SEO For E-Commerce
Let’s talk about E-Commerce for the first time in a while. Let’s also talk about SEO.
Most of your E-Commerce stuff won’t involve SEO. Everyone’s doing the whole dropshipping thing and that involves spending money on traffic outright.
(If you want to learn more about this and getting started with dropshipping and ecommerce, I recommend you follow James Holt and subscribe to his YouTube channel. It’s by far and away the best no-nonsense, nuts and bolt dropshipping advice out there.)
I agree that SEO for ecommerce isn’t the best short-term play, and it’s useless for testing the viability of a niche.
SEO takes too long and you don’t want to wait six months to find out if your store is going to get traffic. Besides, e-commerce stores aren’t really set up for good SEO anyway.
But let’s say you have validated a niche and you’ve had consistent sales for a couple of months. You might want to decrease your ad budget or otherwise invest for the long term.
So let’s take a step-back and read this sentence again:
Besides, e-commerce stores aren’t really set up for good SEO anyway.
Here we’ll talk about how you can get the edge over your competition using skills you already have (at least you do if you’ve read the archives here) and get a ton of benefit for little investment.
The Average E-Commerce Store Is Terrible For SEO
E-commerce stores – especially dropshipping stores with lazy guys who just copy-paste the descriptions from AliExpress – have a terrible weakness.
They’re thing, have no unique content and thus perform terribly, SEO-wise.
SEO is a cheap form of marketing in terms of expense. We’ve already talked about why it’s not ideal above, so let’s talk about when to use it and why.
You use it when you have a winning site already.
You use it to decrease your advertising costs and increase the free exposure your business gets.
This is done in order to give you more of a competitive advantage over people who aren’t even trying.
(If you can’t win on an even battlefield, find a different battlefield.)
So, there’s a big reason. You’re playing on a different battlefield and winning with little competition.
There’s a second reason though.
How Are You Better Than The Competition When You’re All The Same?
A big problem that people have with dropshipping is that they sell the exact same products from the exact same suppliers with the exact same terms as everyone else.
Marketing this is tricky because unless you’re the first to market, you’ll find that everyone’s been spammed to death already.
Now, the best way to deal with this problem is to improve your offer. Clearly. Find some way to make the shipping times palatable or give everyone a free gift with orders over £10 or whatever.
But that’s not got a lot to do with SEO.
So how do we use SEO to our advantage here?
Simple… we use our super-skills that we learned in the archives to blitz the front-pages for terms so that we appear to be the only game in town.
Luckily, AliExpress and other dropshipping guys that use them are terrible for SEO, as we’ve already discussed.
So we use that to our advantage.
We do a little keyword search. Basically every product you sell falls into the “high searches, low competition” area of keyword research.
So you act accordingly.
You use all your keyword ranking tricks so that you appear top of the image searches, first position, second position and onwards.
Then you add in secondary keywords until you control the rankings for “black t-shirt with pink unicorn” and all its variations. This isn’t difficult. With your ecommerce store, a couple of niche sites and a few free blogs, you could do this.
Final Thoughts
This strategy is a case of using simple stuff that nobody is doing and getting big results from it.
Now, I don’t want to downplay the value of doing all the other stuff right. If you want to run an ecommerce store, then you’ll need to learn about social media. You’ll need to learn how to set up your store and offers. You’ll need to learn paid advertising and you’ll have to get proficient at it because you want to be better than your competition.
But it also pays to work around your competition and do what they’re not doing too. It is the X-Factor and gives you that little bit more leeway – or little bit more opportunity.
SEO has been the advantage, but you can apply the same logic to anything e-commerce and anything online business related, to be honest.
P.S. I’ll be providing a more methodical approach to this topic in more detail soon. If you’d like to know about that, you’ll get the news first by subscribing to the email list.
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