Friday 18 May 2012

5 SEO Tools for Ecommerce Business Owners

This is a post for multi-channel business owners. A well measured SEO campaign is vital to keep your traffic levels and revenue stream healthy.


There are lots of great blogs to teach you everything you need to know about SEO. Lots of them, however, skip the first couple of steps and jump right into advanced SEO technique or theory.

To address that, here are five great Google tools to get you started:

1. Google Analytics - Are you set up properly on Google Analytics? Do you know how to log into your Google Analytics?

 

Do you use this free service? The traffic sources report shows how much traffic you’re getting and which channels convert the best. Use the Organic Keyword report to see which keywords your site is optimised for. This is just the tip of the iceberg – Analytics can do much more than this. If you’re not getting the most from your Analytics Set-Up, get in touch to find out more about our services.

2. Don’t neglect Webmaster Tools. This free auxiliary tool will give you information on your sitemap and how well you’re ranking on Google. 

 

Your sitemap tells Google how to find the pages on your website. If you don’t have one you are making it harder for Google to index your site straight out of the gate.

3. Merchant Centre – Are your products appearing in Google Shopping results? If not, you will be missing out on valuable free sales and visits. 

 

Getting the XML file to include all the relevant details can be a tricky job, especially with regular changes Google is making to their requirements. Get some help setting these up and submitting your data feeds.

4. The Google Keyword Tool is invaluable for finding out how many people a month are searching for your products and what terms they are using. 

 

For example, it’s no good optimising your site for the term “ecommerce solutions” if there are only 50 searches for it a month and there are 5000 searches for “ecommerce platform” a month.

 5. SEOMoz isn’t a Google product but it is an extremely useful piece of software to get you started on SEO. 

 

The core to a good SEO campaign is getting links from other highly ranked sites. Links to your site tell Google that other sites consider you to be a good site. The more high quality links you have, the better your ranking will be. SEOMoz allows you to see where your links are coming from. It also tells you where your competitors are getting their ranking from.

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These five tools will give you insight into your site and allow you to make changes immediately that will improve your ROI and measure the results.

Take action today and see what happens – learning about the state of your website and addressing some basic problems will result in some quick wins, an increase in ranking, more visits and most importantly, more sales.

Call us on 0207 492 1929 or take a look at our ecommerce consulting page. We have our own platform so are well versed in the problems faced by multi-channel retailers.