The importance of location for physical stores is replaced by the importance of search ranking in the online world. There are two ways to get onto the first page – a paid listing and natural or organic listing. Today let’s talk about natural listings, but don’t assume they don’t come without cost. 

The art/science (yes that old debate is applicable here also) of ranking naturally high in search engines like Google and Bing is called SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve asked our in-house search specialist, Maurice Peigna, to put together a few pointers about SEO for your retail site.

SEO is an ongoing process

The first thing you should understand is that SEO is not a one-off tactic; it is an ongoing process. Your website is (or should be) continually changing with pages being deleted and updated on an ongoing basis. SEO should therefore be seen as a long-term ongoing process, with constant evaluation and updates where necessary. Behind it must be a well thought-out strategy and plan. For example, the question “what are you optimising for?” is a surprisingly difficult one to answer, but one you must answer upfront. These keywords will become the “anchor text” for the hyperlinks that will later be used for link building.

Using tools such as on-site web analytics as well as the range of tools made available to you (such as Google’s insights for search) will reveal changing search behaviour and opportunities for SEO improvement over time. This won’t stop. You will need to plan and allocate resources to this ongoing.

Search engines care about relevance

Your challenge is to make the search engines understand that you are relevant. Your web pages must use the users’ language and contain the words and phrases that their target audience types into search queries. These pages will have a relevant unique keyword focus. Building relevant content on the site will contribute towards ranking higher on search engines results pages; allowing it to get crawled earlier, faster and deeper by the search bots. In addition, ensure your website internal linking structure makes sense and has a clear hierarchy that is visible throughout the site. For example, breadcrumb navigation: Home > Electronics > TV > Plasma TVs.

Search engines care about popularity

Links to your site indicate that other sites find your site relevant, for something. The higher the quality of the sites linking in, the better it is for your site. It contributes to what is called Page Rank by Google. Think of a link like a recommendation; and the more trusted the recommender, the higher value placed on the recommendation.

Be wise with your link building. When selecting third-party sites to obtain links from (to build your page rank), focus on the quality of the links you are building (ie from a trusted page using the anchor text your want to rank for), rather than the quantity. On the other hand, linking from too many sites in a short period of time could be interpreted as link-spamming. “Spamming” (or “Black Hat SEO”) may get you blacklisted by the search engines and throttled to the nether regions of the Web. Other spamming techniques include: creating fake pages not related to the website’s real content; hiding key words on the page by having their colour the same as the background colours; creating duplicate pages; and reciprocal linking to commercial “Link Farms”. Read more here.

Look the part; and keep your house tidy

It is important to optimise your URLs. Search engines are not fans of dynamic URLs or complex URLs with multiple parameters and session IDs. The URL should describe the content and hierarchy of the page and be readable to humans. Ensure that your URL structure is clear and relevant to page content. In addition, when a page has been permanently removed from one URL to another, use a server side redirect (known as a 301-redirect), which will tell search engines to go to the new page and drop the old one.

Be an individual

Search engines do not like unoriginal content. Ensure your content is unique and refreshed on a regular basis to provide maximum exposure for your SEO endeavours. Use social media to help with your content generation and SEO. Creating a Facebook, Twitter and blogging presence all increase SEO visibility.

SEO should be part of your business review, every month. If you do manage to get to the top of a search result naturally, pat yourself on the back; then get back to work on SEO to stay there.

Paul Marshall, CEO

Lasoo.com.au

If you have any expertise in the products you sell; you should blog. If your retail brand represents anything to do with trust, advice, or experience; you should blog. If you wish to push forward into online, any authority and authenticity you have developed in store to advise and influence people; you should blog.

The reason is blogging will bring you new customers, will reinforce and strengthen your brand, and will bring you more sales. But you must do it well.

So to help you do it well, our expert blogger on Lasoo Caroline Warnes has kindly put together the following tips. You can view Caroline’s savvy shopping blog here.

Blogging tips

1. Have a blogging presence: It’s the age of social media and it’s important to have a presence in as many arenas as possible. Blogging gives your brand a human face and can establish you as an opinion-maker in your field.

2. Blog only about what you know: Credibility is very important online. Decide what you know, and blog about that. Don’t get distracted in something off-message.

3. Blog regularly: Decide from the start how often you can afford the time to blog, then stick to this schedule – whether it be daily, weekly, monthly (or multiple times daily, if you’ve got the luxury of lots of time). Readers are more likely to return when they know when to expect new content – and if it isn’t there when they visit the site, they will get frustrated.

4. Have a point of difference: You won’t attract a lot of visitors if you’re offering nothing new. Rather than rehashing what’s already out there, you should decide what will set you apart from the rest. This might be devoting the blog entirely to an aspect of your field that is rarely covered in-depth, it might be having strong opinions (and not being afraid to share them), it might be having a unique sense of humour – in fact, the best thing you can do is to let your personality shine through, rather than making it dry commentary.

5. Understand the community: Identify the other blogs that are relevant to your area and make a point of visiting them regularly (and leaving comments on them). It’s also a good idea to link back to entries on other blogs and offer your opinion on them. This exchange of links with other relevant blogs is a great way of building your own traffic and credibility in the blogging community.

6. Use social media: Using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to promote new entries on your blog is another great way to enter the community and grow your traffic.

7. Clean up your writing: Blog entries don’t necessarily need to be Shakespeare, but they should at least be readable. Run a spellchecker over your entries before you post them if you don’t trust yourself, or get someone who is good with spelling and grammar to read over them. Nothing is more of a turn-off than a poorly written blog.

Blogging is an investment. It won’t pay dividends to your retail business overnight – but it will deliver a very strong payback in the medium term when done well.

Paul Marshall - CEO

Lasoo.com.au