If you’ve been following along with our SEO blog series, you should have a solid understanding of how search engines work, and insight into the history of search engine optimization. Now that you have the context and background behind SEO, let’s take a look at five key principles for getting your listings to the top of Google’s search results, and keeping them there.

1. Know Your Audience

In some ways, the old edict of “the customer is always right” can be adapted to SEO. When you’re working on optimizing your content, your guiding principle should be doing what’s best for the searcher. Another way to look at this golden rule of SEO is to think of your customers as being on a quest to find your products, and that everything you do to make your listings easier to find directly helps them along their journey. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind when helping your audience reach their destination:

Relevant Content is Key

If you’re going to do what’s best for the searcher, you need to think about more than just a single query that you want to rank for. If you’re selling, say, a smart thermostat, it’s not enough to just cover a single search intent — you need to cover ALL people’s search intent. 

Think of some other keywords directly or peripherally related to your product. When you’re designing content for that product listing it would be beneficial for both you and your audience to address all these facets of the topic on the page. 

By doing so, you’re increasing your page’s relevancy for more than just a single query, and you’re enhancing your customer’s experience by making your listing a sort of one-stop-shop that fulfills every search intent they have. Best of all, you’re broadening your reach by focusing on more than just one potential keyword.

See all the various topics related to the smart thermostat in the image below:

Broad vs. Narrow Search

Broad search terms aren’t usually going to lead a purchase. It’s the narrow and highly specific terms where you have an engaged audience who is interested in purchasing a product. 

Let’s return once more to the smart thermostat example: if you want searchers to discover your listing, keywords like “thermostat” or “air conditioner,” while important to target, aren’t going to be enough to bring in the customers who would be most interested in purchasing your product. 

By targeting more specific terms related to your product, like “Wi-Fi thermostat” or “learning thermostat” in this example, you are laying down a much clearer path for your target audience to reach your listing and buy your product.

2. Detailed Product Specs

If you want to aid Google in getting your product in front of searchers, you need to give it a deep dive into your product’s specifications. The more details you provide, the more opportunity you have to be crawled and ranked.

To elaborate, Google thrives on knowing what people are searching for. Ideally, every product listing you create should have as many of the specs added to the page as possible so that when Google crawls and indexes the page, it has the data it needs to analyze and understand what search queries you should be matched to. 

This information can also affect where you’ll show up on that page — if you don’t have as much relevant content as Google feels you need for the topic, they may not rank you as high. 

Here are just a few mandatory behaviors when filling out product specs:

Highlight the Brand

Make sure your products are labeled with the proper brand. It sounds obvious, but omitting this piece of essential information is more common than you may think. 

It should go without saying, at this point, that leaving out the brand or manufacturer can hurt the product’s visibility in search. If a user doesn’t find this information, they may end up deciding not to purchase.

Provide ALL the Details

Missing specs don’t benefit anyone. Again, doing what is best for your customer benefits SEO. 

By giving your customer as many details about a product as possible, you’re making their buying experience easy, and in turn, making them more likely to purchase — all while increasing your visibility to search engines. Another tactic to consider when creating content for greater visibility is to include questions for any product questions a customer might ask. 

Correct Categorization

Putting your product in the wrong category can be an easy mistake. If a product is too ambiguous to nail down to one specific category, turn to the SEO principle of thinking about what your audience would search for and categorize accordingly.

Don’t Game the System

Be honest with your specifications. Don’t mislabel a product or place it in a category it isn’t meant for as a way of trying to increase visibility — doing so is playing with fire. Google’s algorithms are sophisticated enough these days that they may weed out pages that are intentionally trying to exploit it, which can have severe repercussions.

3. High-Quality Product Content

What your customer wants and what Google wants is the same: quality content. 

Create a robust overview that gives customers a look at your product from every angle. It’s one thing to specify a fast shutter speed on a camera, but it is even better to explain further what circumstances that shutter speed is used for. Having high-quality content helps the search engines understand what your product can do and improve the visibility to your customers. 

Here are a few elements that will enhance your product content:

• Informative Text
• Rich Imagery
• Videos
• Comparison Charts

For more help, here are some SEO best practices for ecommerce product pages.

4. It’s All About the Experience

Google is always looking for the best way to improve a user’s experience. That principle should be at the core of your decision-making in SEO. Everything you do in optimizing your listings should be tied back to the fundamental question, “Is this the best experience for my customers?” 

It may sound idealistic, but the truth is that if you always work towards doing what’s best for your customers, you’ll find that Google, whether actively or passively, is aiding your business in turn.

5. SEO isn’t Magic

SEO takes consistent effort: There’s no magic formula or instant fix when it comes to improving page rankings. It requires frequent attention and an ability to quickly adapt to changes (Google changes their algorithm, on average, every thirteen hours). Making sure you’re always relevant in a changing world is tough, but it will keep you at the forefront of customers’ minds. And that makes SEO one of the best investments a business can make.

What’s Next?

While this is the final entry in our SEO blog series, we still have plenty to share when it comes to helping you reach the peak of search results. For more tips on optimizing your listings visit us at newegg.com/sellers, and be sure to check out our SEO eBook!