EC - SEO and Analytics [LESSON]

SEO and Analytics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Analytics

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of getting your website seen by potential customers. To do that, you must target the correct customers. 90% of people will research online before purchasing a product.  75% of those people will never go off the first page of the browser search, so you need your website to be on the first page. Most of those people will choose one of the first three results that are not an ad. How do you get your site to be one of the top three? You must do a great job of knowing your target market - the people that are going to be looking for what you are selling, but you also need to go through the search engine optimization process. When building your e-commerce site, you will put keywords in the metadata (in the head section of the page); these keywords are what the browser is looking for, so they need to be very specific to your site and what your target customers are likely to put in the browser's search window. The site content must be good and specific to what the target customer needs.  There is a saying "content is king," which means that the most important thing on your site is that you have excellent content. Your coding must be good, as search engines will not pull up sites that are not using validated code. If you can get other sites to link to your site, this is like votes for your site and search engines will rate your site higher for the number of backlinks to your site from other sites. Visitor tracking is not only tracking the number of visits to your site but also tracking what they're doing on your site. There are many visitor tracking services, including Google Analytics, which has free and paid versions. The success of your site depends on visitors, the more visitors you have the better your SEO. You can get your search engine results page (SERP) from Google. This tells you how many visitors you had to your site and much more. 

The point of SEO is to do things to get your site rated as high as possible, so when potential customers search for a site that sells what you sell, your site will come up on the first page of results, hopefully the top three.

Part of making sure your site is ranking high is to keep it updated. You must constantly be analyzing your site for issues and broken links. Broken links will cause your SEO ranking to drop. 

Free-Pexels: https://images.pexels.com Links to an external site. from Bing "Online Pictures" in Word – Creative Commons Only.

[CC BY 4.0] UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED | IMAGES: LICENSED AND USED ACCORDING TO TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION