Shift4Shop eCommerce Blog | SEO (2)

Ask anyone in the digital marketing industry what you need to do to grow your business online and they’ll give you one piece of advice — invest in content.

Sure, you could throw money at ads or hire a famous influencer to do one or two Instagram posts about you, but you’ll probably see a year’s ad budget dry up pretty quickly (and not have a lot of growth to show for it).

A more sensible, cheaper approach might just be to make content the focus of your strategy.

Search engine results pages, or SERPs, are so common in today’s digital world that most people don’t even think about them. For most internet users, they’re similar to a non-descriptive waiting room – a place you end up briefly while on your way to where you really want to go. But for businesses, SERPS are everything. Not only do they determine if people find your website, but they also dictate whether or not your competition is going to outperform you, this month and the month after that.

It should go without saying that no eCommerce marketing strategy would be successful without Google ads. The key is using the right Google ad types for eCommerce and having the optimization tools to tweak them to peak performance.

With more than half of the world’s businesses earning revenues online, it is unwise for any business owner to not tap into those growth possibilities for their business. If your website is an integral part of your company that can impact your business growth, you need to put more effort into boosting your website ranking and visibility. You might think that it is possible to manage your site's marketing campaign with in-house services by following some generic strategies, but you couldn’t be[...]

Google is a complex beast. Its algorithm is comprised of over 200 factors that affect your website’s ranking on the search results page. None of those factors are to be sniffed at, but some do outrank each other in importance.

Below, we’ll cover the ten most important Google ranking factors that you can’t ignore this year.

It's not easy to get website traffic. Both paid ads and organic search engine marketing need to be fully optimized. Search engine optimization is the more crucial of the two, with a much higher potential return on investment.

SEO takes a lot of work, and a significant amount of time, to see results. Whether you're sticking solely to SEO or using paid advertisement alongside it, once your business has arrived at a great strategy that starts pulling in the visitors, you want to keep it that way.

[...]

Vaping is becoming increasingly popular globally and with good reasons. The number of vapers has skyrocketed to almost 55 million from 35 million in 2016. The vaping culture isn't coming to a halt any time soon.

The competition in the vaping industry is rapidly rising, and every vape store owner wants to be ahead of their rivals. This is why having an online presence is essential, especially if you lack the resources to keep a brick-and-mortar store up and running.

If you want to increase your[...]

Are you making mistakes within your Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign? Luckily, if you are, it’s fairly easy to pick out any errors and rectify your actions before you start to lose significant portions of your budget with little to show for it.

Google is now using BERT models in search, which could potentially change the way SEO works.

BERT models, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, are a way for Google to better understand user searches and serve better results.

Like all algorithm changes Google brings, the intent is to improve the quality of search, which means high performing, credible, informative, well written, purpose-specific, and authoritative content will eventually reach web users.

Text ads are Google’s original venture into advertising on their platform. It was launched back in the year 2000, and even today, they make up 45% of the monthly share of click through rates.

If you’re running any branded website that you’d like to get in front of more eyes online, SEO is vital for achieving better searchability and visibility on search engines. But it offers more real value than that; there are various reasons why businesses need SEO to take their brand to the next level.

If there was one thing every content writer or online business would like to know when it comes to publishing blog posts, it would probably be the answer to this question: “How long should a blog post be in order for it to perform its best?” Of course, no magic number really exists. While there are great recommendations to follow, there are always exceptions to the rules. For example, it’s not hard to find a page one ranking article that is much shorter (or longer) than the recommended ideal[...]

What if there was something you could do that would significantly increase your blog traffic? Something straightforward and repeatable that you could do for all the articles you post. You’d do it, right? Well, there are some simple tactics that accomplish this that most blogs ignore.

A penalty always signifies that something has been done incorrectly. Consider sports; when a player gets a penalty, they are often punished in some way, which affects their whole team and in most cases, the outcome of the game. The same is true for Google penalties. Google punishes your website if your strategies and tactics go against their goal of delivering relevant content to users who search for it.

Links from leading professional websites act as a sign of support to Google. The more people that show support for your site, the more authentic and honest you become. One of the essential strategies which all SEO professionals provide you are building links and removing any existing link building errors.

If you've spent any time running a website, you're aware that search engine optimization (SEO) is a complicated process. It takes a lot of work and research to stay ahead and earn a high rank in results.

Keyword research and content writing are crucial, and you also can't afford to overlook the more technical aspects, like meta tags, URL optimizations, your XML sitemap, and more. Of course, the technical parts of SEO can be either helped or hindered by your eCommerce platform.

At Shift4Shop, we[...]

Most common ecommerce SEO practices typically focus on elements like meta titles, meta descriptions, etc. because they’re the tags that show up on SERPs, or search engine result pages. But there’s other tags that only appear on your website page that also play a vital role in ranking on SERPs; one such tag is the H1 tag.

Although the H1 tag isn’t visible in a search result, it helps both search engine spiders and human users to better understand the content of your web page. This helps to[...]

In the 21^st century, many companies are expanding their services to include foreign markets. The benefits of such expansion include access to larger target audiences, competitive advantages, foreign investment opportunities, improved profit margins, diversification, and much more.

AdSense has become one of the most popular ways to monetize websites online. Not only is it relatively easy to set up, but it also has the potential to be relatively lucrative thanks to Google’s intelligent algorithms. Right now, more than two million people are using AdSense to make more money online according to Google. And, while that’s still a relatively low number considering how many websites there are in existence around the world, the point is that if you’re not one of those two million[...]

Are you an eCommerce site owner who's noticed a change in your rankings? You may have been impacted by the latest Google update to the core algorithm.

The mistake that many site owners make is that they treat SEO like a static tactic. They take the one and done approach to SEO.

The truth is that organic search is a constantly moving target. In 2018, Google made more than 3,200 changes to its algorithm. Some changes barely make a dent.

Then, there are changes Google will announce and[...]