Step 1. Set up SEO for your store
Why SEO – search engine optimization – is vital for your dropshipping store? Let’s see!
Where do people go if they want to buy something but don’t know where exactly? Right, they go to Google! These people are precious – they are eager to buy the desired item, ready to buy it right away and they have their money prepared! They type the item title into the search box and usually click on one of the first results in Google. And buy the item there.
But imagine that it will be YOUR store that will pop up in the first search results and people will visit YOUR store and buy items from YOU. Not such a bad perspective, right? Making your site SEO-friendly, you attract visitors and buyers for free! Well, let’s make this dream come true and set up SEO for your dropshipping store to lift it as high as possible on the search engine results page.
E-commerce SEO at the very beginning
Yes, you have to take care of SEO from the moment of your store creation! As you remember, you needed to make sure that your niche has a potential for SEO, and it was the most important aspect that should have impacted your niche choice. We’ve already covered this topic in our article.
We recommend using SEO tools available with the AliDropship plugin. To apply SEO settings on your WordPress site, go to AliDropship => Settings => SEO. Activate this option to generate sitemap.xml and robots.txt files.
A sitemap is important because it tells search engines about the content that you have on your site and how often it’s updated. It makes it easier for Google to index your site and show it on search results. A robots.txt is a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of the site you don’t want to be accessed by search engine crawlers.
Enable SEO metadata fields and SEO metadata generator. It will make your site more SEO friendly. Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions are hidden text elements on your page that are used to describe your site on search engines. These elements are meant to give a small taste of what your site is about to people who have come across your page by way of search engines.
If you built your store with WooCommerce add and enable Yoast SEO plugin. You can find it in the Plugins section among the recommended ones.
Let’s set the name which will be shown on the Google results page.
Go to Appearance – Customize and choose ‘Site identity option’.
The below instructions are for a WooCommerce site.
Site structure
Besides the aspects above, you have to pay attention to your site structure. It should be well-organized, logical and easy to access – otherwise, search engines will be disoriented and you won’t get as high rankings as you could have got.
Moreover, site structure is important for your site visitors as well. If it is not clear and simple, visitors get puzzled and close your site page right away. Google definitely isn’t for such customers’ behavior, so it will decrease your ranking. Oh no!
What can you do to encourage visitors to stay on your site as long as possible?
- Build your site architecture with the relevant keywords so that visitors could easily find the desired items on your site. You’ll learn where to find keywords below.
- Create a logical hierarchy of categories to improve navigation within your store. It would be great if you could make any product page only 3 clicks away from the home page: create several unique product categories, maybe some subcategories, and you won’t lose your customers.
- Always stay tuned and add up-to-date popular items to your store (it’s not about SEO but still). If people see much cool stuff – they don’t want to leave your site and immerse into an exciting choice between one cool thing and another.
You don’t want your customers to get lost on your site, do you? Then always remember about logic site structure.
Keywords
Why on Earth do we need them? Well, for lots of things:
- to help search engines better index your site
- to make a clear structure of your store
- to name products and categories
- to make client’s search for stuff easier on your site
- to pick new items and categories that are favorable for SEO
- to get more orders without any extra costs!
Where can you find keywords?
- Wikipedia – yes, it really can be of some use.
Let’s imagine you sell earrings. Search for earrings page on Wikipedia.
So, feel free to pick several keywords from such an article! But remember that Wikipedia is not a panacea and it might not work for some niches. So, let’s move to the next more reliable source of keywords.
- Google Keyword Planner – This tool suggests new keywords related to the products you sell and shows the average number of monthly searches. So, you can see if the keywords have enough potential in advance.
Go to Google Keyword Planner (you’ll have to sign in or create a Google Adwords account), type up to three keywords (products that you sell) and enjoy the list of related keywords. Probably you’ll need to scroll down a bit.
Note that you should choose keywords not only with the biggest amount of searches – less frequent keywords will be of much use too since they’re less competitive and more specific. They show what exactly people search for – so, using such keywords on your site will increase the conversion rate.
- Google autocomplete function
It’s simple: just open google.com, type your keyword and – voila! – Google will show you some nice ideas.
- Related search field
It’s even simpler! Just search for your keyword – in our case we searched for “earrings” – and take a look at the bottom of the search page.
- AliExpress autocomplete function
You upload and sell products from the Aliexpress platform, so, it’s pretty logical to look up what kinds of products are offered there. And you may find new ideas for possible keywords at the same time.
Hooray! You gathered some keywords for your site! Let’s use them.
E-commerce SEO of a product page
When you upload products from AliExpress, you automatically import all the text descriptions, photos, reviews, etc., which means your store content is not unique. If you fix this, you’ll boost your store performance without any additional expenses.
What to do?
- Edit product names
AliExpress product names are too long, weird and sometimes sound like a dark magic spell. We definitely don’t need that nonsense in your store.
In the item’s title, simply leave the most important 3-4 words that contain the category keyword and item main features to help your visitor understand what the product is like.
- Edit product URLs
So, we’ve changed the product name to a more or less SEO-friendly one. Now we need to transform the URL: long and ugly, it will be unwelcomed by search engines.
- Write product descriptions
This is absolutely essential and, according to our experience, people really read them! Write 2-3 sentences telling about your product, mention its benefits, list its features in bullet points. Don’t forget to include the keyword once or twice. This text should make the product even more appealing for your customer, so, make it unique and – please! – don’t copy it from AliExpress or other sites.
- Make ALT-tags for each image
If you include any images in the product description, don’t forget to add an Image Title Attribute with a keyword! This info really has some value for search engines, and it’s easy to add.
- Import clients’ reviews
Positive reviews increase new visitors’ loyalty and let them know more about the product – that’s the main reason why we import them. However, there’s one more thing – search engines see reviews as a unique content that is regularly updated – and they really appreciate it.
- Add the keywords you found to the Keyword field of the product in the SEO section.
