SEO

One of the most important visitor sources for many online stores is visitors coming via search engines. In the Netherlands, Google is the market leader and is therefore the most important source for visitors and customers.

In this manual we give you tips on how to score as high as possible in Google. It concerns the so-called organic results, also known as the free entries (green block).

This manual does not guarantee high results. Everyone wants to be in position 1 in Google. It is also good to realize that you are not high in Google within a few weeks. This costs a lot of effort and time. 

Keywords

Before you start optimizing your website, it is good to first create a list of keywords you want to be found on. It is important not to focus directly on many different keywords, but first around the 10 most important ones. This gives you results sooner and you are found on the most important words, which often yields the most.

It is important to know how often a particular word is searched in Google. The more often this is, the more interesting the word is (and often more competition). To measure the search volume, Google has developed a tool.

Based on the search volume, the relevance of the keyword and the competition, it is best to determine which keywords you want to focus on. At the start of the optimization it is useful to place these keywords in for example Excel and mention the current position of your web store. This allows you to accurately measure the effect after a number of months.

Tip! You can determine the position the best in a browser other than what you normally surf on the internet. Google keeps track of you while surfing and that can hamper the results of Google.

Texts and landing pages

The first step to optimize the web store for Google is to customize the texts in your web store. Make sure you write the texts you place on the website not only for search engines but also for your visitors. If these are not attractively written, the visitor will most likely leave your website. It also works the other way around, also take Google into account when you write these texts.

Firstly, it is good to determine which keywords you want to be found on. Often it works best to create a separate page for each search term on which the visitor "lands" when he clicks on a link in Google. This is also called a landing page. A landing page does not necessarily have to be a specially created page, but can also be a category, product or existing page.

On landing pages you can best process the keyword (s) in the title of the page. The best thing is to name only the keyword in question. In addition, it is important that in the text on this page you name the search terms a number of times and also use synonyms of the keywords. Do not fill the page completely with these words but use it in moderation, otherwise Google will find this differently striking, so the effect is gone and you may therefore be "punished".

In addition, make sure that you are internally linked to this landing page at least once in your web store. This can be in a piece of text, but of course also in the menu structure. Otherwise, Google can find this page difficult or not at all making the whole optimization for nothing.

Do you want to create special landspages for certain keywords that you would rather not have in the menu? That is possible with the CCV Shop software. You can set the settings from 'Show in menu' to 'no' in the properties of a page.

Meta Data 

When you have adjusted the texts, it is important to adjust the metadata per page, category and product. Metadata is information that tells something about a page but can not be seen on the page, category or product itself.

Metadata is important for Google, among other things. The two most important data are the 'title' and the 'description'. These two data are shown in the organic results of Google. These must be attractively written so that customers will click on the link in Google. In addition, the title field is also used in for example the tab of the browser. 

It is also important that the keyword is processed in the title and description. Keywords are not only shown in Google search results, but Google also "crawls" this data to determine how relevant a page is for certain keywords.

Another metadata is 'keywords', or keywords. This used to be used a lot and was also seen as important by Google. However, in the past there has been a lot of abuse of this field so Google decided to stop looking at these keywords. However, it can never hurt to fill this in anyway.

For each page, product and category, you can adjust the above data. If you change a page, product or category, you have the 'Metadata' tab. There you will find the entry fields 'Page title' (title), 'Meta keywords' (keywords) and 'Meta description' (description). Fill this in for each page, regardless of whether you see it as an important or less important page.

SEO aliases

Now that the pages are optimized, you can give each page a unique address / url. In other words the address you see in the address bar of the browser. Give each page, category, and product a unique name that preferably only consists of the keywords of that page. Here, too, Google looks to determine the relevance. You can enter these so-called SEO aliases with the properties of pages, categories and products.

An example of an optimized seo alias:

• Url without SEO-alias: http://www.webstorename.nl/Webstore-Page-274055/Information.html
• Url with SEO alias: http://www.webstorename.nl/info

Natural link building

According to experts, the positions within Google are 30% determined from internal optimisations such as texts, metadata and URLs. The remaining 70% is determined by links from external websites to your web store.

In other words: the internal optimization is certainly important, but the most important focus should be on obtaining as many links as possible to your web store. This is also called link building. However, it is important to do this with policy and not simply to have links to other websites. For example, there are companies that sell links in large quantities. Be careful with this. If there are wrong websites and / or the number of links rises very much at once, this can have negative consequences for your result in Google.

It is therefore important to build up a natural link growth. That basically means two things: make sure that you do not put lots of links on websites at once and then do not get new links. Also make sure that the links that are placed on websites have a lot of relevance with the webshop and keywords you want to be found on. The most important rule in this says: the more important the website or higher this website is in Google, the more interesting the link on that website.

It works best when you sit down for a few hours every week and start looking for a website where a link can be placed. If you can place between 5 and 20 links every week, Google sees this as natural link growth. This is very positive for the positions within Google. This is a time-consuming task and the first result can only be seen after a few months, but this is the best way to get and stay high in Google.

SEO Analysis tool CCV Shop

With the SEO Analysis tool you can quickly find large and small SEO improvements that can increase the conversion and the number of visitors. With the SEO Analysis tool you can scan pages in your web shop in seconds. After the scan has been carried out, you will immediately receive optimization tips for your online store and you can start immediately by optimizing your web store. 

To use the SEO analysis tool you have to download the app in the App Store. You can find this via: ''Start point > App Store" under the category 'support'. The SEO Analysis can then be found via: ''Starting point > My Webshop > SEO Analysis".

Under "Starting point / My webshop / Settings / General / SEO" you will find the following options:

Automatic SEO aliases

Automatically generate an SEO alias when entering, for example, a product name

 

Automatic redirects

When changing an SEO alias, it is desirable that the old alias refers (redirect) to the new alias you choose. This prevents the ranking of your webshop from falling in search engines due to a bad link reputation because links are incorrect. This setting ensures that a redirect is automatically created when you change an SEO alias.

In the product management, for example, it is possible to search for all redirects that refer to this product.

These redirects are only created if you change an existing alias (from `shoes` to` leather-shoes` for example). Not the first time you enter an alias. The system already has default redirects for that.

Custom 404 page (page not found)

For this last point, see the following article: https://ccvshop.zendesk.com/hc/nl/articles/360021054579-Eigen-404-pagina