7 Ways to Boost Sales with SEO

Every business depends on sales to survive, and in today’s world, increasing sales necessitates a strong digital presence. E-commerce accounted for $2.3 trillion in global sales in 2017, and that figure is expected to rise to $4.88 trillion by 2021. If you want to capture a portion of those sales, you must have a strong search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place.

It goes without saying that the world of E-commerce is competitive, and learning and implementing cutting-edge SEO techniques can give you the competitive advantage you need to get noticed online, convert more prospects into loyal customers, and ultimately increase sales. However, because SEO is constantly changing and best practises change, it can be difficult to know if you’re doing everything you can to increase sales with SEO.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry: there are plenty of tried-and-true techniques you can use, and today you’ll learn some great tips on how to use SEO to increase sales.

1. Be Keyword Clever

Keywords in SEO aren’t used as much as they used to be, but they’re still an important part of the equation. Prospects may never find you if you do not use keywords, which is why keywords are the foundation of your SEO strategy.

Assume you run a business that sells handcrafted fly-fishing lures. Handmade fly-fishing lures is an obvious keyword phrase for which you’ll want to rank. However, there are other keywords and phrases that customers are undoubtedly using to find products similar to yours, and it is up to you to figure out what they are and begin incorporating them into your:

• Content
• Web pages
• URLs
• Headings
• Image descriptions
• Metadata
• Page titles
• Emails

Google AdWords is a great place to start with keyword research, but there are numerous other keyword planning tools available. Longtail keywords are important because half of all search queries are four or more words long, there is less competition for these phrases, and they have higher conversion rates. When you have the right keywords in your toolbox, they will assist you in connecting with prospects who are looking to buy what you’re selling.

2. Create Stellar Content

Keywords, on the other hand, are meaningless without great content: they’re nothing more than a word salad. However, content is more than just a vehicle for keywords; it is a tool that can be used to convert prospects, something valuable that can be offered to customers, and a shareable resource that can be used to reach new audiences.

When prospects search the internet for information about a product or service similar to what you offer, they will come across social media posts, blogs, web pages, and other content that was created to answer their questions, provide information, and otherwise facilitate a purchasing decision. Prospects will find your brand before all others if you work to have the best, most relevant, most engaging, and most authoritative content on the internet, giving you the opportunity to build relationships and convert leads into customers.

Great content comes in a variety of forms, and your goal should be to cultivate and create content in all of them, including:

• Blogs
• Video (which can boost organic search results by 50 times more than text-based content)
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Animations
• User-generated content
• Guest blogs
• Ebooks and whitepapers
• How-to guides
• Lists
• Product reviews

Inbound marketing revolves around content, and if you have a solid inbound strategy in place and great content to drive it, you’ll have customers knocking on your E-commerce door. However, keep in mind that you should optimise all of your content with relevant keywords, and that the keywords you use are relevant to the piece and type of content you’re presenting.

3. Use Social to Grow Your Audience and Reach

Because an increasing number of consumers are turning to these platforms to engage with brands, social media is one of the fastest growing elements of a comprehensive and modern SEO strategy. Nearly 80% of people use Facebook to find interesting content, which means there’s a huge opportunity for you to reach new audiences, attract more prospects, and develop long-term relationships with customers.

Aside from that, social media is a great way to show a more human side of your organisation, it can be used as a direct marketing tool with resources like Facebook Ads, and it can even be used to bolster your customer service efforts.

4. Go Local and Go Mobile

The emphasis on mobile and local content are two of the most significant changes to SEO best practises that have occurred in recent years, and the two go hand in hand. Because 30 percent of all mobile searches performed today have a local intent, local SEO is becoming increasingly important as more consumers use mobile devices to search for businesses. Furthermore, more than 70% of people will visit a nearby business after conducting a local search, so if you want to drive business to your physical or E-commerce store, you must focus on local content (including local keywords and landing pages) and ensure your digital footprint is completely mobile-friendly.

5. On-Page SEO

There are numerous reasons why on-page SEO is critical to your success; therefore, if you want to increase sales, you must focus on on-page techniques. Briefly, on-page SEO makes your site more user-friendly, makes it easier for search engines to index your pages, increases your search ranking, and allows you to focus on optimising essential elements such as visuals. If you’re unfamiliar with on-page SEO, here are some of the most important steps to take:

• Making one-of-a-kind and descriptive title tags
• Increasing the speed with which your pages load in order to reduce bounce rates
• Creating descriptive and keyword-optimized alternative text for your website’s images
• Adding keywords and relevant descriptions to headings
• Improving navigation and indexing by linking site content with internal links.
• Making use of sensible and easy-to-read URLs
• Writing meta descriptions to increase visibility and relevance on search engine results pages

6. Manage Your Reputation Carefully

When it comes to SEO, reputation management isn’t always something that comes up, but it’s an important factor that shouldn’t be overlooked. Controlling what people see when they search for your company online is the essence of reputation management. Assume you were a restaurant that received several negative Yelp reviews in a row and got into an immature Facebook spat with a customer. Following that, any potential customer who uses the internet to decide whether or not to dine at your establishment will first encounter negative reviews and social media debate, and that will be the reputation your restaurant will have from then on.

Reputation management is thus all about ensuring that you put your best foot forward online when customers look for you, which you can do by:

• When communicating with customers online, maintain a professional demeanour at all times.
• reviewing online reviews on a regular basis
• Responding to negative reviews in a timely, calm, and professional manner
• Positive feedback and testimonials from satisfied customers are encouraged.

7. Develop an Integrated Strategy to Keep You on Track

If you want SEO to work for you, it cannot be done part-time or with minimal effort. To increase sales with SEO, you must be intelligent and dedicated to your efforts, which means having a solid strategy that incorporates all of the components discussed today. To do so, you’ll need a team in place that is familiar with SEO best practises and can examine your company’s goals in order to create and implement a long-term strategy that will help you achieve them.