SEO for eCommerce with Hassan Aanbar

In this training session, we sat down with Hassan Aanbar, a leading expert in SEO and Email Marketing. Hassan broke down some SERIOUSLY useful and highly applicable strategies for you to optimize your website for organic traffic from Google, and you can start today.

Watch this short and helpful presentation to get all of the goods, but here are some high-level takeaways:

SEO is super important to work on because it will provide a steady and organic flow of buyers to your website. People looking for your solution turn to the product, so even if search volume looks low, the quality of each of those individuals may be high because they are highly qualified buyers (for the most part).

If you sell products that people search for by name. And you’re not ranking for those names, then you’re literally leaving money on the table.

Forget waiting for months and years to rank. You can rank for a product’s name in as little as a few weeks.

People coming from search are very easy to convert. They’re considered warm leads, already in “research mode” ready for your store to convert them into buyers.

On-Page Optimization is 90% of the work in eCommerce SEO.

Shopify Vs Woocommerce Vs BigCommerce
– WooCommerce: on-page optimization is straight forward, with the help of plugins like Yoast SEO
– BigCommerce: More accommodating to SEO than its counterparts
– Shopify: SEO on-page optimization is more complicated to implement than on other platforms

On most platforms, namely Woocommerce and BigCommerce SEO optimization is free, and for Shopify plugins cost as little as $5/month!

A Site Audit is an absolutely Critical step: It can potentially help bring a lot of search traffic after fixing all the reported errors.

Tools:
– Developer: Screamingfrog (free to use for up to 500 URLs)
– DYI: Ahrefs or SEMRush
– My favorite: Ahrefs – Simplicity in solving all blatant issues. (You can run the audit using the free 7 day trial)

Things to Correct

• Meta Tags
• Titles
• Meta Descriptions
• Duplicate Content Issues
• Outgoing links (beware of broken links)

Meta Tags is really the lost art of copywriting.

Title Tags are your chance at getting people’s attention while they’re browsing Google or Bing.

Description Tags are most effective if you write for people…machines are getting smarter (AI anyone?).

Fix Duplicate Content Issues

• Canonical URLs
• Adding the tag to your URLS rel=canonical simply means you’re telling Google this is your preferred page over the other duplicates.
• When Google sees many versions of the same page, they remove ALL of them from the SERPs. 

How to apply the rel=canonical tag

• If you have 2, 3 or more versions of the same page, pick the one with the most visits, or whichever one you like.
• Add this tag to all pages that you don’t want to, linking to the page that you picked:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://examplestore.com/rednintendonunchuck/” />

301 Redirects Vs 302 Redirects

• 302 is a temporary redirect telling Google to come back another time (NOT GOOD)
• 301 is a permanent redirect telling Google that this page has moved to another URL. Passes link juice and authority. 
• Using 301 is preferred and won’t hurt your website’s ranking stats

How to add redirects on WordPress? Use any of these free plugins:

• Redirection
• Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
• Simple 301 Redirects
• For other platforms you need the help of a developer (someone who can handle .htaccess files)

Off-Page Optimization For More Traffic

Link Building

• This is useless if your on-page is wack (translation: not good)
• Build links using “influencers” or bloggers. You hit 2 birds with one stone.
• No sponsored posts, make it as subtle as possible. Blend them in as reviews or even better, sprinkle them with recommendations.
• Your goal is to get links from related blogs or websites in your niche. Getting traffic is a bonus.

Other Critical Aspects

• SSL certificate
• Mobile and Desktop speed
• Mobile Responsiveness 
• Social Signals (FB page, Instagram, Pinterest…etc)

Things to avoid:

• Don’t buy SEO gigs on Fiverr and other obscure freelance markets…especially not links
• Don’t hire someone without a proven track record and testimonials/recommendations
• You might end up needing 2 people (on-page specialist, mostly a dev, and an outreach specialist)

If you haven’t watched the video yet, definitely circle back up and do so Hassan dropped some pure gold in these areas and goes in much greater depth. You can connect with Hassan through his agency page here.