Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines like Google and Bing are among the best tools for being found by customers. Customers use search engines to find products to buy. Showing up in the top positions is essential, and the practice of optimizing the site to appear higher in results is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

Search engines provide a service to users by recommending the pages that best match the search terms they enter. Identifying which words a customer would use on a search engine to find our products is one of the fundamental aspects. Ensuring that search engines consider our store pages more relevant for those keywords than those of our competitors is the other most important aspect of SEO.

Keywords

The keywords we should focus on are the ones our customers would use to search for our products. These can be different from the ones we would use because we naturally are experts in the field we operate in and tend to use more specialized terms. A separate case is when we operate in B2B, addressing a clientele mainly made up of industry professionals.

The value of a keyword is ultimately the sales return we get from customers who came to our store by searching for that keyword on search engines. Keywords also have a cost due to the time and resources we must invest to position our site ahead of competitors when customers search with that keyword.

A keyword might have a very high sales return but might be so optimized by our competitors that it could be extremely difficult to achieve satisfactory results. In these cases it can be more effective, in terms of cost and benefit, to target a range of less searched keywords.

Site relevance

Once the keywords have been identified, the other important aspect of SEO is how relevant our store site is to those keywords for search engines.

We should never forget that the purpose of search engines is to offer their users the results that best satisfy their searches. Search engines are now so advanced that, to be relevant to search engines, we ultimately need to be relevant to their users, namely our customers.

This means that we need to design site navigation, take care of product copy, and provide precise, relevant, clear, and up-to-date information for our customers in order to increase the relevance of pages for search engines.

Other aspects that affect the relevance of our store are:

• the number and quality of links from other sites pointing to ours. The number matters, but above all how relevant those sites are to the same keywords
• the length of time our store and our domain have been active. The longer we operate with our store, possibly with the same domain, the more relevant it will become
• the presence of a mobile site that is easy for users to use
• technical details handled by SEO experts

The technical details handled by SEO experts are the most elusive aspect because search engines often change the criteria used to assign relevance to a site or a page, and in this case only the intervention of an SEO consultant can help.