In recent years, the eCommerce sector has brought forth a plethora of opportunities thanks to the emergence of dropshipping. As with every opportunity, industry has seen immense expansion in recent times. One area affected by this expansion is the sheer number of sellers in the dropshipping industry.
Due to the lucrative nature of this industry, the most popular niches seem to be saturated with sellers thus the need to apply tips in a bid to aid dropshipping success.
Arguably the most important tip for dropshippers has to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In this article, we’ll be looking at five key SEO for dropshipping techniques that will contribute to your dropshipping’s store success.
What is dropshipping?
If you’re starting or contemplating starting a dropshipping business, dropshipping pretty much involves selling products without inventory.
However, if you’re reading this article, there’s a high chance that you’re a dropshipper, and that you’re looking for ways to succeed in dropshipping.
As a drop shipper, you don’t deal with the products directly. Instead, you buy a product from a company and have the company deliver the product to your customer. It’s the perfect business to start if you’re down on finances. It’s easy to run, easy to scale, and a business you can successfully handle. Amazing right?
Like most other things, it’s not without its peculiar challenges. For example, you can hardly brand the products you’re selling, unless you find a supplier who can assist you with the personalisation, since not everyone does. Again, there seems to be increasing competition in the dropshipping industry, so much that you find yourself working so hard to keep afloat within your niche. This is especially the case if you dropship a popular product.
Let’s show you some tips to help you succeed in the online drop shipping business in 2020 and subsequently.
Five (5) SEO for Dropshipping tips to help your business
Being successful in the dropshipping industry requires excellent customer service, provision of quality goods, and an extensive effort towards reaching your target audience.
While most individuals find it easy to fulfill excellent customer service, and provide quality goods, many dropshippers continue to suffer from inconsistent sales owing largely to their inability to drive traffic to respective sales channels.
These challenges stem from an inability to effectively manage SEO techniques.
It’s especially challenging these days seeing that the industry has become quite saturated to the extent that an inability to strategize on proper client engagement could lead to your business being lost in the deep, vast sea of struggling online businesses.
The secret to ranking tops on search engines and ensuring that your customers find you first whenever they require your products is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Optimization (otherwise known as SEO) is a strategy that helps to increase the organic traffic inflow to your website by enhancing your visibility on search engines when prospective clients search for your products.
Let’s break it down. The internet accommodates various categories of persons, including sellers who have products to sell and buyers who need those products. When a prospective client searches for a product provider on search engines like Google, Google comes up with a list of product providers that are best suited to the stated needs of the client.
The problem here is that not every seller makes the lists, and even when they do, they may not make the first page on the search engine, which is where most clients tend to choose businesses.
The import of this is that search engines have special algorithms used to rank websites. The higher your search engine ranking, the greater your visibility, and the more likely you are to gain more customers.
Therefore, SEO looks at the criteria that search engines use for rankings and makes sure that you meet those criteria.
SEO ultimately attracts visitors to your website and produces great organic results for your brand. Now let’s look at some SEO for dropshipping tips to help your business and achieve the results you desire!
SEO for Dropshipping tip n.1: Use Gift Related Phrases
Use gift related phrases: To experience success as a dropshipper, you may need to question the status quo as it pertains to item categorizations on your website.
If your website is fashion based, you probably have categories listed thus:
- Oxford shoes
- Sneakers
- Boots
- Sweaters
- Jackets
The challenge with this is that it is efficient only when prospective buyers are interacting with your page. These days, very few people search for the aforementioned words when trying to shop for fashion items. Instead phrases such as ‘Father’s day sweater’ or ‘bracelets for valentine’s day’ are more prominent queries.
Simply change your categorizations to a list of this sort:
- Father’s day picture frames
- Christmas hats
- Best shorts for summer
- Hats for mother’s day
You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results!
SEO for Dropshipping tip n.2: Make sure you blog!
While this seems mundane, it remains of utmost importance. It helps by engaging converted leads, as well as providing added value to prospective customers.
Google loves content and not just any content, lengthy, quality content. This means that you have to blog.
This is because clients are drawn to value. If they find that your content helps answer a question that they have or is useful to them in one way or another, they will become regular visitors to your website.
Your articles need to be original and of high quality too. The effort is attractive to clients, and it is easily seen by how well you organize your content and how original it is. It would help if you also were consistent.
No matter how good your content creation game is, inconsistency with posting relevant articles does a lot to limit your chances of ranking high on search engines.
SEO for Dropshipping tip n.3: Backlinks are important!
Make good use of Backlinks. Backlinks are links to your website page from other platforms. It’s other people telling potential clients to check your website out.
Backlinks are usually one of the ways Google ranks websites. Google wants to ensure that clients are linked with the best product providers when needed. The more people refer to a store, the more likely you are to get attracted to that store – it’s the same thing with Google. The more Backlinks you have, the more likely you are to rank high on search engines.
Again, Ensure that they are from credible websites. Credible websites are websites that are authoritative in their fields and have gained industry regard over time.
SEO for Dropshipping tip n.4: Website Functionality / Sitemap
This is very important since your website may not even be indexed if you fail to submit your sitemap. Most dropshipping platforms ensure that these sitemaps are automatically submitted, however, some platforms may require a manual submission of your sitemap everytime you make changes to your site.
This is especially true if your online dropshipping store is password protected.
Google and other search engines care about the functionality of your website, especially customer experience. Invest in developing quality websites that offer top-notch functionality.
First, your website should load at generally acceptable speeds. A top functioning website shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds to display content to its customers.
Your website should also be reliable, accessible, secure, responsive, and scalable. It should be able to display content correctly and adapt to whatever device your clients choose to use.
Apart from these mentioned, your graphics and website aesthetics matter too. Everyone loves to see beautiful and creative graphic designs, and the more beautiful your website looks, the more appreciative your clients would be as a result.
SEO for Dropshipping tip n.5: Keyword Optimization
Remember that Google and other search engines try to match clients with the best product providers to satisfy their needs. But Google cannot read the clients’ minds and, as a result, you must work with specific words which these clients query when searching for a product to match them.
These “typed-in” words are called keywords, and you cannot execute an SEO plan without them.
In essence, SEO’s heart is in keyword optimization. For your dropshipping business to succeed with SEO techniques, you have to pay maximum attention to it. Some websites are highly functional but have not achieved a top ranking.
This may be attributed to ineffective keyword optimization techniques. Keywords define your content. Google uses these keywords to understand your website’s needs and match your site with clients indicating that they need your services.
To find the right keywords for your content, you should be able to predict the kind of words your target audience would use when searching for your service. You can also search for some terms related to your findings by studying Google’s ” people also ask” section.
Optimizing keywords means that you should know where to place your keywords to yield the best ranking results. Typically, your keywords should form your page titles and subheadings.
They should also be used in meta descriptions, URLs, directories, images. Keywords should also be used in the main content of your blog post. It would help if you worked with a creative content marketer to help you achieve the best results with keywords optimization.
A final tip before you go…
As a drop shipper, you’re already aware of the unlimited possibilities available to you on the internet. And you can’t wait to exploit them to your advantage.
You are probably excited because it’s really easy to start, plus it involves little capital to set up. But with time, you’ll soon discover that making it big in dropshipping isn’t as rosy as it looks, and you’d need to put in a lot of hard work to achieve your goals and a good supplier who will have your back every step of the way.
Well, if a good supplier with steady shipping times and high-quality products if what you need then there is good news for you!
Yakkyofy is the only supplier on the market that can provide you with real-time B2B quotes for dropshipping products. Our web-app that easily integrates with Shopify and WooCommerce will allow you to automate your business and fulfillment process entirely, so that you can focus on nailing your SEO knowledge and apply it to grow your organic traffic.
With Yakkyofy, you deal with the marketing and we will take care of everything else! All to need to do to start benefiting from all the above is simply…
AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY:
Okonkwo Noble understands the need for sustainable travel. He is a foremost trumpeter, writer, Electrical electronic engineer, and adventurer. When he’s not writing for Nettra Media on modern marketing, also volunteers as a part-time English teacher for Internally displaced children.
