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Let’s say you’ve just opened your brand new custom sports footwear store near Downtown Baltimore, but you’re unsure how to make your small business stand out in your niche. There’s a lot of competition, and you know that online business and eCommerce are essential. You’ve made a website or decided to create one, but what now? Where do you start with SEO optimization? Should you go with a local Baltimore SEO Company instead? Can you start on your own?
Here are just a few beginner-friendly marketing tips:
1. User experience is vital. Optimize your website for mobile users, as an increasing number of internet users—and part of your target audience—are shopping through a mobile device. Your customers should be able to view, search, and shop on mobile with ease. In addition, site speed is critical, so ensure that your website loads as fast as possible.
2. Begin to study what good content quality is, then learn about Google’s EAT Principles. EAT stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. These elements help determine whether a web page has high-quality content, and Google uses its algorithm to deliver the best results to searchers. Google specifically seeks out websites that feature original, good-quality content and will eliminate low-quality or duplicate content.
Content that search engines look for:
Product descriptions
Blog Posts
Resource posts (How your product is made, how to care for it)
Videos
Infographics
Images
Information snippets
FAQ
Audio
Page Titles
Meta descriptions
Header tags – H1, H2, H3
Images that are named and have image alt text assigned
3. Know your audience and users. What specifically would your customers be searching for to find your website? Understanding your target audience’s search intent or the reason behind their search can help inform you on what site content to focus on and figure out what your best keyword strategies should be.
4. Keywords are another significant part of search engine optimization. One of the best practices for keywords is to attempt to focus on long-tail keywords versus short-tail keywords. For example, for a sports footwear store, a short-tail keyword might be: “hiking sneakers.” Where a long-tail keyword would look like: “trail hiking sneakers.” Every page on your website should have a core keyword, and every keyword should be in that page’s meta-data, headings, and at least three times in any content on that page.
This is a lot all at once, and this is especially true for anyone trying to start or run a business. There are many more nuances that make SEO complex and, ultimately, it is a time-intensive effort that needs continuous maintenance. Search engine algorithms change constantly, and user behaviors evolve as well. Therefore, good SEO requires constant maintenance and observation. These simple four beginner SEO tips will get you started but don’t cover everything that good SEO practices entail.
When you run a small business, your time is precious. You may find it easy to become overwhelmed with learning SEO, tracking information, or translating what the information all means and implementing it on your site. When that happens, turning to your local Baltimore SEO Company may be the perfect solution you need to help you elevate the power of your eCommerce website to its fullest.
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