Today we want to take care of the big picture! How do I increase my ranking?
Set and implement SEO goals
The main goal is often: a top ranking, as high as possible on the Google search results page in your shop topic. But only one can be number 1. Then maximum free clicks flow to your own web shop and sales increase!
But it doesn't work without investment: interesting, unique and solidly prepared content has become indispensable, and these don't just happen. Content specialists provide text, images and video.
This also requires goals and strategies for SEO. For example, do you want to gain more new customers or reactivate existing customers or attack the competition, address specific customers in a region or wake up “hidden needs”? Depending on your goals there are different strategies available.
Change in the SEO world
The SEO environment has changed a lot over the past 20 years. In the early days of Google, the blunt accumulation of texts, links and keywords was enough.
- Today the complexity has increased so much, that an individual can no longer process the entire optimization environment in every detail.
- Nothing works without SEO tools. Shop operators can hire a professional SEO agency to develop their own SEO know-how and of course to improve the ranking.
- There are many Googles: more and more platforms on which users are searching. In addition to the classic Google search are Google image and video search optimizations. Social media and video portals play a major role, even for direct traffic, but also as a ranking factor for search engines.
- Diverse, well-made content on your own online shop is essential to give the search engine a reputation and signal domain authority. A lot of time and energy is invested here.
What is ranking?
Anyone who speaks of "ranking" as a search engine optimizer (SEO) means the position of a website or its subpages (URLs) within search results pages that a search engine throws out for a specific search query (keywords).
The search engine ranking can be influenced by various parameters: we call them ranking factors . A thing of intensive observation, research and reengineering from the SEO community, because Google and others keep themselves covered for obvious reasons.
These individual ranking factors are observed and optimized in the right direction by the SEO team with various measures and activities.
Essential ranking factors
| Ranking factor | Activities in search engine optimization for online shops |
|---|---|
| Number and quality of backlinks | Shop operator: organizes external, high-quality links to his shop from excellent, trustworthy websites. |
| Page information architecture | Smartstore: comes out-of-the-box with an excellent website structure. Expandable with out-of-the-box content management system, menu builder, page builder, widgets and by customized programming. |
| Internal linking | Smartstore: links in the product catalog are created out-of-the-box in the shop software. Further internal links can and should be set by the shop operator, for example from long texts in item descriptions. |
| Placement of keywords in text elements such as meta title, description, text, ... | Smartstore: automated and manually optimized by the shop operator / SEO agency. |
| Term optimization of the content in relation to other documents on the same topic (Proof and Relevant Terms, Topic / Content Cluster, WDF * IDF) | These optimizations require expert knowledge. Shop operators should use external tools and get at least support from content & SEO agency how to use them effectively. |
| URL structure | Smartstore: has a good URL structure out-of-the-box, can be adjusted manually, for example for extended image file paths in Media Manager. |
| Trust rating (Trust) | Google uses artificial intelligence to evaluate if shop customers trust the shop. Shop operators / SEO agencies increase this automatic value through serious, suitable, unique content. |
| Loading speed |
First and foremost, the hoster with a suitable hosting package. Smartstore:
For high-traffic scenarios like "1000 customers in the shopping cart at the same time" are out-of-the-box multi-server technologies available for content and search in the Smartstore Enterprise Edition. |
| Length of stay and bounce rate of visitors back to Google | Shop operator: optimized with good specification attributes for the shop search Mega Search Plus (from Premium Edition) and
fascinating shopping worlds with Page Builder (plugin in the marketplace). Especially the shop search on your own Page keeps new visitors engaged and away from clicking back to Google. It is therefore worth optimizing your own Shop search engine Mega Search Plus , for example through synonyms for the out-of-the-box "Did you mean?" Functionality. |
| Click-Through-Rate (CTR) from the search result pages to the webshop | Shop operator: with good landing pages that contain exciting content from the Smartstore Page Builder. These are then saved as Snippets are played out on Google, along with the page title and other things, as many Google users as possible need to click animate. The CTR can be found in the Google webmaster tool "Search Console". |
| other factors such as site traffic, authorship, timeliness ... | Shop operator / SEO agency, possibly also supported by measures such as SEA, affiliates and social media. |
Source: according to a list on Searchmetrics.com
Smartstore shop system: How to increase your ranking
There are powerful functions built into the shop system that make it easy for the shop operator to generate good SEO content: create, edit and keep up to date. Because optimization is never finished! Also in cooperation with specialized service providers. Technically everything is prepared in Smartstore.
Smartstore consistently integrates all basic SEO concepts in all areas so that search engines can use your content and present your shop in an excellent position.
Highly ranked mobile-friendly
With the consistently responsive design, Smartstore is perfectly designed for Google's mobile-friendly ranking.
Google attaches great importance to a view that is optimized for mobile devices. Therefore, Smartstore automatically recognizes the device with which your customers visit your shop.
At this point you don't have to adjust anything yourself. In tools like Page Builder, you or your agency can move in a targeted manner if there is a need for optimization and play out special mobile content. That pays into your ranking.
SEO in any language
If you want to reach a target group in different languages, Google requires certain settings so that your content is in in the local search results. With Smartstore this happens automatically.
A lang tag in the HTML code of your shop defines the language of the content. Your shops are in their own sub-folders that contain the
Country code (e.g. /en or /de) included.
This will keep you ahead of the game on Google internationally. You can easily store SEO content in any shop language, for products, product groups, menus and much more.
Smartstore ranking support
Here are some of the on-page SEO functionalities built into Smartstore that you can use to improve your ranking.
Speaking URLs
Smartstore creates SEO-friendly, self-explanatory URLs (web addresses). The basis for this is the product name that you provided with the article creation anyway. You will find the same principle in product groups.
Smartstore doesn't just use speaking URLs. Shop operators can access all SEO-related information (e.g. meta title). add or change meta descriptions or meta keywords, in any shop language.
In this way you or your agency can intervene deeply in the URL structure and the best ranking potential in this optimization area realize.
And because you can still see it: Web addresses today start with https://, so they need SSL encryption on your
Server. The Smartstore shop system has been supporting this consistently and perfectly for search engines for years.
Breadcrumbs
breadcrumb lines like “start page > Shoes > Men's shoes > Brand ABC ” are first of all a navigation aid in the web shop. Smartstore sets up these breadcrumbs so that they copy to the results pages and searchers 1: 1 unfiltered. That is why good breadcrumbs are so important and valuable for more traffic to your shop.
Rich Snippets
With rich snippets, pages in the shop also contain structured, machine-readable data. For example, on a recipe page this can be data such as ingredients, cooking times, baking temperature or calories. They supposedly do not affect the ranking on Google directly.
Your attractive content for free on Google search pages
But the content is displayed as a highly attractive graphical search result on Google. In this respect, it is extreme for shop owners Interesting. Who doesn't want to present themselves to the search engine with good structural data in the page code? More visitors will be on the pictures click on google. And every click also pays for your position on Google.
Smartstore creates the required data on the basis of information that shop operators store in the product catalog.
Meta Tags
Meta tags contain important information for Google and Google users. Some of them are shown directly to Google searchers. For all products, product groups and pages can contain individual information for the important meta titles and meta descriptions deposited will. In multilingual shops, of course, also in different languages. Dynamic meta tags also come with a Extra plugin from the Smartstore Marketplace feasible.
Canonical Tags
Search engines penalize duplicate content, so it is important to present unique content to the outside world. But sometimes it is not possible because the same content needs to be found in several places on the website. For example a shop product that is based on several Category pages must be entered.
Google says that it recognizes such cases as permissible itself. Shop owners can use Google's own webmaster tool "Search Console" check whether this is the case or whether there are any error messages. Or use canonical tags.
Canonical Tags protect against the punishment of the entire shop by Google. So mark your “Duplicate Content”.
Smartstore takes care of the technically clean display of canonical tags and links. Get copies in your header
one
Entry: in the HTML page source text, the original is linked in the Link element and with the attribute
rel=“canonical“ provided.
XML sitemap
Smartstore automatically creates a sitemap. Shop operators can influence the entries in the sitemap. Search engines read them out and determine the structure of your shop. This then influences the ranking by the fact that the search engine crawler is targeted at interesting pages can be directed, for example your content cluster.
Content is King
Content is King is a common phrase when it comes to search engine optimization. The Google search algorithm loves new content. It gives pages a higher ranking when they are current, relevant and most importantly when Deliver popular content to visitors.
News and blogs
News & amp; Blogs: Smartstore contains a system for managing news and blog entries. This makes it easier for shop administrators to continuously offer new content. News and blog tools are built into all Smartstore editions and are therefore freely available. The Content can not only be played on the blog page, but also be integrated into page builder stories.
Page Builder
The Page Builder stands for the simple construction of wonderful websites with just a click of the mouse, without the technical HTML code to touch. Today, non-developers can easily and quickly build and maintain a large number of attractive landing pages and content pages Up to date to save time. Faster than the competition allows!
Content cluster
You can also easily cluster your content, which means that the core topic of your online shop has a wide range of content in Providing “content clusters” : a network of attractive pages, images and texts. In other words, this is yours Content bank that pays for your ranking in the long term. Page Builder gives you the technical requirements to run this bank too create.
What does Page Builder offer for ranking?
- The Page Builder helps shop owners to create high-converting landing pages and content clusters . Here you can post your Implement keyword strategies in visually impressive shopping worlds.
- 100 percent responsive design from mobile devices to desktops.
- Texts, images, videos, animations: everything is beautiful and of the highest design quality.
- This includes all products and product groups from the articleatalog ready.
- Content sliders and YouTube videos are also embedded with one click.
- Independent elements can be added through individual programming.
A powerful system that pays for itself quickly. Page Builder is available as a commercial plugin for all Smartstore editions, so from of the free Community Edition, available in the Marketplace.
More media and image SEO
The new Media Manager (included exclusively from Professional Edition) allows you to deal with article and Content image files and videos.
Easily manage huge image stocks
- Manage thousands of media using a Windows-like interface.
- No more duplicate image content.
- Simply drag hundreds of images onto the
Uploadarea in the Media Manager - Forget technical tools like
FTPfor classic file uploads. - Use
ALTtags and titles for image SEO in all shop languages.
Output images only as large as they need to be
With the Tiny Image plugin, available exclusively from Premium Edition and Premium Flat, your uploaded images are automatically technically optimized for the shortest (search engine) loading times.
Only the data that are required for the respective image size are displayed. Only with small mini-preview images small Amount of data, and all of this fully automatically in the background. In addition, modern image formats (such as the very slim WebP from Google) recoded when it makes sense and is readable by the shop user browser.
All images in the system are consistently optimized when Tiny Image is activated: product images, article images in the blog and news up to Images in Page Builder Stories.
Video streaming
Moving images move your customers and the ranking on Google with them! Smartstore 4.1 supports the video trend in SEO. Product image galleries, page builder stories and the Media Manager administration tool have real & nbsp; video streaming out-of-the-box. This means that the shop customer can immediately jump to any point in the video.
Increase ranking with moving pictures
Videos are important for higher ranking when customers search specifically for videos on the subject of XYZ on Google. So will your video file found from your shop. You don't have to upload anything to YouTube for this. Simply host your videos on your shop.
Smartstore has SEO out-of-the-box
All in all, Smartstore offers the best conditions to achieve your SEO goals. Much of the way are Smartstore shop operator already done: Smartstore is prepared for SEO right from the start. Good luck!