When building a successful website, plenty of factors must be analyzed, considered and ultimately implemented properly. For those simply wanting to start a blog and share advice with the world, building a reliable stream of traffic is hard – but doable, considering that needed information is being provided to those in search of it.

When selling products or services, however, that difficulty increases. E-commerce brands all too often learn this the hard way, as nobody inherently knows where to find a product or service they may not yet know they need. This is why both marketing and SEO are critical to long-term e-commerce success.

Today, we’ll look at the basic building blocks for developing a successful e-commerce strategy that utilizes SEO.

Keyword Analysis

Before any e-commerce endeavor can produce results, it must find out who – and what – to target in search. With a seemingly unlimited number of potential targets, e-commerce websites that are new must pick their battles. Namely, the goal should be one of pinging links at SERPs that are not heavily-contested yet relevant to the website’s offerings.

Keyword analysis and research can help uncover which niches are worth targeting, and which are best left alone. As your brand grows and develops a much successful SEO strategy, reaching out to other niches will become more feasible.

Content Creation & Marketing

While the goal of any e-commerce website may be to sell products and services, those who focus solely on this generally have poor SEO outcomes. Especially true for those who are new on the scene, attracting visitors and generating favorable signals with search engines requires a steady flow of content that isn’t purely promotional.

Most online stores now manage blogs that report on a variety of related topics and current events, providing both the opportunity for meaningful content with which to advertise and the chance to plug products and services. Content is arguably the most valuable component of SEO – you can’t avoid using it.

On-Page SEO

Optimizing specific elements on each product page is a vital component of proper SEO. If you want your products and services to be visible in search results related to them, then this is crucial. While content creation separate from this aspect can help improve your site’s authority and rankings, you need to ensure that elements such as titles, tags, descriptions and headers are properly formatted for SEO.

Additionally, optimizing key elements such as URL structure can further improve performance relating to keyword usage and enhance the effectiveness of product descriptions.

Link Building

Last but not least, your brand needs mentions across the internet to further improve SEO outcomes. Link building has transformed over the years, but still remains crucial to long-term SEO performance.

The more websites that are pinging links back to your pages, the greater the chance is of your product pages ranking well in search. This has a cumulative effect over time, and can help improve all of your pages’ performances in targeted SERPs.

It isn’t easy to build a successful e-commerce website from scratch, and building it is just the beginning. Once deployed, you need a comprehensive strategy that addresses keywords, links, optimization and content in order to be truly victorious in your long-term endeavors.