Your friends and family are well aware of your business. The social media followers are getting daily doses of images and hashtags. You’ve even set up email marketing to engage with customers for repeat purchases.
With all of this accomplished, you’re now searching for ways to find potential customers and increase website traffic. This search led to the question “what if I looked into dropshipping SEO strategies? Maybe I can find tips to increase my search engine ranking for keywords related to my best-selling products?”
If this is you, you are heading in the right direction. SEO for dropshipping stores is an important aspect of your website’s digital marketing strategy. Fortunately for you, most dropshipping sites pay little attention to search engine optimization. These dropshippers are missing out on an opportunity that serves the whole point of their website; to make money online.
A great place to look for an example of an industry that thrives off of SEO is affiliate marketing websites. Dropshippers may have a more profitable opportunity since the average affiliate program payout is between 5-30%. Your dropshipping website has the potential to make a greater profit margin from each new customer you gain.
Oh, and you get the benefit of continuing to market the new products down the road.
Ok, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Some of you may have heard of SEO but are not sure what it is, so let’s give you a brief definition.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is a form of online marketing requiring many actions that together earn you the top spot in the search results. Search engine optimization includes optimizing keywords, developing a technically sound website, building backlinks to your business, and producing quality content on your website.
We will discuss all of this throughout the article, so buckle up because we are about to put the SEO peddle to the metal.
What is SEO for a Dropshipping Business?
A dropshipping store is a unique website offering e-commerce products but without the hassle of inventory management. This means you can spend more time building out SEO-friendly website pages. This list includes product descriptions, category descriptions, and blog content that gets people to nearby pages to where you can earn a transaction.
The definition of “SEO dropshipping” is not all that much different from traditional SEO but includes strategies that take the best ideas from affiliate marketing SEO and e-commerce SEO. It is when these two types blend into one beautiful SEO strategy that leads to rewards.
Exactly what we plan to accomplish with this article and by the time we finish this topic. When you finish reading, you become a master of Google search ready to take on the internet and drive revenues to your online store.
OK, that may be ambitious, but we have high hopes for what you will learn and the actions you will then feel confident enough to take.
Google SEO vs Google Ads
If there is anything holding you back from starting your SEO campaign, it’s deciding whether to spend time on organic search marketing or Google ads. There really isn’t a debate since both complement each other very well.
You will find inexpensive search terms where it is worth the pennies each PPC ad click costs. Also, there will be very expensive keywords requiring only 3-6 months of SEO effort to reach the first page. Big win here!
Alternatively, it may be extremely difficult to rank for keywords that are important to your dropshipping business. Here, paying the money for the ads while you continue working on SEO is the best strategy.
Should a Dropshipping Business Invest in SEO?
Yes. If you want your dropshipping business to benefit from the most cost-effective form of website traffic, then invest in SEO. With that said, we use the word “invest” loosely. You are not required to spend large amounts of money right out of the gate.
Like many things in business, start with the fundamentals. If you are new to dropshipping or SEO, follow a crawl-walk-run strategy.
An investment is not only about money but also about time. The big question to ask is: will you learn SEO yourself or hire SEO agencies to handle the work? Let’s look at the pros and cons of each.
Learn SEO Yourself
Reiterating the benefit of having a dropshipping store; you are free from managing inventory and managing personnel who manage the inventory (that’s a tongue twister). However, you may run your dropshipping business on the side and be busy working your 9-5 or school schedule. So, deciding to learn SEO yourself is a question you need to consider.
If you do not have time, let us exercise a word of caution. Do not cease learning because you lack the required time to study and implement SEO fundamentals. You will need to have an education about the subject of SEO in order to be sure the SEO expert you hire will correctly handle the job.
Hire an SEO Agency
While you can hire a single freelancer to work on your SEO, we strongly advise you to look for a reputable SEO agency to perform the work. The reason is, in the beginning, you need more than SEO action, you need SEO strategy in advance so you start off in the right direction.
Also, you will rarely find a freelancer with the skill set and knowledge to handle everything it needs for a website to rank high in the search engines. The SEO services an agency offers will often include all aspects into a single package. Laying out the strategy sets your SEO efforts on the correct course so that you do not end up in a place where you never intended to be.
SEO Steps For a Dropshipping Website
By now you understand SEO has a lot of moving parts. You recognize it isn’t as simple as 1-2-3 rank. You have a practical understanding of SEO for dropshipping websites.
Now, let’s dig into the details about what steps you or a team of SEO specialists need to take for your dropshipping website to succeed online.
Keyword Research
Hopefully, you did product research before deciding on both your dropshipping website name and catalog. Keyword research requires an equal, if not greater, commitment than you gave to finding dropship opportunities in a specific niche.
There are endless options for doing keyword research but to start, but to begin, we suggest using Google keyword planner. There are better keyword planning tools (we will get to those) but looking under Google’s hood is always a good idea.
You will find thousands of articles suggesting you start with easy long-tail keywords, but this isn’t always good advice. With Google leaning more on-topic authority, your website needs to cover those widely discussed conversations, building an authoritative position on the topic.
Ultimately, the keywords you look for depending on the Google dropshipping SEO strategy you put in place.
Website Development
Once you have a strategy in place and the keywords you want to target, it’s time to move on to your dropshipping website. The first step is choosing the right e-commerce platform that’s equipped with what’s needed for SEO success. We’ve reserved a section of this article specifically for Shopify, but other SEO-friendly e-commerce platforms including WordPress and BigCommerce make SEO seamless.
Whichever e-commerce platform you choose, be sure it has the technical SEO components recommended for maximum visibility. Here’s a list of what to look for.
Meta Tags: The platform you choose should include customization for all page meta titles and meta descriptions.
Website Speed: Make sure that your website starts with and maintains fast loading times for all pages. You can do this by setting up a CDN and optimizing images to the smallest size without affecting the quality.
Custom URLs: Your website should be able to have specific URLs where you can have keywords within the title.
Easy Blog Integration: Content should be easy to publish and allow you to upload images and other forms of media that improve the page experience.
Content Marketing
Your dropshipping website‘s content marketing strategy is critical to the success of your category and product pages. The more quality content you produce around the products you offer, the more Google sees you as an authority on that subject. This strategy is a great way to compete against large e-commerce retailers who have more domain authority than your brand.
Content marketing is more than publishing a blog post. Essentially, we should consider content to be any page on your website. This includes your home page, categories, and every product description on your site.
Most websites make the mistake of going wide with their content, focusing too much on being a thought leader. It’s important to remember that when people search Google, they look for answers, not followers. Keep most of your thought leadership content on social media and with your email marketing campaigns.
Link Building
Link Building is when someone creates text with a hyperlink back to your website and is a very important SEO ranking factor. There are endless opportunities for a dropshipping site to earn backlinks on their website.
QUICK TIP: One of the best dropship hacks is finding other blog articles that discuss the “best, top, or product ideas” about your product type. Reach out to the creator of the blog, letting them know about your website, the product you offer, and what makes you special.
Ask them if your product would be a good fit for their article? If they say yes, you will get more leads and a backlink to that page. Win-win!
Social Signals
If you started a social media marketing campaign but are not getting the results you are hoping for, here’s a reason to keep going. SEO experts consider social signals to be necessary for your search rankings. Social signals show Google that your website is relevant in real-time with brand mentions and, hopefully, website traffic.
Being alive on social media is more important than just likes and followers. It’s a place for your customers (and the search engines) to understand your brand through a visual lens.
QUICK TIP: Include social media into your content marketing by grabbing snippets from blog articles to create social media posts. Then integrate social media images into your product descriptions and blog content to create a more rich experience.
SEO Tips for Beginners
We’ve covered a lot, but here are a few more SEO tips to keep us going.
- Website Links: Google understands a lot about your website through its Internal and external links. The anchor text and where you tell a person to go next help Google better recognize patterns about your business. Make sure you are creating diverse but on-topic internal and external links.
- Setup Reporting For Real Feedback: It is said that you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. Thankfully, even without spending a penny, you can get a world of insight from Google analytics and Google search console. All you need to do is submit your sitemaps and Google will do the rest. Get this done!
- Eliminate All Thin Content: Make sure that every indexed page on your website has at least 300 words. For articles, the general recommendation is no less than 1000 words, but we find that most articles need to be 1500-2500 words. Category and product descriptions may be less, but always give your best effort to creating rich details on every page you publish.
- Create a User Experience: Build for the Search Engines but optimize for the human. Use schema markup to make sure the search engine easily understands what the page is about. Use titles and tags that engage the searcher to click on ads, then make the articles a joy to read by including images, easy-to-read font sizes, and brief paragraphs.
- Don’t Forget About Image SEO: Google's lens keeps getting better and better. SEO is no longer just about words but also about images. You could miss out on a ton of traffic if your product, category, and article pages do not have images.
- Prevent Duplicate Content: Ecommerce websites are notorious for duplicate content creating what we understand as content cannibalization. Make sure your website isn’t fighting against itself for search positions. Optimize each page for a primary topic and focus only on that. If duplicate content is unavoidable, use canonical links for the pages that rank.
How to Improve SEO on Shopify?
Is Shopify Good for SEO? Yes, and Shopify’s search engine optimization tools are getting better all the time. How to do SEO on Shopify once required a custom process, but since the pandemic, you no longer have to figure out how to set up SEO on Shopify. Now, you can integrate plug-ins just like WordPress (such as Yoast SEO) that take care of many previously very time-consuming steps.
Instead, When you are on this platform, you need to focus on how to optimize SEO for Shopify. What plugins are best? What is new inside the Shopify store? Shopify answers many of these questions in the Shopify SEO guide.
SEO Tools For Your Dropshipping Store
The SEO industry has more tools than you could ever use. But for starting your SEO efforts on the right food and gaining traction quickly, the right tools will save you a lot of time and energy.
Keyword Research Tool
Companies like Ahrefs have keyword tools that go well beyond Google Keyword Planner. These tools help you identify keyword gaps where the competition is missing out, long-tail keywords with each rank-ability, and questions that people ask.
Content Writing Tools
The development of content writing tools is one of the greatest things to happen to on-page SEO optimization. These tools make writing content far easier and ensure we cover topics in full. Content writing tools provide you with the important topics for a product description or blog article should cover.
These tools fix one of the biggest SEO challenges. Writing tools like Surfer.io let you create content briefs. We can pass along these content briefs to other writers so that we set expectations for the tone of voice and important article details for external writers to follow.
AI Writing Assistants
AI content writing tools are all the buzz in content marketing, but there’s often a misunderstanding about what these tools can do. Many believe these tools write an article or product description for you, which you can then publish. Like it or not, they will not create content that outperforms a great SEO writer.
However, you can use writing assistants to keep the digital pen moving and prevent writer’s block. AI writing assistants like Jasper.ai generate thousands of words on a topic that you can review, edit, and organize in a way that makes your writing job easier.
Dropified Dropshipping Integration
We hope you enjoyed this article about SEO for dropshipping websites. Sign up for our newsletter to get more dropshipping tips. Better yet, sign up for a free trial to see for yourself how seamless Dropified makes the process of integrating your dropshipping website with hundreds of thousands of products.
