How to Improve SEO for Dropshipping – Beginner's Guide

As a dropshipping store owner, the ultimate goal for you is to improve your revenue by selling products. But how can you increase your sales if people can’t see and find your store online?

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. You need to learn how to improve the SEO of your dropshipping store so that people can find you through a Google search. The higher you rank on Google search, the more people will visit your store, which in turn, you will gain more sales.

Things you need to know about SEO for dropshipping:

Did you know that the page 1 Google search results have a 71.33% of chance getting clicked?

That means if people can’t find you on the first page of Google search results, you missed more than two-third of potential traffic.

As astonishing as the number can be, it gives you more reasons to work on your SEO and trying to outrank other websites on Google.

It never too late for you to get started. Take your first step now by reading this beginner’s guide as it is carefully designed for people who are new to the concept of SEO.

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What Is SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, in the simplest words, the better SEO you have, the higher you will rank on Google search. As you rank higher on Google, it will increase the organic traffic to your site.

SEO is one of the most important strategies of digital marketing, especially for dropshippers.

Utilizing the correct SEO tactics can be a critical contributing factor for running a successful dropshipping store and set yourself apart from the competition. Imagine your store is ranked on the first page of Google search results, which means you will have a click-through rate of 71.33% when people search on Google.

It is also very important to be aware that applying SEO to your website and improving your Google ranking isn’t something that will happen overnight.

It is a long-term approach that requires lots of sophisticated tiny little changes. When these little changes accumulated, it makes a huge difference and will greatly impact your website by giving it higher rankings.

Therefore, don’t be upset when you are ranking lower than expected. Be patient and have the correct mindset. Continue to research and learn more about SEO. As you apply more changes to your website, eventually you will achieve the result you desired.

Key Concepts

Before we jump into the tips of improving SEO, let’s start by focusing on understanding some of the basic key concepts.

Keyword Counts

The length of content on each page plays a pivotal role in SEO as it is directly correlated to how the search engines perceive your page.

The more words you entered on a page, the more keywords will be included and the easier it will be for search engines like Google to understand what your page is about.

However, it doesn’t mean you can write whatever you want on your page. Bear in mind, you can’t force to have more keywords by stuffing unrelated content to your page.

You need to make sure the content on your page is natural and beneficial for your visitors. For instance, a great example of increasing keyword counts on the product page of a dropshipping store is to add more content to describe your products in detail.

H1 Tags

The H1 HTML tag is the first header tag that a visitor will find on your pages. It is usually the title of a page. To use an example from the dropshipping world, the H1 tag of a product page is the product title itself.

You can use words like “best”, “top”, “cheap” to optimize the H1 tag. Here is a list of words you can reference from. Please note that you don’t want to overdo those keywords as the search engines might consider them spam.

Titles and Meta Descriptions

Titles and meta descriptions are the first two things people will notice from search engine results pages (SERP).

According to Moz, Google displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag, which means if the title is under 60 characters, it will be displayed properly on Google. Since the title is typically the first thing people will see about your website, it is important to make it nice and neat.

Meta description is the part below the title tag on the search engine results page. According to the recommendation from Moz, a meta description should contain 50-160 characters as it should be long enough for a descriptive brief summary of your page. Creating a compelling meta description will encourage more people to click through to your website.

Internal Links

Another fundamental aspect of SEO is using internal links.

Internal link refers to the type of hyperlink on a web page to another page on the same website.

Adding internal links on your page not only helps your visitors to navigate from one page to another and discover more content from your website, it also helps increase domain authority and page authority.

Domain authority (DA) refers to the prediction of how likely a website will rank on search engine result pages while page authority (PA) predicts how well a specific web page will rank. The higher the better for both scores (0-100).

Therefore, if you have links to pages and posts that have high authority, you should insert them into your web page. Please make sure the added internal links are also related to your web page content.

Backlinks

Backlinks play a crucial role in improving the SEO of your page. Backlinks are the external links that will direct people to another website.

Pages that have a higher number of backlinks tend to have better search results as they boost your domain authority and page authority.

Here’s the list of some of the important categories of backlinks:

Do follow links: Do follow is essentially the default state for a link. Any link without the no follow attribute is a do follow link. They are important because they can pass the authority to your page.

No follow links: No follow links are those that contain a rel=”nofollow” attribute if you look for the link in the HTML of the page. It is important to know about them as they don’t add authority to your page.

Tips for Boosting SEO

After going through the basic key concepts of SEO, you most likely already have some tactics in mind to improve your search results. But we still want to dive into more tips for you to better utilize the above information.

Produce High-Quality Content

One of the habits that most dropshippers have is that they usually keep the product name, description, specs, images, etc. from the AliExpress supplier.

Try to avoid having the same content as much as you can because such a habit results in the problem of duplicated content.

If the search engines detect the same identical content, it will result in lower search rankings for your web page.

After all, you can’t outrank an AliExpress web page, since the domain authority of AliExpress is so much higher than yours.

Be in your customers’ shoes and try to think from their perspectives. Imagine the product name and description that will grab their attention and give them a reason to purchase your products.

As long as you are following your own SEO guide to create high-quality, original and compelling content, eventually, you will achieve high search results.

Add Alt Text to Your Images

Alt text is used within an HTML code to describe what the image is about. It helps the search engines like Google to learn about the image.

You can boost your SEO by adding image titles and more keywords in the alt text.

As always, don’t overdo it as Google will regard the image as spam if you have too many unnatural descriptive words such as “Top”, “Cheapest”, etc.

Encourage Sharing on Social Media

Being active on social media not only brings you more traffic to your website, it also improves your SEO if people start sharing your links on social media.

Even though social media is not a direct factor that contributes to SEO, all of the sharing on social media adds up to more visibility for your content, which in turn, will increase your search rankings on Google.

Conclusion

SEO has always been a huge and complicated topic. There’s so much more we can discuss and obviously we can’t finish them all in one article.

But the above information at least gives you a general understanding of how SEO works, along with some useful tips you can apply.

Again, SEO is not a quick shortcut for you to boost your traffic instantly. You can’t magically make your website rank on the first page of search engine results overnight.

It is an approach that takes time for you to see the results. Update your content regularly and follow your own SEO guide. In the long term, you will be rewarded for things you’ve been working hard on.

Happy dropshipping with DSers!