10 Essential Priorities For Your Retail SEO Strategy

10 Essential Priorities For Your Retail SEO Strategy

Ecommerce is expected to reach almost 35% of sales among big-box retailers worldwide by 2023, rising from 23% in 2019, according to Edge Retail Insight.

This growth is expected to continue, with ecommerce taking a nearly 40% share of sales by 2025.

This comes amid strong online growth and stable or declining physical store sales worldwide.

However, store-based retail nevertheless continues to account for the majority of sales. Additional research shows consumers prefer a mix of online and offline shopping.

Regardless of how the transaction is carried out, the majority of shoppers use search engines for discovery and comparison shopping.

How consumers use search engines for various retail discovery.Image from LSA, February 2022

That means that whether customers are shopping in your store, on your website, or via a social commerce platform, SEO is an area of opportunity retailers cannot afford to miss.

Here are 10 top priorities for your retail SEO strategy.

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is extremely important for retail brands. Knowing what keywords consumers are searching for and how they are searching is vital to building out your informational architecture and content strategy.

It should cover keywords at all stages of the fragmented user journey:

  • informational,
  • navigational,
  • transactional,
  • and intent-based.

There are a plethora of keyword research tools, but always make sure to review your competitors’ keyword research strategy, too.

That includes Amazon because of the high purchase intent there. Use Amazon’s keyword tool, as well as tools like Ahrefs.

Once the site is up and running, review paid search data and find keywords that are converting and driving traffic and sales.

Make sure the site is ranking on the first page wherever possible of all the major search engines for those keywords through ongoing optimization.

This will help you augment organic performance initially but then reallocate your paid budget over time as SEO proves its value.

2. Local Search

Getting found online is key to driving traffic and sales.

It’s a simple truth that the more you show up for your customers, the more your business thrives and can provide services.

But when it comes to local search, accuracy matters.

So get on a good local search platform and then claim and optimize your listings.

Optimized listings help your retail brand show up at the top of local searches and provide a consistent customer experience to drive acquisition and retention.

Make sure you are taking advantage of Google Business Profiles, a tool that helps businesses manage their presence across Google properties, to share updates with your customers.

Add photos to your GBP listings to improve the customer experience, add attributes so customers know what to expect, display your products and inventory, submit relevant categories, respond to Q&A, and also monitor and respond to reviews.

I can’t tell you how many retail brands still don’t respond to reviews, both good and bad.

To learn more about how to optimize for local search, read the Definitive Guide to Improve Your Local Search Rankings.

3. Structured Data

Structured data can help

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Ukraine wishes Russia to be severed from the world-wide web. Specialists say it’s a risky strategy

Ukraine wishes Russia to be severed from the world-wide web. Specialists say it’s a risky strategy

But now Ukraine is pushing for something even far more dramatic and consequential.

On Monday, Ukraine’s federal government known as for Russia to be disconnected from the world world wide web. It sent a letter to ICANN, the US-based international non-gain that oversees the global method of world-wide-web domain names and IP addresses, with a plea.

“I am sending you this letter on behalf of the men and women of Ukraine, inquiring you to address an urgent need to have to introduce rigid sanctions from the Russian Federation in the industry of DNS [Domain Name System] regulation, in response to its functions of aggression to Ukraine and its citizens,” wrote Andrii Nabok, who signifies Ukraine on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee.

Internet governance experts say Ukraine’s request, if carried out, would efficiently sever Russia from the web, leaving Russian websites without a home. E mail addresses would quit doing work and online customers would not be ready to log on. Russia would suddenly discover itself on a electronic island.

But these exact governance authorities are skeptical that Ukraine’s request will finally be fulfilled. For just one factor, they say, it would established a unsafe precedent that could give authoritarian countries license to make comparable calls for. For a different, it is not apparent that ICANN could make such a decision even if several required it to. Moreover, they extra, reducing Russia off from the rest of the electronic entire world may be offering the Kremlin particularly what it wishes: a citizenry unable to obtain outdoors data.

Governments this sort of as China’s have sought to wall off their personal men and women from the outdoors digital earth. But Ukraine’s ask for is unparalleled, according to Vint Cerf, commonly viewed as one of the fathers of the web.

“It is the to start with time in my memory that a governing administration has requested ICANN to interfere with the standard procedure” of the area name system at such a scale, Cerf told CNN Organization.

“The internet operates in huge measure for the reason that of significant levels of believe in among the lots of components of its ecosystem,” Cerf additional. “Performing on this ask for would have destructive consequence in quite a few proportions.”

The letter was initial described by Rolling Stone. Angelina Lopez, an ICANN spokesperson, confirmed to CNN the letter experienced been obtained and that officers were examining it, but declined to remark.

How it may possibly work

As section of his ask for, Nabok claimed the Russian web nation code .RU and its Cyrillic equivalents must be revoked. In addition, Nabok reported he was sending a different request to Europe and Central Asia’s regional internet registry, inquiring it to consider again all of the IP addresses it had assigned to Russia.

Nabok argued that the measures would be yet another way for the earth to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and that it would aid world-wide-web customers access “responsible facts in different domain zones, avoiding propaganda
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