How You Can Teach Yourself Ecommerce SEO

There are dozens of variables to focus on when you effectively run an ecommerce shop, and it’s important that you pay attention to all of them. Because presentation is so important in today’s business world, your web design has to be A+. And with more people than ever researching reviews before doing business with a brand, your customer service also needs to be stellar. Bad customer service can easily lead to a bad review, and 85% of consumers trust online reviews just as much as they’d trust a word-of-mouth recommendation.

But all your efforts into a building a visually appealing site and training your team on best customer service practices will be in vain if your customer can’t find you. There’s no better way to achieve higher clickthrough rates than by strengthening your ecommerce search engine optimization.

SEO is unique because it is simultaneously complex, yet simple to learn. The core fundamentals of SEO remain the same, despite the fact that SEO consists of so many moving, constantly evolving parts. As difficult as it can be for a newbie, learning it is still an attainable goal. Even if you eventually hire an SEO company later down the line, it helps to know the jargon and be familiar with the basics. Here are a few different ways you can teach yourself ecommerce SEO to help put your ecommerce shop on the search engine map:

Research Other Sites

Begin your research efforts by making a list of site competitors, and making another list of websites you admire. Start going through the webpages (including the blogs) of each of those. Take note of areas they are hyperlinking in the blog, observe their product descriptions and headlines, and write down the strategies you notice.

Fortunately, there are plenty of “spy tools” at your disposal to help you reverse engineer the success of any website. These include Moz’s Open Site Explorer, Screaming Frog, and iSpionage. Each of these offer valuable tools for discovery competitor keywords, and better understanding how they’re ranking for terms that are relevant to your business. For instance, Screaming Frog allows you to easily crawl any competitor website and see what meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-page SEO tactics they’re using–and whether they’re effective.

Download An SEO Ebook

One of the best ways to learn more about search engine optimization is to download an SEO eBook. These are cost-effective and instant. There’s no need to spend chunks of money purchasing books that are often outdated by the time you receive them. SEO moves fast, and algorithms are constantly changing. Ebooks are best suited to capture all the lessons that SEO has to give, because they are easily updated to fit current trends.

Today’s eBook readers have all the capabilities to achieve the study habits you’d employ with a traditional book. For example, you can highlight passages in different colors, bookmark pages, and take notes. Furthermore, eBooks generally come equipped with several resources. They might have an accompanying blog that can help take your research to the next level, or perhaps easier access to the writer for a collaborative learning approach. It would be much easier to reach out the creator of an ebook than a traditional SEO book you find in the business section of your local bookstore.

Take An Online Class

There are plenty of free online SEO classes to take advantage of. Online classes are the perfect forum for discussion, real-time learning, and helps you pace your learning, so that you’re not taking in an overwhelming amount of information too quickly. It allows you to work slowly and really get to know the material you’re absorbing. How Search Works is Google’s introductory SEO course, and while it’s rooted in self-learning, it provides a great initial foundation from which to work off of. Start here, and then move on to more interactive classes. Search the Coursera and Udemy platforms for ecommerce SEO, and filter your results as you see fit.

An “SEO” search on Coursera currently yields nine results, and they focus on the more reputable courses from top-notch universities. For example, the majority of their SEO courses come from the University of California, Davis, which includes a six-course specialization class in search engine optimization.

Udemy, on the other hand, yields over 600 results for SEO. Some are free, while others are paid. With this, you’re able to see ratings for these courses as well. For example, currently, the top SEO course is just $10.99 and averages 4.3 stars out of over 1,000 reviews. This gives you more insight as to whether a class is right for you. There are also courses dedicated exclusively to ecommerce SEO, which will offer more tailored SEO information to help take your online store to the next level.