Imagine that you run a small craft brewery in England producing gluten-free beer. How would you use SEOPress and SEOPress Insights to help you sell more beer on your ecommerce site?
Why launch an ecommerce site?
A small brewery will typically sell its beer locally through deals with local pubs and shops. They will often have a shop or a tap room at the brewery. These direct sales are precious for the brewery because direct sales generate the biggest profit margin. Selling on the Internet is a way of increasing direct sales and profits.
A lot of breweries in the UK set up an ecommerce site during lockdown to sell beer to clients when pubs were closed. These sites offered home delivery or click and collect as well as regular postal delivery.
Why choose WordPress, WooCommerce and SEOPress
WordPress is not always the first CMS that comes to mind when thinking about launching an ecommerce site. However, using a plugin like WooCommerce quickly makes WordPress a powerful and flexible ecommerce solution that integrates blogging capabilities. Thanks to the popularity of WordPress, themes exist for many types of businesses, and you can find themes that are created specifically for craft beer breweries.
WordPress and WooCommerce do not have all the features you need to do all your SEO jobs. You will need a SEO plugin for WordPress to optimize your site. There are lots of reasons to choose SEOPress ahead of other solutions. One good reason to choose SEOPress for an ecommerce site is that it offers integration for Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce reports. Another is that SEOPress also provides a solution to track keywords and monitor backlinks in WordPress: SEOPress Insights.
Optimizing product pages for SEO
Keeping in mind our fictive brewery, imagine that it sells 5 beers:
- Picture This, a lager
- Twitching Eyes, an IPA
- Social Scientist, a Stout
- You’re My King, a Brown Ale
- And Atomic a Golden Bitter
A common mistake we will see in brewery shops is that the name of the beer is used as the product name. For example, you could be tempted to use “Twitching Eyes” as the Product name for a beer whereas the keyword you want to target is “Gluten-free IPA.” There are over 200 searches for “Gluten-free IPA” in the UK every month and over 8000 searches for “Gluten-free Beer.” Adding the keyword to the product name will help optimize the page for this popular keyword by adding it to the page title and permalink.
With SEOPress installed you can add the product’s targeted keyword in the Content analysis box and analyze the content of the page to see if it is optimized for the keyword. If you also have SEOPress Insights, you can click on the Track with Insights button to add the keyword to the list of keywords that SEOPress will track every day.
Setting Up SEOPress Insights
SEOPress Insights is a plugin that you add to SEOPress. Using the installation wizard, you can enter a list of keywords and chose which search engine you want to track. For our brewery site in England we could add the following keywords and set the search engine to Google.co.uk.
- Gluten-free Beer
- Gluten-free Lager
- Gluten-free IPA
- Gluten-free Stout
- Gluten-free Brown Ale
- Gluten-free Bitter
You can continue adding keywords directly from any type of post or from the SEOPress Insights Ranking report. Current rankings for new keywords will be listed the next day.
For a new site or one that has not been optimized for SEO you may see a lot of pages ranking as “>100”. This signifies that your site could not be found in the first 100 organic results in Google. As you improve product pages, changing product names, or adding longer product descriptions, you will hope to see ranking improve. Initially, if you see the site ranking 77th for “Gluten-free IPA” after previously ranking “>100” then you can celebrate having made an important step towards optimizing that page. But being 77th, on the 8th page of results in Google, will not generate many visits or orders! You need to keep optimizing!
Beyond optimizing product names, TITLE tags, META Description and product descriptions (always add a long and short description), you may need to start adding more pages to the website. An ecommerce site with just 5 products may well have fewer than 10 pages. You are likely to need more pages for Google to recognize you as an important source of information on gluten-free beer.
Optimizing product pages via a blog
Making a blog work for your SEO means regularly posting new and interesting content. If you write about a product, you should link to that product’s page from the article. A good target to give yourself is to write and publish at least one article per week. Articles can be anywhere from 300 to 2000 words-long. A brewery could write regular articles about each beer, the beer-making process or events at the brewery. Subjects related to gluten-free beer could be health problems such as Celiac or suggestions on where to find gluten-free products other than beer. Keyword research may reveal popular searches such as “Is Guinness gluten-free?” The brewery could write an article in response to this question. No Guinness is not gluten-free, but Social Scientist Stout is!
Use SEOPress to find suggestions for keywords as you write posts. Add the keyword as the Target keyword to analyze the post, then add the keyword to SEOPress Insights to start tracking your ranking success.
SEOPress Insights for Backlinks
Adding posts and improving product pages can help make incremental improvements to ranking, but some improvements will also come from the increased popularity of the web site over time.
The other thing that SEOPress Insights does is report on backlinks to your site. You can audit your backlinks very rapidly and be alerted when new links to your site are detected. Seeing new links may give you new ideas for link building campaigns. A brewery may see a pub that sells their beer has added a link to the brewery from their website. This could give them the idea to contact all the pubs who buy their beer to tell them about the site and invite them to add a link. Seeing a link from a local newspaper could also inspire them to contact the journalist to tell them about the brewery’s news.
With SEOPress Insights increase ranking and sales
SEOPress Insights is a great tool for tracking keywords and monitoring backlinks, but it will not improve your ranking or help you sell more beer if you don’t use it! Having daily updates on ranking can inspire you to continue optimizing product pages and writing posts as you see ranking improve. It can also be useful to track effects that Google updates have on your ranking by being able to see daily ranking changes. Getting information on backlinks will also help inspire for link building campaigns and more quality links will improve ranking. Ranking for the correct keywords will improve traffic and generate sales.
Doing SEO is very much like making a craft beer. There are a few basic ingredients. In beer the ingredients are water, cereals, hops and yeast. In SEO they are text, photos, HTML code and backlinks. A craft beer is never finished, brewers are always looking to get better ingredients or improve the process to make the beer better. Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process too. You may never achieve SEO perfection, but SEOPress Insights will let you know how close you are getting.
Cheers!
Alcohol should be consumed in moderation.
