Get Your Products Found in Google: Essential SEO for Online Retailers

Moving away from eBay and Amazon to sell your products on your own webstore is a fantastic strategy for most online retail businesses. Aside from not having marketplace fees butcher your profit margins, you also get away from the overwhelming level of competition that these marketplaces present.

However, most online retailers find that not getting traffic to their stores is what holds them back from making maximum sales numbers. Here are some essential SEO tips to help boost your search engine placements and increase your online sales.
Optimize your product images

As an online retailer, you will sometimes have 5 images for a single product listing and these images provide an opportunity to help increase visibility in the search engines. To optimize your images for Google Image search, you need to add “alt tags” or “alt text” to your images.

Alt text is text that is added to an image tag to describe what the image is about (the ‘ALTernative text’).

How you add alt text depends on your website’s content management system. If you are using WordPress, when you insert an image, right under the title field is the alternate text field. You can enter your alt text there.
Don’t skimp on the details in your product descriptions

You don’t need to read many of our previous SEO blog posts to learn that when it comes to ranking well in the search engines, content is king. Along with increasing your content through blogging or article writing, you should maximize the amount of relevant content in your product descriptions.

Even some leaders in online retail forget this step (see the meagre description below for a pair of women’s jeans. Do you see the words “jeans” anywhere, other than the listing title?).

It’s important that your item descriptions have specific information about the product itself. This goes a long way in ensuring that buyers find your product when they search for specific attributes of your items.

Copy the eCommerce success story, Endless.com, and add detailed information about each product you list on your store. They have more product details about this red handbag than I can capture in my screenshot!

You can surf around the store and get ides here: http://www.endless.com/.

Use the Google Merchant Center to increase your products visibility

Formerly known as Google Base, Google Merchant Center can help your listings get found by buyers in Google searches.
You can sign up to the Merchant Center here (it’s free). From there, you need to submit a “product data feed” which is simply a list of all the items you sell and their “attributes” such as price, size, URL, and so on. Creating a data feed is easy and Google has a number of resources to show you how to do it quickly and without any fuss.

For a full list of the Google attributes you can use in your data feed, click here.

Remember that SEO is complex, but not difficult and the results that it can bring to your business can dramatically increase your bottom line. For more hot tips on SEO and achieving top rankings, like our Facebook page.