7 Ways to Get Google to Fall in Love With Your E-Commerce Business
7 Ways to Get Google to Fall in Love With Your E-Commerce Business
You’ve spent months, maybe years, longing for them to love you. Wondering what it would be like when they finally saw you. Yet when it happens … when you finally start to gain that visibility and they begin to appreciate you, it’s the most blissful feeling in the world.
Falling in love is hard to do – but this Valentine’s Day we’re here to help.
No, Webtmize didn’t enter the dating service field and I’m not talking about helping you get your crush to love you back. I’m referring to the most efficient and sustainable ways to get Google and other search engines to fall in love with your online business.
Think of SEO specialists as your personal cupids. Only we’re not here to make your crush fall madly in love with you. We’re here to help Google and consequently, your target audience, fall madly in love with your website.
Getting another person to love you back is a lot like getting Google to fall in love with your website. That’s because Google has rolled out a new algorithm update that putting it simply, values websites that speak to people, rather than to robots and computers. We’ll help you understand exactly what that means.
How do we do it? We don’t have a magic bow and arrow that will rank you at number one in a day. No SEO does despite the numerous spam you get in your emails from phony specialists claiming otherwise.
What we do have is years of experience, up-to-date insights on the latest Google ranking algorithms, and SEO tools like web crawlers, backlink analysis as well as keyword analysis tools. Armed with all of these, we provide you with actionable ways to improve your website and find everlasting love with Google.
1.Gain their trust. E-A-T & Y-M-Y-L
Every single relationship is based on trust at its core. If the object of your affection can’t trust you, then they can never really open up to you and be vulnerable with you. Ultimately they can never truly love you.
Google also recognizes how important trust is in a relationship. That’s why their latest algorithm updates have placed higher importance on the Y-M-L & E-A-T concepts.
Y-M-Y-L stands for ‘your money or your life’. The concept is simple. A few sites have a serious or direct impact on your life. When websites deal with particular subjects such as news, government, law, finance, shopping (i.e. any online store that requires your credit card information for a purchase) Google knows that users need to trust that website more since it can have a direct impact on their lives.
In a relationship, your partner needs to feel secure with you. In SEO, users need to feel secure when visiting and entering sensitive information onto your website. So making sure that your website is not only secure, but also trustworthy is key. When Google knows your users have faith in your website, it will too.
E-A-T stands for expertise, authority and most importantly trust. Just like in the unwritten rules of love, it’s very important that a website and its content can be trusted by users.
An easy way to make sure that your content is trustworthy is to make sure it is written by an expert in the subject. Your audience and Google need to feel like the information is coming from an authority in the field or subject.
In love, building trust takes getting to know a person.
In SEO, it goes a long way if your business has an About Us page which includes your real name and credentials that will help your audience get to know you, and why they should trust you or your business in a particular matter.
Bonus: Reviews
Don’t we all wish dating apps came with a Reviews option where people who previously went on a date with your potential match can let you know if the person is a total creep or a catch?
While that’s not possible on dating apps, luckily on websites it is. And the more positive reviews your website has the more likely users are to trust it. So, add a review section – it’s a simple and effective way to boost your website’s SEO.
2.Words don’t matter: Do keyword research, but don’t keyword stuff.
When it comes to love, sure you can sweet-talk your honey in the beginning to butter them up. But if there’s no meaning behind those words, they become empty and worthless. Just words. Soon enough your crush will catch on and quickly move on to someone else with more depth. Similarly, in SEO, keywords are empty and meaningless with no context. That context would be carefully curated content. Content that speaks to people, not robots and computers. Content that answers peoples’ questions and brings value to their lives in one form or another. It is simply not enough to research which keywords are the most popular and include them on your webpages for the sake of including them. Even Google recognizes, which is why their aforementioned latest algorithm update values natural language and user search intent, over keywords. Keyword stuffing, an outdated SEO tactic that once helped sites get better rankings quickly can even get you a penalty today. When you throw words around, you’re diminishing their value. Which is exactly what is happening to our beloved words. So as a fellow writer and professional SEO, who wants to see the value of the written word increase, I implore you – write for your fellow humans. Enrich your content with relevance to your users. Only when we stop focusing so much on including as many keywords as possible and instead shift our focus to making every word count can we breathe life and value back into our words.
3.Study your competition and offer what they can’t. Be unique.
We live in a digital age, where love connections are literally at our fingertips with dating apps like Tinder, Bumble and Plenty of Fish. This technology definitely makes the process of falling in love more convenient and accessible. On the other hand, it can also add an element of complexity.
Think about it. With all of these options at their fingertips, the object of your affection can easily overlook you if nothing about you or your dating profile stands out. There is plenty of fish in the sea, and technology has provided you with a giant net to catch every one of those fish to your liking.
The way to conquer this problem is by studying the competition and offering your crush something the competition doesn’t. You may be witty when they are athletic or vice versa.
Something about you makes you more valuable as a love connection to someone than your competition.
This is paralleled in the e-commerce industry. The internet has provided us with a wonderful way to provide our service or product to billions of people worldwide. Something that was never possible in the traditional market. And just like in dating, it’s important to study your competition. The best way to do so is by conducting a competitive analysis between your website and your top three competitors. Webtmize has conducted numerous analyses, studying the most essential SEO aspects of our clients’ websites compared to their competitors. Our analyses never overlook any detail and can provide you with the competitive advantages to leverage, as well as opportunities and areas to improve on.
4.Be Easy.
This is the one and only time that the rules of love will not apply to get Google to fall in love with your website.
In the real world, you shouldn’t be easy if you want to win the affections of the object of your affection.
On the other hand, if you want to get Google’s attention, you should be very easy.
Google values websites that clearly indicate what each of its pages has to offer, and that are easy to navigate.
Webtmize puts the time and effort to ensure that our clients’ title tags, meta descriptions and H1s are optimized so that they don’t leave Google’s algorithm guessing what any page on their site is about.
We also analyze our clients’ websites to make sure their user experience is optimized making it as easy as possible for people to navigate through it, and get what they want out of it.
Playing hard to get is over-rated when it comes to Google’s love language. Be simple, be easy. Don’t keep anyone guessing.
5.Looks matter. But they’re not the most important criteria.
We’d all love to believe that looks don’t matter when it comes to the rules of love. But like it or not, they do. Physical attraction is the first thing you base your opinion of a potential partner on. If there’s zero physical attraction, the romance quickly turns into a friend-zone situation.
That’s why apps like Tinder, who match people based primarily on their physical attraction to one another are so popular. Don’t like what you see? Swipe left.
It’s the same concept for a website. If your website isn’t visually appealing to users, your bounce rate will likely be high. Needless to say, Google doesn’t like that.
But while looks matter, they’re not the most important thing. That’s also why you haven’t heard of many epic love stories deriving from Tinder. You can’t base a life-long meaningful connection solely on looks. There needs to be some substance in that arm-candy for things to turn long-term.
The same applies to your SEO. Your website’s design should have a sleek design with consistent and professional branding, as well as high-resolution images, to make a good first impression on your target audience. But it’s the content or “substance” of your website that will keep the audience coming back for more.
6.Take your time.
A worthwhile, long-lasting relationship takes time and won’t happen overnight. It takes time and effort to ignite that spark and ensure you don’t lose it.
Gaining, and maintaining that deep connection between your site and Google is no different.
Maintaining a long-lasting relationship with a sweetheart, especially if this one is as demanding as Google, might appear as one of the most obsequious tasks. It can take anywhere from 3-12 months to start seeing results from your SEO efforts. But like true love, the results are worth it.
And just like love, once you gain it, you don’t want to lose it.
Webtmize is armed with organic traffic tools that monitor your website’s performance on a monthly basis. We provide all of our SEO clients monthly reports with wins and losses to pinpoint what’s working and what isn’t to adjust their SEO strategies accordingly.
7. But don’t waste theirs.
What’s worse than a partner who takes forever to open up to you? A website that takes forever to load.
One of the most detrimental things for a website’s SEO is slow site speed. Webtmize has tools that identify a website’s desktop and mobile site speeds, and where the biggest pain points are. We then offer our clients actionable advice on increasing their site speed. Whether it’s offloading plugins that aren’t being used or reducing the weight of images.
Now that you know the most important tricks of the trade, it’s time to get out there and mingle. Of course, love and SEO can be a bit more complicated than this. And no relationship is one size fits all. Luckily Webtmize’s SEO specialists are right here to be your wingmen and women guiding you into building that love connection with Google. All it takes is some effort and sound advice to shine through. Trust us, they’re going to love you.