Organic search engine traffic is the holy grail of a repeatable and scalable online ecommerce business. I’ve grown the organic search engine traffic for several websites to hundreds of thousands of annual visitors and am documenting my experiment growing a new blog from scratch, which will ultimately serve as the platform to launch a digital or physical product.

Below, I’ve outlined ten key ways that you can improve the SEO of your ecommerce store today, whether it’s hosted on WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, or another website builder. Remember, that it can take upwards of 3-6 months for some of these techniques to take effect, but they are 100% worth implementing!

1) Study The Factors that Impact SEO.

I highly recommend reading through this beginner’s guide to SEO and the factors that affect search engine rankings. After reading through these tutorials, I’ll think you’ll find that the most important elements of a page’s or website’s SEO rankings over time are:

• Number and quality of websites linking to that website domain and its individual pages.
• Keywords in the title and body of the page and how they relate to the search query.
• The URL structure of the page (http://www.yoursite.com/23.html vs. http://www.yoursite.com/awesome-product-name)
• Making sure that all elements are readable by search engines (naming and alt tags for images).
• The anchor text that is used to link to you and that you use to link other websites.
• Check out this list of the ranking factors that affect search.

Over time, relevant and authoritative inbound links to your online store’s domain name and its individual pages are weighed very heavily.

For example, you might run a fashion store and get recommended and linked to by a fashion blogger. This is a great link that will boost your website’s SEO profile.

One of the issues with many websites is that they over do the search engine “optimization” part, by using unnatural anchor text, getting links from iffy websites, having duplicate content, and being too aggressive with their on-page optimization. This can have a negative effect on your SEO and get you flagged as a spammer in the eyes of Google.

2) Research The Keywords Customers Might Use

After you gain an initial understanding of how search engines work and the importance of various factors that affect the authority of a website’s domain in the eyes of google, then the next crucial step is to identify the types of keywords that customers might use to find your products. If you have a very niche store, this keyword analysis will also likely extend to finding the homepage of your online store.

Take a second and put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer and answer these questions:

• Why do they need your product and what would they search for on google to find it? E.g: “Bag to carry books.”
• How would they describe your product when they search for it? E.g: “Leather tote bag”
• What words would a prospect type into google images? E.g: “Cool tote bag”
• How would they further limit their search? E.g: “Tote bags on sale.”

These questions are the first layer when considering how to describe your product on your website to potential customers. If you describe them well, you will have a better chance of ranking in google for those terms. However, there are also indirect ways of obtaining repeat traffic, which we will talk about next.

3) Identify Where Customers Spend Their Time.

Do your customers spend their time browsing a particular fashion website or blog? Are they always on Instagram looking at inspiring fitness photos?

The best way to identify content to create or attract customers and get linked to by media publications and blogs is to work backwards. First, describe the individual who suffers from the particular pain point which makes them want to own your product. Let’s say it’s a fitness fanatic who bought your product and they are raving about this particular smart band that you sell.

Next, dig a bit deeper into the reason that person bought the product. They clearly care about fitness, meaning that they likely watch fitness youtube videos, might look up workout routines, probably wonder about the best things to eat for a particular diet, and be likely to enjoy motivational content on Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram.

You might narrow their desires even further. Maybe people who buy your product are also in college or are young professionals and therefore are also looking for cheap and fun ways to create healthy meals.

You should seek to know and understand their desires, hopes, and dreams as intimately as you might understand those of a friend. Once you’ve narrowed down who your customers are, what problems they have, and what they care about, it’s time to generate content that is meant to both improve your website’s SEO and the relationship that you have with your customers.

4) Create Content To Attract Customers and Links

As the marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Everyone is a media company.”

Unless you want to rely on paid advertisements for the rest of your business’ lifetime, then you need to create compelling content that engages customers. There are a few forms that this content could take, including:

• Starting company a blog.
• Making a YouTube show.
• Posting original content on Instagram, SnapChat, and Pinterest.
• Curating content through Twitter, Facebook, and more.
• Publishing a podcast.
• Writing a book.
• Making a free course.
• Host some kind of a contest.
• Publishing case studies or research.
• Making company data transparent in some way (like Buffer revenue figures, Kickstarter stats, SmartPassiveIncome profit, etc).
• Starting a LinkedIn, Google+ or online forum group.
• Writing posts on other blogs or platforms (LinkedIn, Medium).

The content that you create should fall into one or more of the following categories.

• Useful. It solves a problem, answers a question, or helps out a customer.
• Entertaining. It makes people smile, laugh, or feel a positive way.
• Inspiring. It pushes customers to achieve their goals.

The goal of working hard to create amazing content is to attract attention through social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. This attention, which comes from providing value, helps you develop an initial relationship with your customers, get them on your website, and, in some cases, generate links from bloggers, media publications, and social bookmarking websites like Reddit or Quora.

Great content is shared, linked to, and consumed. It introduces consumers to your brand in a non-threatening way and if your content is specific to the demographic of your customers, it will lead to conversions.

Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the inbound marketing strategy at Shopify. They have a build a business competition, youtube channel, blog, forum, theme marketplace, and more.

Not only does all of this content make it easier for customers to find out about them and other websites to link to them, but it also makes them appear to be an authority in the ecommerce space. Wouldn’t it be great if you were seen as the primer authority in your space?

5) Create Content For Media Publications and Bloggers

Creating content on your own website or social platforms is one way of indirectly attracting inbound links from reputable sources. It might surprise you to learn that creating content for other websites can actually be more profitable from an SEO standpoint than creating content for your own website, depending on the competitiveness of the niche/industry.

What do I mean by this? Let’s say that you want a larger publication focused on traveling to link to your ecommerce store as an interesting place to buy a new satchel. However, you’re having trouble getting the attention of journalists in the niche because there are so many competing products out there.

Rather than trying to compete with your compelling story and pitch (which is a good way to compete by the way), why not create some great content for that publication’s audience? Maybe you could share the best ways that you’ve found to get a cheap flight to your ideal travel destination, ways to pack light, or the motivational post where you’ve surveyed retirees and asked one regret in their lifetime, which happened to be that they wish they had traveled more.

I don’t know! It could be any type of useful or entertaining content for the audience of that publication. By delivering this value free of charge, you will have the opportunity to link to a blog post, item, or even the homepage of your website within the post or in the bio.

You could even pitch a hard-to-reach media publication on the correlation between a random buying surge that you experienced with your online shop and how that interacts with another variable, like a media story. The goal here is to give a publication, blogger, or journalist interesting content, which will then give you the opportunity to receive referral traffic and in time, more organic search traffic.

6) Design Your Media Story

Another way to obtain inbound links, which will heavily influence your organic search rankings, is to persuade a media publication of the value of writing about your company or a particular product.

When crafting a media story, I would research the types of publications and reporters that you would like to write about you and study the types of companies that they have written about in the past and the angle that they used to highlight them.

Writing a compelling pitch is crucial and even your subject line and initial paragraph must be given thought. Why would a journalist be prompted to open this email among so many others?

Below, I’ve compiled a few resources to identify and pitch journalists more effectively.

• Haro – Help a reporter out is a free service that you can use to connect with journalists.
• Buzzsumo – You can plug in topics and see influencers in the particular niche.
• InkyBee – InkyBee also has an influencer-finder feature that will help identify individuals that you should reach out to.
• Muck Rack – A tool that you can use to find and pitch journalists.
• Vocus Media Database – A more expensive tool to find journalists in your niche.
• Press Friendly – Another tool that will help you craft a media story and identify journalists that you should reach out to.

7) Go after low hanging fruit.

While great links require time and effort, you can also improve your SEO profile with “low hanging fruit” or links that are easy to get, and strategies that are easy to implement.

• Sign up for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Medium, Instagram, Google+, and every other social network that you can think of. Make sure there is a link in your profile back to your website and a description of your website for each site.
• Submit your business to local and global directories so that individuals can more easily find out what your company does. Here is a list of places where you can list your business.
• Answer questions on Quora and other Q&A websites in your industry’s niche, which may provide you with an opportunity to link to your website (don’t spam).
• Create a free press release with one of these websites or a paid press release to make an announcement.
• Encourage user reviews on your product pages.
• Interlink webpages on your own website.
• Make sure the website is mobile optimized.

8) Research your competitors

The easiest and surest way to improve the SEO for your ecommerce business over time is to research your competitors!

First, I would conduct basic google searches and see which competitors are advertising or ranking for key terms. Check out those webpages and how they are structured. What is their url structure like? What keywords are on the page? What is the title of the page? What alt tags are the using? How old is their website?

After scoping out your competitors using google, I would recommend using the tools below:

• Semrush – To see where competitors are getting their organic traffic
• SpyFu – Another tool that you can use to analyze competitors.
• Open Site Explorer – You can use it to compare your website to others and the demographic of their inbound links.
• Alexa – Another tool that will allow you to see how your website ranks against competitors.

The Key Takeaway

The key takeaway from this post is that there are no tricks. Great content is linked to on the web because it’s great. Awesome products get positive reviews because they’re awesome. If you consistently provide value to your customers and have a strategic content and media approach, you will experience organic search engine growth over time. It won’t happen all at once, but it will happen, as long as you fill a need in the marketplace .