If you’re selling building products online there are several things you can do to help your customers to buy and help your search engine rankings at the same time.
Start by using the words that your customer will use. Yes, you might have your own jargon and especially in the area of the construction industry you work in, you will probably have your own jargon. But all the time there will be new entrants into that business or industry space. They won’t know your special language. So don’t alienate them. Think – what words would they use to search for your products? Use those words in your meta data, H1 and H2 tags and description text. Also, use those words in page content and product descriptions and if you can, for file names too.
Then build a sales pitch which compels people to buy. Explain why they might need your products. Don’t make them guess. Give them all the reasons, help them on their journey to purchase – virtually hold their hand and persuade them gently.
Web pages are cheap, so there’s no excuse for not giving full technical details, excellent descriptions and brilliant photos. If it helps, use diagrams, different angle views. Think to yourself: if I wanted to buy this product and I knew nothing about it, what information would I want? What might stop me buying? Then give every single possible piece of genuine information about your product. I don’t mean, say it’s the best thing since sliced bread – no-one needs to believe you. Instead use the space you have to explain everything you can – assume nothing. The more optimised images you have on your web site, the more opportunity you have to add alt tags and these are just what the search engine robots are looking for.
I know this only scratches the surface but it’s common sense, simple stuff really, if you do the best for your potential customers, you’ll also find you’re doing the best for your search rankings too.
I just wanted to highlight the above point: ‘Start by using the words that your customer will use. Yes, you might have your own jargon and the industry that you work in will probably have its own jargon. But all the time there will be new entrants into that business or industry.’ So how do you know what the keywords or phrases are that your customers are using to find your products or website? Using your analytics tool view the KEYWORD report and have a look at the ‘long tail’ keywords. These are the keywords which appear at the bottom end of the top 50 keywords. Don’t just look at the top 10 or the top 25. Look at the top 50 and concentrate on finding hidden gems in the BOTTOM half of the table. These are the keywords which your customers use to find your site and will contain very specific words and terms. Traffic maybe smaller but these are the ones you should concentrate on as part of your SEO mix. You maybe surprised by the choice of words/phrases used but they will contain phrases or words which you did not even think of. They will also contain words which describe your products and this will tell you what the industry use as jargon for your product(s). I’ll give you an example, my employers (construction industry) sell geocellular drainage tanks (complicated stuff) and to an average Joe Smith these tanks essentially look like milk crates stacked together to form a tank to hold surface water. Now, when i looked at my ‘long tail’ keywords i found out that my visitors had been using the phrase ‘milk crates to hold water’ in Google to find our product. But the keywords ‘milk crates’ was nowhere to be found on our site. By adding the keywords into the H1 and H2 tags was saw an increase in traffic. We also found out the ‘milk crates’ was an industry term/jargon for our product. Keep a close eye on the bottom half of your keyword report, this is where the hidden gems lie.
This is brilliant point well put and a great regular exercise to perform to. The long tail will definitely identify some hidden gold. Thanks Pritesh.