Be Superman With These Ecommerce SEO Tips

Are you sick and tired of seeing all of your competitors rank for the keywords that you need your ecommerce store to rank for? It can truly become tiresome when struggling with how you can improve the organic rankings for your online store.

If you have ever wanted to up the ante and enjoy the remuneration of improved traffic and conversions, then it never hurts to call in a caped crusader. These following tips can help you ditch the Clark Kent business attire and break out your Superman SEO outfit, so you can fly to the top of Google.

The way that you structure the URLs in your online store can either make you or break you. In essence, poorly structured URLs are your kryptonite. This is actually rather commonplace at many online stores. With too many cooks in the kitchen on the website backend, the end result can be very messy code with competing site structures, broken ULRs, confusing navigation and more.

To avoid this, make sure you coordinate carefully with your website designer and SEO staff. Assure that your site’s structure is synergistic and that pages are not competing against each other for rankings and saturation. This is best understood when you can see an illustrated example, such as the chart we’ve provided below. For even more tips, check out this fantastic Kissmetrics guide so you can realign your site structure to please the Google beast.

Duplicate content is one of the biggest errors that online stores make. It’s common practice for ecommerce retailers to simply copy and paste manufacturer descriptions of the products they are selling to their online pages. In addition to this major faux paw, retailers also commonly duplicate content across many pages. As Moz explains, duplicate content is any portion of content that appears on more than one page of your site, or content that you have copied from another site that you did not create.

When Google scans this duplicate content, one of several things can happen.

• If you scraped the content from another online source, you can get penalized for it and your pages will generally be ignored.
• If you post unique content from one page and then copy it to the next, the pages can compete for rankings, with Google ultimately choosing one page or just ignoring both.
• Duplicate content almost always counts against your domain ranking and authority, and makes it more difficult to rank new pages.

So how do you know that you have duplicate content? The surest way to find out is by using an automated tool like Siteliner (pictured below). Simply enter your URL into the search bar and let it run its tasks. Next, make changes to correct any duplicate content issues that are found. You can also tell Google to simply ignore those pages, but then that would result in the pages not being indexed or found by visitors.

Want to know a Superman SEO trick that’s used by the best and brightest of the bunch? Of course you do! It’s called URL keyword matches. So what is this and how does it help you rank better for certain pages? When creating a page for a keyword such as “blue Nike shoes,” for example, you want to make sure that the URL string also includes the keyword being used to enhance your ranking prospective. A good example of this in motion would be as follows: http://www.yoursite/blue-nike-shoes.

By including your keywords within the URL string, you accomplish several goals. These include: encouraging more clicks from users because the keywords are bolded and stand out more in the search results; pleasing the Google bots that scan your pages by providing an exact keyword match within the URL; and improving optimization overall of the page.

Now there are many parts of SEO that you never want to automate. Things like article spinning or cheap automation services that promise you the world on Fiverr will only do harm to your website. They are the Lex Luther of bad things that you can do to destroy your hard earned online rankings.

But there are good ways to automate SEO. One of them is found with a great add-on tool for Word Press called Yoast. This tool helps you perfectly optimize pages by letting you know what’s missing and what needs improvement. Get a quality Yoast score going for each page, and you can really be a Superman for your SEO.

It’s imperative that you track your work for SEO so that you are never lost in the mix. A lot of people simply overlook tracking altogether. But a quick look at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude shows that he tracks everything using special crystals that kind of serve as his futuristic hard drives for data storage.

Your version is far simpler. Use tools like Moz, Wunderlist and Excel to track every page, every article, every blog post, every back link that you’ve earned, every ranking, your web traffic, domain authority, spam links that you need to disavow, and so much more.

Knowing what’s going on with your online store’s SEO at all times is incremental in you seeing the success that you desire. Make certain that you create easy to-do lists with Wunderlist, or the equivalent task list solution, and check things off as you complete tasks so that you never fall behind on work again.

When he’s not working to save the world, Superman has the rather toned down day job of Clark Kent, a reporter for the Daily Planet. There’s another lesson that we can learn here: sometimes you just need to grind out story after story to attract the masses to your online store.

The solution to this is by blogging, and daily. Study after study has proven that online businesses that blog daily increase traffic by a large margin. A Neil Patel experiment demonstrates that blogging does indeed work like a charm, and has the potential to increase your site traffic by 50x or more.

Now you will want to learn some of the best standards and practices for blogging, so you can capitalize on the new traffic that you earn from it. But don’t worry, that’s because we’ve got you fully covered on the ins and outs in our complete guide: 9 Ways To Blog Like A Ninja.

Make sure you syndicate your new blogs across all of your social channels afterward, too. Adding daily content to your website adds more meat and potatoes to your site’s structure, gives you the ability to integrate new keywords that you can rank for, and helps you attract more traffic from search and from social signals. In short, it’s a Superman SEO tip that you shouldn’t ever overlook.

The reality is, and some hardcore comic buffs may agree or disagree, that on occasion, even Superman paired up with a sidekick. In a recent major motion picture, this happened to be Batman. The point is that sometimes, even if you are amazingly talented, you simply need to bring in some extra guns.

Be sure that you carefully vet any sidekick that you are considering. Whether they are an SEO agency, a freelancing expert or a service or solution – research and due diligence are priceless. Make sure you have a clear understanding of what work is being done and what you are going to pay for it, with identifiable deliverables that are cemented into the bindings of a contract to best protect your bottom line.

By using good SEO software, such as Moz (mentioned above), you can be in a better position to succeed with your online store. Half of the battle here is knowing simply what your competitor is ranking for, and why and how. Fortunately, you no longer have to guess these metrics; good software does the heavy-lifting for you.

Most SEO software allows you to track your competitors, their rankings and their landing pages. This gives you the chance to actually try to rank for the same keywords as they are, all so that you can attract a portion of their traffic to your store for a chance to earn added business. It’s simply a must-do in today’s SEO world, especially if you want to be Superman.

Lastly, do not ever forget about the might and muster of super social ambassadors. They help you take your work and daisy-chain it by sharing it to, potentially, thousands of other social fans, incrementally improving your overall reach. Social media has become such a powerful force that it has even spawned entire political revolutions. There’s no reason that you can’t do the same with your online store, either.

So what is the power of just one fan on Facebook or the equivalent social medium? Take a look at this awesome graph we’ve delivered below. It can give you further insight into just how far the reach truly is from just one super fan, who can help you spread the good word about your brand. For even further insight, take a look at our related guide: Social Commerce Statistics You Shouldn’t Ignore.