6 Best Practices to Manage your SEO

While SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization in technical terms, SEO management is the process of developing, implementing, and overseeing strategies that improve your website’s placement on search engine results pages (SERPs). For e-commerce business owners, SEO management is a roadmap to increased online visibility. You can set up SEO on your business website by using proven techniques such as keyword optimization and backlinks. Doing so helps the website to attract more organic traffic from search engine queries.

Here are six of the best practices you can follow when handling SEO management for your own site:

1. Monitor and Improve your Technical SEO

You can deploy smart tools on your website to monitor and improve technical SEO on the site. If you use free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can easily analyze the state of your website’s technical SEO. Google Search Console can help you identify website errors, indexing issues, and potential security problems on the site.

If you can carefully organize and optimize your website’s technical SEO, it can help improve the user experience (UX) while making it easier for search engines to index and rank your pages at the same time. To improve your website’s functionality however, you must focus on improving the following four key elements of its technical SEO:

Site Speed: You can improve the loading speed of your site by optimizing images, removing unnecessary plug-ins or apps, and hosting it with a reliable and reputable platform.

Mobile-friendliness: You can optimize your website for mobile devices by using a responsive page design or template that can recognize mobile visitors and cater reliably to their experience.

Site Architecture: E-commerce business owners can improve their site structure if they use a consistent URL structure and organize their sites with a clear internal linking structure.

Site Security: This is hugely important for business reputation and protection. You can increase the security of your site through some basic best practices. Simple practices like ensuring your website has an SSL certificate that authenticates the site’s identity are important. If in place, it creates an encrypted connection as a security layer between it and a website visitor.

In addition to the foregoing, it is advisable to continually optimize your e-commerce website’s metadata. You can use an HTML format that helps website users and search engine algorithms better understand your content. It helps too to focus on using clear phrases and relevant keywords in your web page title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, and alt text for images on your web pages.

2. Maintain your Website Content for Freshness and Accuracy

If you invest valuable time and effort into creating quality content for your website, it is not helpful if you don’t publish it. It is what you publish that attracts search engines. Therefore, you must endeavor to keep your content current and relevant at all times. This is crucial for maintaining strong search rankings and providing value to your customers.

For effectiveness, you can approach your content updates in two ways. Firstly, always try to diligently monitor page performance. This will help you to quickly notice any sudden drops in rankings or traffic. If a previously successful page starts losing visibility, it likely needs a refresh. You can then check to see if new competitors are outranking you with more comprehensive or current content. Next is to ensure your page still follows Google’s best practices.

Secondly and very important as well, you can try proactive approach to content monitoring. Check for pages with outdated statistics, discontinued products, or references to brands that no longer exist then update them. Refreshing your content this way before rankings decline considerably is always a very good strategy.

3. Monitor your Site’s SEO Performance Using Key Metrics 

To monitor your site SEO performance, you can deploy smart SEO tools. These tools will help you to monitor quantifiable metrics. Such data can help you to gauge your site’s performance and progress against set goals. Following are some of the most relevant KPIs for SEO management you can rely on:

Average Position: This metric helps to track how your pages rank on average for specific keywords.

Search Visibility. This is measured in percentages. It represents how much your website appears for specific keywords compared to competitors.

Impressions: This metric provides you the number of times your pages appear in search results for relevant queries.

Organic CTR: Organic click-through-rate measures how many users who see your listing actually click through to your site.

Traffic from Organic Search: This metric measures all traffic coming to your site through organic search.

4. Broaden your Backlink Strategy

If you carefully build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites, it signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and valuable. Such links not only generate direct referral traffic but also help improve your search rankings. You can rely on smart SEO tools like Ahrefs’s Backlink Checker or SEOptimer’s Backlink Checker to see who’s currently linking to your website. Tools like Semrush’s Backlink Gap can help you discover new link opportunities from relevant publications in your industry. You can also be deliberately creating valuable content that other websites naturally want to reference. Valuable content like proprietary research, original surveys, and industry studies tend to attract backlinks. You can effectively use these types of content as your “link magnets” to attract backlinks to your website.
 
Good content creators can earn valuable backlinks as guest bloggers. This is by way of contributing expert insights to industry publications and monitoring current events in your business niche. If your content offers an expert source for journalists and other writers, it can be another good source of valuable backlinks.

5. Identify Content Gaps and Expand your Content Accordingly

Your SEO management can be considered successful if you continuously monitor your competition as they publish new content and target new keywords. This helps you to stay on top of trending topics in your industry with a view to capturing spikes in search traffic. Anytime you spot these opportunities, you can create new content or enhance existing pages to fill the identified gaps. Most times, by creating a comprehensive how-to guide with helpful visuals on such trending topics, you can organically drive qualified traffic from related searches directly to your web store.

6. Regularly Generate a Comprehensive SEO Report

You can regularly generate a comprehensive SEO report by using a combination of free and paid SEO Tools. This report comprehensively collects insights and data about your e-commerce website’s search engine performance. Compiled data from these performance metrics can then be used to organize and analyze the following key areas:

On-Page Optimization: On-page SEO reports cover key aspects of your website, like metadata optimization and content quality.

Referral Traffic and Engagement: This report helps to evaluate analytics related to user behavior, engagement, and referral traffic to better understand your website visitors.

Backlink Profile: This report covers link-building metrics about referring domains, acquired links, and the quality of links based on domain authority.

Website Analytics: This report helps to measure factors like site speed and top landing pages to better understand your site’s structure and technical SEO.

Keyword Performance: This report helps to collect data about keyword performance using KPIs like keyword rankings, keyword difficulty, and CTR.

Google SEO Rankings: This report helps to track your website’s performance in relation to Google’s ranking factors.

Local SEO Performance: Relevant for mostly local brick-and-mortar stores. So, if your business has a brick-and-mortar storefront, you can analyze local keywords and performance on local search queries related to your industry and localized area particularly on Google Business Profile.