[intro]Before you complete this Guide, you need to ensure that your EKM online shop is ready for trading - that you have added a domain name and a Payment Gateway, and that you have opened a Google Ads account, which you'll need to help generate keywords for your shop content. [/intro]
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Once your EKM online shop has been fleshed out with Products, Categories, Design Images and Webpages, the next step is to ensure that all of the SEO tasks required are completed so you can create a Google Ads account in the future to promote your brand to potential customers far and wide.
What does ‘organic’ mean?
Organic is a term you’ll often hear used, and it means that no money is paid and interest in the online shop or website is grown ‘naturally’ over a period of time with particular emphasis on people seeing your content and recommending it to their friends. The opposite of organic is paid, where an amount is invested in the advertising and promotion of an online shop or website.
What’s a keyword?
A keyword is a term or phrase that a person enters into a search engine to find what they are looking for. It can be a single keyword - known as a generic keyword, such as ‘PS4’ mentioned above - or it can be longer using more than one word; these are known as ‘long-tail’ keywords.
As a general rule, the shorter, more ‘generic’ keywords (again, such as ‘PS4’ - this could refer to online shops which sell the games, consoles and accessories, as well as gamers’ websites that review the above, for example) will have more results. There will also be more competition for these keywords; the ‘PS4’ example doesn’t indicate whether the person who entered it into a search engine is searching to buy games or the consoles, or whether they’re looking for reviews, or blog posts, or live streams - ‘PS4’ is not very specific at all.
How do I tell Google what keywords I have on my online shop?
By using lots of different SEO methods. There are two key areas you need to consider:
- ‘On-site’ (also known as ‘internal’);
- ‘Off-site’ (also known as ‘external’, and ‘backlinks’ - as these methods direct traffic back to your online shop from elsewhere online).
On-site SEO
SEO within your own online shop is all about making your content relevant to the Products you sell and the keywords you want to be found under, as well as highlighting the keywords you’re targeting through different elements of your content. An example of different elements to consider would include Page Titles, Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags and Header Tags.
These are all elements that a human visitor might not necessarily notice, but that are inspected by search engines regularly so they know where to list your shop in search results. Therefore, you need to ‘optimise’ these areas to help the search engines with relevant content and the right keywords.
On-site SEO also applies to your shop structure, looking at internal links to ensure that customers are not being wrongly directed to different pages - for example, creating a link to ‘Nintendo Mini’ which actually directs to a page full of trainers is directing your customers to the wrong place. Search engines check this content and your shop can be negatively impacted as a result. Click here to work through the On-Site SEO Guide.
Off-site SEO
When you have completed the on-site SEO on your EKM online shop, you can begin to look at the off-site SEO. Essentially, if an online shop or website has plenty of external links pointing back to it, search engines see this as a measure of value; if a website or online shop is being linked in lots of different places then it must be more useful than one that is not linked anywhere. With this in mind, it’s also important to consider where those external links are placed. Search engines recognise that blogs and social media platforms are populated by real people 99% of the time, so links on these kinds of websites are more valuable than those on directories which are not often frequented.
Therefore, external links on blogs, Facebook Pages, Instagram bios, LinkedIn, Pinterest and similar are what you are aiming for. Click here to work through the Off-Site SEO Guide.
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[contact] If you need our help with your EKM online shop, contact your Ecommerce Expert or the Customer Support Team, who will be able to point you in the right direction. We're open from 8am-6pm weekdays and 9am-5.30pm weekends. If you'd like to suggest a feature or an upgrade on any of the EKM platforms, please let us know on the EKM Suggestions Board. If you have a non-account-specific question to ask the EKM Team, join us in the EKM Community. [/contact]