Your family and friends know a lot about your business. People who use social media get pictures and hashtags every day. You’ve even set up email marketing to keep customers interested and get them to buy from you again.
Now that you’ve done all of this, you’re looking for ways to find potential customers and get more people to visit your website. This search made me wonder, “What if I looked into SEO strategies for dropshipping?” Maybe I can find tips to improve my search engine ranking for keywords related to my best-selling products.”
If this sounds like you, you’re on the right track. SEO for dropshipping stores is an important part of how you market your website online. Most dropshipping sites don’t pay much attention to SEO, which is good news for you. These dropshippers are missing out on a chance to make money online, which is the whole point of their site.
Affiliate marketing websites are a great place to look for an example of a business that does well because of SEO. Since the average affiliate program payout is between 5 and 30%, dropshippers may have a better chance of making money. With each new customer you get on your dropshipping website, you may be able to make more money.
Oh, and you’ll be able to keep selling the new products in the future.
Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Some of you may have heard of SEO, but you might not know what it is. Let’s explain it quickly.
What does SEO mean?
SEO means “optimization for search engines.” It is a type of online marketing that requires you to do a lot of things to get to the top of the search results. Search engine optimization includes things like making sure your keywords are optimized, making sure your website is technically sound, building backlinks to your business, and making sure your website has good content.
We’ll talk about all of these things in the rest of the article, so get ready to get serious about SEO.
What is SEO for a business that sells items online?
A dropshipping store is a unique website that sells products online but doesn’t have to worry about keeping track of inventory. This means you can spend more time making web pages that are good for SEO. This list has descriptions of products and categories, as well as blog posts that lead people to pages where you can make a sale.
The definition of “SEO dropshipping” isn’t that different from “traditional SEO,” but it does include strategies that take the best ideas from affiliate marketing SEO and e-commerce SEO. When these two types come together in a beautiful SEO strategy, that’s when you see results.
What we want to do with this article and by the time we’re done talking about this topic. When you’re done reading, you’ll know everything there is to know about Google search. You’ll be ready to take on the internet and get people to buy from your online store.
Okay, that’s a big goal, but we have high hopes for what you’ll learn and what you’ll be able to do after that.
Google SEO vs Google Ads
If you haven’t started your SEO campaign yet, it might be because you can’t decide whether to spend time on organic search marketing or Google ads. There isn’t much of a choice between the two, since they go well together.
There are some low-cost search terms that are worth the few cents each PPC ad click costs. There will also be very expensive keywords that only need 3–6 months of SEO work to get to the first page. Big win here!
On the other hand, it may be very hard to rank for important keywords for your dropshipping business. In this case, the best thing to do is pay for the ads while you keep working on SEO.
Should an SEO investment be made by a dropshipping business?
Yes. Invest in SEO if you want your dropshipping business to get the most traffic for the least amount of money. Even so, we use the word “invest” in a very general way. You don’t have to spend a lot of money right away to get started.
As with many business tasks, start with the basics. Follow a crawl-walk-run plan if you are new to dropshipping or SEO.
Investing is about more than just money; it’s also about time. The big question is whether you will learn SEO on your own or hire a company to do it for you. Let’s look at what’s good and bad about each one.
Learn SEO on your own.
Reiterating the benefit of having a dropshipping store: you don’t have to keep track of inventory or manage the people who keep track of inventory. But you could run a dropshipping business on the side while you work a 9-to-5 job or go to school. So, you should think about whether you want to learn SEO on your own.
If you don’t have time, I want to warn you about something. Don’t stop learning just because you don’t have enough time to learn and use the basics of SEO. If you want to be sure that the SEO expert you hire will do a good job, you will need to know a lot about the subject.
Hire an SEO company.
You can hire a freelancer to work on your SEO, but we strongly suggest that you look for a reputable SEO agency. The reason is that at first, you need more than just SEO actions; you also need an SEO strategy so you can get started in the right direction.
Also, it’s rare to find a freelancer who has all the skills and knowledge a website needs to do well in the search engines. Most of the time, an agency’s SEO services will include everything in a single package. By making a plan, you can make sure that your SEO efforts go in the right direction and don’t take you somewhere you didn’t want to go.
SEO Steps for a Site That Dropships
You should now know that SEO has a lot of different parts. You know that it’s not as easy as 1-2-3 rank. You know how SEO for dropshipping websites works in the real world.
Now, let’s get into the details of what you or a team of SEO experts need to do for your dropshipping website to do well online.
Research on Keywords
Before choosing your dropshipping website name and catalog, you should have done some research on the products you want to sell. Keyword research takes as much time, if not more, than looking for dropshipping opportunities in a certain niche.
There are many ways to do keyword research, but to get started, we recommend using Google’s keyword planner. There are better keyword planning tools, which we will talk about later, but it’s always a good idea to look under the hood of Google.
There are a lot of articles that will tell you to start with easy long-tail keywords, but this isn’t always good advice. Google is giving more weight to authority on a specific topic, so your website needs to cover conversations that are talked about a lot, giving it a position of authority on the topic.
In the end, the keywords you look for will depend on the Google dropshipping SEO plan you set up.
Website Development
Once you have a plan and know which keywords you want to focus on, you can move on to your dropshipping website. The first step is to choose an e-commerce platform that has everything you need to be successful with SEO. We’ve set aside a section of this article just for Shopify, but WordPress and BigCommerce are also SEO-friendly e-commerce platforms that make SEO easy.
No matter what e-commerce platform you choose, make sure it has the technical SEO features you need to get the most traffic. Here are some things to look for.
Meta Tags: The platform you choose should let you change the meta titles and descriptions for each page.
Speed of Website: Make sure that all pages of your website load quickly from the start and stay that way. You can do this by setting up a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and optimizing images to be as small as possible without losing quality.
Custom URLs: The URLs of your website should be able to be changed so that you can include keywords in the title.
Easy Blog Integration: Content should be easy to post, and you should be able to upload images and other media that make the page better.
Content Marketing
Your category and product pages on your dropshipping website will only do well if you have a good content marketing plan. The more high-quality content you make about the products you sell, the more Google will see you as an expert on that topic. This is a good way to compete with big online stores that have more domain authority than your brand.
Content marketing is more than just putting up a blog post. We should think of content as any page on your website, in the end. This includes your home page, your categories, and every product description on your site.
Most websites make the mistake of having too much content and putting too much emphasis on being thought leaders. It’s important to remember that when people use Google, they’re looking for answers, not followers. Keep most of your content about thought leadership on social media and in your email marketing.
Link Building
Link building is when someone writes text that links back to your website. It is a very important SEO ranking factor. A dropshipping site can get backlinks to their site in a lot of different ways.
TIP: One of the best dropship hacks is to find blog posts that talk about the “best, top, or product ideas” for your type of product. Reach out to the blog’s creator and tell them about your website, the product you sell, and what makes you unique.
Ask them if your product would work well with the article they are writing. If they say yes, you’ll get more potential customers and a link back to that page. Win-win!
Social Signals
If you started a social media marketing campaign but aren’t seeing the results you want, here’s why you should keep going. SEO experts say that you need social signals for your search rankings. With brand mentions and, hopefully, website traffic, social signals show Google that your website is important in real time.
More important than likes and followers is being active on social media. It’s a place where your customers (and search engines) can get a visual sense of your brand.
TIP: Use snippets from your blog posts to make posts for social media sites as part of your content marketing. Then, add images from social media to your product descriptions and blog posts to make the experience more interesting.
SEO Tips for Beginners
Even though we’ve already talked about a lot, here are a few more SEO tips to keep us going.
Website Links: Your site’s internal and external links tell Google a lot about what it is about. Google can learn more about your business from the anchor text and where you tell people to go next. Make sure you create internal and external links that are different but still on topic.
Set up reporting so you can get real feedback: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Google analytics and Google search console are great because you can learn a lot from them without spending a dime. Just send in your sitemaps, and Google will take care of the rest. Finish this!
Get rid of all the thin content: Make sure every page on your website that is indexed has at least 300 words. Most articles should have at least 1000 words, but we find that most need between 1500 and 2500 words. Even though category and product descriptions may be shorter, you should always do your best to add lots of details to each page you publish.
Build for the search engines, but make sure the site works best for people. Use schema markup to make it easy for a search engine to figure out what a page is about. Use titles and tags that make people want to click on your ads. Then, make the articles fun to read by adding images, font sizes that are easy to read, and short paragraphs.
Don’t Forget About Image SEO: Google’s lens keeps getting better and better. SEO is no longer just about words; images are also important. If your product, category, and article pages don’t have images, you could lose a lot of traffic.
Prevent Duplicate Content: Duplicate content is a common problem on ecommerce sites, which leads to what we call “content cannibalization.” Make sure that your site isn’t competing with itself for search rankings. Optimize each page for a single main topic and only pay attention to that. If you can’t avoid having duplicate content, use canonical links on the pages that rank well.
How to Make Shopify Better for SEO?
Does Shopify help with SEO? Yes, and Shopify’s tools for search engine optimization keep getting better. Before the pandemic, you had to figure out how to set up SEO on Shopify on your own. Since then, you don’t have to. Now, you can add plug-ins like WordPress, like Yoast SEO, that take care of many steps that used to take a lot of time.
Instead, you should focus on how to optimize SEO for Shopify when you are using this platform. What are the best add-ons? What’s new in Shopify’s online store? In the Shopify SEO guide, they answer many of these questions.
Tools to help your dropshipping store with SEO
There are more tools in the SEO field than you could ever use. But the right tools will save you a lot of time and energy by getting you off to a good start with SEO and helping you gain traction quickly.
Tool for Keyword Research
Companies like Ahrefs have keyword tools that go well beyond Google Keyword Planner. These tools help you find keyword gaps where your competition is missing out, long-tail keywords with different rankings, and questions that people ask.
Tools to Help Write Content
One of the best things to happen to on-page SEO optimization is the rise of content writing tools. These tools make it much easier to write content and make sure we cover every aspect of a subject. Content writing tools show you what your product description or blog post should say about the most important things.
One of the biggest problems with SEO is fixed by these tools. Content briefs can be made with the help of writing tools like Surfer.io. We can give these content briefs to other writers so that they know what to expect about the tone of voice and important article details.
AI Writing Helpers
Content marketing is all about AI writing tools, but people often have the wrong idea about what they can do. Many people think that these tools will write an article or description of a product for you, which you can then publish. Whether they like it or not, they won’t be able to make better content than a great SEO writer.
But you can keep the digital pen moving and avoid writer’s block by using writing assistants. AI writing assistants like Jasper.ai generate thousands of words on a topic that you can look over, edit, and organize in a way that makes your writing job easier.
Dropshipping Integration with Dropship Corporation
We hope this article about SEO for dropshipping websites was interesting to you. Sign up for our newsletter to get more information about dropshipping. Better yet, sign up for a free trial to see for yourself how easy Dropship Corporation makes it to add hundreds of thousands of products to your dropshipping website.
