SEO for Dropshipping Stores: 7 Ways to Increase Your Traffic

Getting FREE traffic is the dream of every dropshipping store owner, but not every dropshipping store is SEO-Optimized.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has the potential to increase your revenue, sales, conversions, and make you an authoritative brand in your niche.

According to Semrush, 37.5% of all traffic to ecommerce sites comes from SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

The best thing about SEO is it's a constant source of traffic without paying a single dime.

SEO can help customers find you.

Having a dropshipping store without SEO is leaving money on the table.

Integrating SEO with other marketing activities has a twofold benefit: it increases the effectiveness of these marketing activities while also improving your organic search visibility.

This saves you time and money and brings down your cost per conversion. 

So, let's start with 7 ways to increase your organic traffic for your dropshipping store!

What is ecommerce SEO? Is it important for your dropshipping store?

Well, ecommerce SEO, or SEO in general, has the same definition and user intention behind it.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of generating more organic (i.e., free, natural) traffic from sites like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Implementing proper SEO techniques can make your website a reputable and authoritative website in your niche, and can increase brand loyalty.

Let's take a look who shows up when you search Google for any product or service.

For this example, we will take men's hoodies.

As you can see, many websites rank for the keywords 'men's hoodies'.

Implementing SEO results in your page to be searched and ranked in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

SEO plays an essential part as research shows 89% of the consumers surveyed use internet search engines to make purchasing decisions.

So, if you ask me, I'd say SEO is as important as marketing in the long term.

1. Keyword research

The first step to implementing SEO in your dropshipping store is figuring out which keywords you want to rank for.

Now, for example, everyone that has a clothing store can't rank 1st for the keywords 'men's hoodies', right?

That's where keyword research comes in.

Keyword research is the process by which you research popular search terms people type into search engines like Google and include them strategically in your content so that your content appears higher on a search engine results page.

You can find keywords that people are typing in Google and get ranked for those keywords with the help of some basic tricks or using some free tools such as Ubersuggest.

You can use Google to find related and long-tail keywords with the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension.

Also, you can target these keywords in order to eliminate competition as a long-tail keyword has way less competition than a normal keyword.

A longer keyword has fewer search queries and traffic but higher conversions.

Including keywords in your product description strategically can help search engines index your pages in Google faster as your product description contains keywords that people are searching on Google for.

You can also use Ubersuggest if you have some experience with SEO because Ubersuggest can be a bit overwhelming but it is a great tool.

Just go to Ubersuggest and type in your keyword and click on "Keyword ideas".

I personally target keywords that have a SD (Search Difficulty) of less than 25.

As you can see, the SD for the keywords 'men's hoodies' is 75, and I'm 99% sure as a startup ecommerce store, you cannot rank (Top 10) for the keywords 'men's hoodies'.

If you are just beginning, I highly suggest you read the full-in-depth Keyword research guide from Backlinko.

2. Competitors' keyword research

Knowing what keywords your competitors are ranking for is important.

If your competitors are putting in effort ranking for those keywords, there must be something you are missing.

Competitors' keyword research is relatively easy as you can do this with any tool such as Moz or Ubersuggest.

We can start our competitor's keyword research by going to Moz Domain Analysis and typing your website domain.

If you scroll down to the bottom, you'll be able to find Top Search Competitors.

Now, if your top search competitor is too big, like in my case Shopify, AliExpress, Oberlo, and BigCommerce, then you don't have to research them, at least not when you are starting out.

But you can go with the small competitors, and put their domain in Moz domain analysis, then you can find their competitors (because you'd all have the same niche).

Once you have at least five competitors in your niche, go to Ubersuggest and type their domain into Ubersuggest.

You can now see all the keywords that they are ranking for and have an idea of what works in your niche and what does not.

If you want to learn more about competitors' keyword research, I highly recommend reading this article from Wordstream.

3. Website speed

Believe it or not, but website speed indirectly affects SEO negatively, and that's the last thing you want when starting out, right?

A slow website means a higher bounce rate.

When visitors visit a website and the website takes more than 3-4 seconds, your bounce rate can go up to 90% according to Google /SOASTA research.

Let's be real, no one wants to wait more than 2 seconds to load a website.

Website speed is what interests your customers.

If it takes forever to load, you've already lost half of the potential customer's interest, and that's not a good start.

Here's how to ensure your website is at its top speed:

• Check your website speed by Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom, and GTMetrix. Find out the results and problems with your website
• Use AMP Pages (Accelerated Mobile Pages) that load within 0.5 secs (but do your research if you want AMP or not)
• Compress Images
• Use a fast and responsive Wordpress/Shopify theme.

These are just the basics that you should use on any website on Wordpress/Shopify to improve page speed.

You can read how to score a perfect 100% on Google Speed Test to learn more.

Or you can read my other article here that contains 7 ways to increase the speed of your Shopify store (Shopify Speed Optimization).

4. Website structure

Ecommerce website structure is an important aspect of SEO.

It not only helps search engines to find all the pages, but it makes the website user-friendly too.

A proper website structure will also optimize your website's speed because a proper structure requires fewer codes.

And Google, or other search engine bots, can easily navigate through your website and index it quickly.

A great example of proper ecommerce website structure is:

Ecommerce websites tend to have more pages than classic websites, and if you don't have a proper structure from the start, you'll be easily lost in the future.

A great way to implement this structure on your website is to remember that almost 99% of your pages should be three clicks away from the homepage.

Also, if you already have pages that are live on Google and you want to categorize them properly, make sure your old URL is a 301 redirect to the new URL or else you'll lose ranking or Domain/Page authority too.

5. On-page SEO

Now that you've done your keyword & competitors' keyword research, it's time to use those keywords on your page.

On-page SEO is basically optimizing each individual page for SEO.

Here are a few tips on how to do on-page SEO with the keywords you found.

• Place the keywords you found in Title, Sub-headers, Meta Descriptions, Image Alt Tags, Descriptions & URL.
• Write at least a 1000 word product description and include the applicable keywords in it, but avoid unnecessary keyword stuffing which Google may find suspicious.
• Your product page should contain all the information like Shipping, Returns, Terms of service, etc. 
• Use influential words to increase CTR.

If you want to learn more about what to include on your product page, then I suggest reading this article here (written by this guest post author!).

You can refer to my blog post product description that sells to have an in-depth idea about what your product page should contain and what it should not.

If you want to learn more about this, check out the Aherf's Guide to a complete ecommerce On-Page SEO

Note: Want to know how to make your product pages even better? Check out ConvertMate 一 a Shopify app that uses AI to optimize product pages, improve SEO, and track customer behavior.

6. Content marketing

Now, I think content marketing is one of the most crucial parts of SEO for ecommerce.

Content marketing will bring a constant source of organic traffic that will help you establish a connection with your audience.

SEO and Content marketing both go hand in hand.

Both are required to start ranking on search engines.

Content marketing for ecommerce stores contains three steps:

• Keyword research
• Creating content around your products' niche
• Content marketing

Now, as the keyword research part is already over, two steps are remaining.

1. Creating content around your products niche

Creating a blog around your products or your niche, in general, can really help you get organic traffic & boost your conversions.

When people are looking for a product to purchase, they always start with searching it on Google.

When you have a lot of content around that product or niche, chances are, your website will start to rank for those audiences.

Once people land on your blog and read about the product, how it helps, and so on, the chances of those visitors converting into customers are high because you just provided them some free value.

You can start with writing a 600-800 word blog every week and go skyscraper technique as you go on.

A great example is Petsmart.

2. Content Marketing

Once you've started to write awesome pieces of content, it's time to market that content to the relevant audience.

SEO takes time.

You can't write one article and expect 1000s of people to be reading that article on the same day or even month.

To start getting some traction, you can market your content personally by joining communities on Reddit and Facebook.

Let's say you have a Pet product.

Once you write some blogs around that niche, you can join pet communities on, for example, Reddit.

Or you can join Pet groups on Facebook.

You can share your blogs with those communities every once in a while.

Now don't spam them with your content as soon as you join them, but take some time to connect with users, and then you can share your content.

Doing this will help you gain some traction at the start.

7. Link Building

Link building is one of the major factors that affects SEO directly and determines your rankings.

For search engines, links are votes that your website has good content, and the more links, the higher your DA (domain authority) and rankings.

But link building too has some gray areas, and performing Black/Grey Hat link building techniques can lead to Google penalizing you.

Here are some of the White Hat techniques you can use:

• Guest blogging
• Broken link building
• Content marketing with emails

Link building is a chapter on its own, and if you are interested in learning more about link building, I would suggest you check out the Article shared by Moz.

Conclusion

So, those are the 7 ways to do SEO for your dropshipping store.

Doing SEO at the start can be a bit overwhelming.

And sure, you can hire agencies to do it for you, but doing it yourself at the beginning will give you an idea of the ins and outs of SEO.

So, in the future, if you hire an agency, you'll know what results they've brought in and if they are doing the right kind of SEO; there are many agencies out there who do black hat SEO that can lead to Google penalizing you in the future.

Making SEO your priority from the start will give great results in the future, and this way, you don't have to only focus on paid advertising.

I hope this guide was helpful to you, and good luck with getting free traffic to your dropshipping store!

If you want to learn more ways to get free traffic to your dropshipping store, then I suggest reading this article here.

About the Author: Pratik Patel is a Digital Marketer & E-commerce expert that sells Individuals & startups grow their ecommerce business.