Switzerland is one of the most preferred countries for entrepreneurs to start e-commerce due to its high purchasing power and the online shopping habits of its citizens.
You may have invested time and money in building a great-looking online store with a well-balanced selection of products. After launch, you check Google Analytics several times a day only to find: the store is empty. Or, you’ve been running the e-shop for a while already but only get customers when you pay for traffic through ads in Google. Effective but perhaps a bit expensive.
The solution is SEO, search engine optimisation. With SEO, you can get a more or less constant flow of visitors to your Swedish e-commerce site without paying a penny per click. It sounds almost too good to be true, but that’s the beauty of search engine optimisation. Of course, hiring an SEO agency that provides Swedish link-building services involves costs, but it’s more like an investment rather than an ongoing expense.
To hire an SEO agency or not – it’s all about how much you are willing to learn and how much of your own time and effort you are willing to put in. For most businesses, it pays to bring in external expertise. In any case, here are 3 tips on how to get started with SEO for your e-store.
1. Understand the customer
It’s easy to get snowed under in your field. As a shopkeeper, you can be likened to an expert. What’s in the store and how it’s set up may seem obvious to you. But how does a customer experience your e-shop? It’s a useful exercise to try to put yourself in the customer’s mind.
Often you end up with a need to improve the user experience. For example:
- Creating a simpler structure among categories
- Creating clearer menus
- Making the page faster
- Creating internal links between products and articles on the site
- Writing better product descriptions
- Providing tips on other similar products
Why are these important? There are two aspects. User experience is more important than ever for SEO because a better user experience often leads to better rankings. It also means your visitors buy more in-store.
If you start from the premise of creating the ultimate user experience, you’re already well on your way with your e-commerce SEO.
2. Create great content
Every time you add an item to your store, you have a new opportunity to get free traffic from Google. One of the most important aspects of SEO is creating good content. Without texts on the site, the search engines have very little information to use to judge what ranking the site should get.
Good content includes writing well-formulated, concrete and descriptive texts. In an e-shop, for example, this might mean putting effort into writing good product descriptions and category texts.
Do your research. A well-written product description of 200 – 300 words will have a much better chance of drawing in traffic from Google than a short text of 50 words.
Category texts should be fairly comprehensive and describe what a particular category contains. Use synonyms and write naturally.
Anything you can do to make Google understand your content better is helpful. For example, you can use subheadings (called H2s and maybe even H3s).
Don’t try to guess what people are searching for online! You will benefit greatly from a keyword analysis tool.
Tip – Create a blog for your online business. There you can go in-depth on topics that people are searching for. Write comprehensively and informatively about each topic. Take the opportunity to link to different products where appropriate.
3. Build links (Backlinks)
On the web, links act as a sort of signal that a particular piece of content is relevant and should rank higher. Once upon a time, it was possible to get backlinks left and right, for example from link directories. The search engines of the time thought that was enough to give a particular e-commerce store a better ranking.
Today it is more complicated. You need to get links from high-quality sites, not from spammy sites. It’s an advantage if the links are in a sensible context, for example in an article that is also preferably thematically relevant to your shop.
As Fabi Gylgonyl of International SEO Agency, an expert with extensive experience in international link building campaigns, aptly puts it, “In today’s SEO landscape, the quality of backlinks transcends quantity. It’s about crafting a network of connections that not only point to your site but also enrich its context and relevance in the ever-evolving web ecosystem.”
How to build links? The easiest way is to hire a Swedish SEO service that already has both a network of contacts and proven methods. Otherwise, one method is to create good content and recommend it to others. Link exchanges are common too. It is also possible to buy links, but this can be risky if Google detects it.