Ecommerce can be one of the most competitive fields out there, with so many different types of stores with different budgets, sizes, and market control. It can be tough to gain visibility and establish your ecommerce store, but with the right SEO strategy, you can appear in the search engine results more often and close more sales on your website. Here are a few tips for making your SEO strategy work even harder for your business:

Know Your Audience

If you’re going to be upping your SEO game, one of the first things you need to do is distinguish is who your audience is and what they’re searching for online. According to SmartInsights, approximately 53 percent of internet users have made a purchase online this past year, which is a huge demographic to pull from. However, by honing down who your customers are, where they’re coming from, and what their needs are, you’ll be able to distinguish what type of keywords you should employ with greater ease.

Start by looking through your current SEO practices to see exactly which search terms are getting people to your store. Platforms like Shopify offer SEO insights that can give you a much more powerful look at what drives traffic to your page. Try to find commonalities between results, including if there are any items you might want to promote further. A good thing to note with SEO strategy is that if you’re able to reduce the number of steps someone has to take in order to reach you and place their order, the more likely they’ll be to close the deal. Keep strategies like this in mind when taking a birds-eye view of your customer experience, as it will help you improve targeted marketing considerably.

Invest In Content Marketing

A cornerstone of SEO, content marketing is the practice of getting people to your site via the keywords you implement throughout your website and on your blog. Although most people consider this to be a primary practice for B2B marketers, B2C entrepreneurs can benefit from the practice just as much. In fact, according to Hubspot, even with 43 percent of people admitting they skim blog posts, content marketing is still a strategy that drives traffic to web pages and can help you target and convert new leads.

If you’re looking to improve your content marketing strategy, the good news is that this can be much simpler than you’d think. Look at the current line of inventory in your store and choose which pieces you want to highlight or feature. Not only should you start showcasing these more often in your regular web copy, but you should also try to include them in your blog posts. While you don’t want to be “spammy” and just write a single word or key phrase over and over again, a little repetition isn’t necessarily a bad thing; however, the biggest focus you should have is coming up with quality content.

The more informative you can be — not just about your products or services but also about current industry trends and related topics of interest for your consumer base — the more your customers will begin to see you as an authority and look to you for insight. Finally, make sure that whenever you write, you link back to that content across social media to make your marketing campaigns run full circle.

Focus On Niche Keywords

As we mentioned above, your keyword search is going to be a crucial step in improving your SEO game. Again, it’s important to emphasize that the keywords you use matter; looking to niche items in your store that appeal most specifically to your target audience might be the best options to consider when choosing keywords.

Let’s say, for example, that you run a golf shop. While it can be hard to compete with the likes of big box stores for searchables like “golf clubs,” you may be able to reach the top of the Google search results for a particular brand’s nine iron, gloves, or golf shoes. Accessories like these are just as frequently searched as more generic terms (sometimes even more so), which presents your business with an opportunity to not only attract new leads, but the exact kind of customer looking for what you have to sell.

According to Kissmetrics, as much as 30 percent of your traffic could be coming from search, so you want to direct customers to your page as much as possible.

Don’t Forget About Mobile

Finally, one thing too many ecommerce owners overlook when developing their SEO strategy is that mobile is absolutely critical for your ecommerce shop’s success. According to TechCrunch, most people now spend an average of 5 hours per day on their phone, which has officially surpassed the amount of time spent behind a desktop or laptop computers.

First and foremost, if your site is not optimized for mobile, stop what you’re doing right now and make those improvements. Your customers are searching for you on mobile, and if they can’t get your site to process on their smartphone when they find you, they aren’t going to bother looking you up again on the desktop later. The buying process in your store should be seamless; anything less will result in empty carts.

What are some SEO strategies that have helped make your ecommerce shop more profitable? Comment with your insights below.