Volusion SEO tips: How to optimize your Volusion store
Optimizing your ecommerce website is very different from doing the same for an informational site. When you have a large and diverse inventory, you have as many keywords to potentially optimize for. So you end up optimizing the keywords that reference the product categories, like dog collars, and even the umbrella category that conveys the breadth of your entire product offering, like pet supplies. This creates a problem in having to optimize for such a competitive phrase. But there are steps you should take, and Volusion’s platform allows you to make adjustments that will help you climb the search rankings.
The natural place to begin is with Google Analytics, or a similar traffic analysis tool if you’re using something else. I plan on writing a more in-depth article about optimizing an ecommerce site with Google Analytics in the coming weeks (they changed their interface, so most of the articles on this topic are now obsolete as the paths they instruct you to follow no longer exist).
View a list of keywords (that aren’t brand names) that are driving traffic to your site over time. If you don’t yet have Google Analytics setup, you’ll want to create an account as soon as possible and embed the code they give you in each webpage you want analysis of. The longer the period of time you have data for, the more useful the data is. Six months is a healthy length of time that will give you a meaningful snapshot of traffic to learn from. Monitor not only the visitors from each keyword, but the conversion rate. You can filter reports by different pages, like homepage and other landing pages.
Note which keywords outperform the others. Do an organic search for these keywords and see where your Volusion store ranks. It goes without saying that where you appear in organic search has a huge impact on your traffic.
Next, look at your anchor text in Google Webmaster Tools. It should be in the traffic category. Anchor text is the text that displays for a link. It is usually underlined and in blue, for example – this anchor text links to the 1Digital Agency homepage. You should see a connection between the anchor text that GWT presents and the keywords that are responsible for the most traffic (disregarding brand names). The page that you pulled up reporting for probably ranks well for these keywords because you have both supporting keyword content on that page and because the search engines have recognized external websites linking to said page using the keywords in your anchor texts.
If you don’t see the keywords you want your Volusion store to rank for in any of the Google Analytics reports, you’ll have to do two main things:
- For the sake of instruction, I’ll assume that the page you’re looking to optimize is your homepage. As you’ve identified which keywords are going to get your traffic and conversions where you’d like them, you’ll need to adjust your strategy to incorporate these keywords into your homepage. eCommerce sites often slide into the bad habit of neglecting text-based copy as the real estate of the homepage is a competitive landscape for several objectives. Pay attention to your title tag, meta description and on-page copy, but be careful of things like keyword stuffing and keyword cannibalisation
- Refine your internal and external linking strategies to incorporate these keywords into the anchor text. Again, you can use Google Webmaster Tools to see these links and their sources. I suggest starting with adjusting your internal links, as these are easier to control.
- This article is continued in the next Volusion SEO tips entry, which goes into specific detail for how to optimize through your Volusion dashboard.