammy" sites. Another concern is if there are too many links from a site to yours, this is also not optimal. If you find such links you need to contact the administrators of those sites to take action and remove them.

🛒 Check for broken links

The next optimization you can implement is to check your site for broken links (links) to pages that no longer exist on your site or on someone else's site. Google ranks worse sites that have such problematic links. And the checking itself is done through various tools, a free one you can use for this purpose is Broken Link Checker.

🛒 Identify the keywords used by your competitors

This point is of utmost importance. By analyzing the keywords used by your competitors and their position in the search engine, you can easily get information on the best next steps to take for your SEO strategy.

Once you've compiled a list of your competitors and their keywords, it's time to dig deeper. Now is the time to discover which on-page and off-page tactics are performing for them. Through various tools, you can find out what works for them. For example, what is the technical state of their site, what are the main traffic sources for their site, what add-ons they use, etc?

Other items to investigate are: what anchor texts lead to the competitor's site (an anchor text is a word, combination of words, or URL in which the link is "placed"). You should check this for the H1 headings on competitor sites as well as the meta descriptions and the text itself. Additional items that are important to examine are: what meta descriptions they use. What alt tags do they have and what their descriptions are (an alt tag is an HTML tag that search engines use to decipher the graphical elements of a site, including photos).

🛒 Inbound links to competitors

This is where we get more into off-page optimization. Knowing what links and from which sites lead to those of your competitors is quite valuable information. The reason is that through it you can identify potential traffic sources. If you find that a site has a link to a competitor, then there's a chance you can create better content and contact the owners of the site in question, and they may be willing to share a link to your site as well (we're getting into the territory of "link building" tactics here, which deserves its own article). You can find the most complete analysis and information on competitor inbound links through paid tools like MOZ, Ahrefs, etc.

🛒 Check for duplicate content and mirror copies

While to many website or store owners, this step may seem unnecessary, it is actually quite important. It turns out that without suspecting it, you can have a duplicate of your website. This happens for several reasons. For example, there may be a misconfiguration of the CMS (content management system) platform, or these mismatches may come from hosting or domain settings. A common case is a situation where search engine algorithms (and their crawling bots) identify the www.site.com version and the site.com version as 2 different websites.

There is a separate problem with filters for filtering products or categories in online stores. Often when using and setting them, different new URLs are generated, while the content remains the original. However, this does not prevent search engines from getting "confused" and identifying this content as duplicate. This is the time to point out that with your CloudCart store, you have full control over the product filters and this situation can be prevented with ease.

🛒 Choose a CMS that allows optimization

Obviously, a lot of factors depend on the CMS. If you choose an inappropriate platform that doesn't allow you to edit with ease elements like page title, meta description, H1, URL, photo titles alt descriptions, etc., then your SEO strategy is doomed to fail from the start (or it will just be that much harder). Of course, using our powerful Marketing Suite in your CloudCart store you can apply a variety of optimizations, directly through your admin panel. Check out the available SEO tools for your CloudCart store.

Final words (and the start of your SEO optimization)

The truth is, we could go on with many more recommendations on what to identify to start optimizing your website or store. Things like Google Page Rank, site reputation, previous optimization audit (if any), domain settings, and more are all part of the initial phase. However, the main goals you should start with are mentioned and they are a good foundation.

You can start today to optimize your online project, and if you need specific advice for this, then you can trust our friends and partners at Optimystica.

In fact, as mentioned, their book "Google First 2023" is now on the market (sixth edition) and served as the source for the ideas in this blog post. If you want to start your SEO optimization the right way - we highly recommend reviewing the book.

To conclude - we wish you successful optimization and lots of organic traffic!