How to SEO your dropshipping business

If you are a dropshipping market owner, then you should know that the most important thing you must do before creating your web page is to do a proper search engine optimization for your business. Dropshipping markets usually meet different obstacles than traditional markets, so it’s important to read this article and find out precious information and advice that will help your your website rank better in Google.

First of all, take into account that Google is more and more sophisticated when it comes to analyzing the quality of the content, so it’s important to understand the different characteristics used by its algorithms to rank your website. In other words, SEO is not about filling your content with as many keywords as possible, but creating quality writings, that can help the readers with valuable information.

This article is structured in two main parts: in the first part, we are going to explain all you need to know about SEO and secondly, we will give you some SEO guidelines that you should follow in order to achieve success.

SEO for beginners

SEO comes from ’’search engine optimization”, and a proper SEO means higher rankings when a person enters related keywords into a search engine. Your aim is to raise the organic traffic of your website, like the traffic you obtain without paying for advertising. Nowadays, search engine optimization is used for different content types, including photos, videos, news and even academic papers. In other words, considering that the popularity of the dropshipping market has increased, it’s crucial to know how to properly use SEO and set you apart from the competition.

One of the most important aspects of SEO is to do a research and find the most relevant keywords for your business. It may be tempting to add as many keywords as you can, but SEO is about finding an equilibrium between more factors, such as the originality, the quality of information, the internal links, your web page structure and many more.

Also, an effective search engine optimization requires to carefully comb your site for any errors or problems that might be holding it back from better Google rankings. There are apps like Google Speed Test that can help you identify the possible problems of your website, such as the poor loading speed or the quality of your website mobile version. In the moment when you will get used to all these factors and concepts, you’ll realize on your own that it's very important to do a very good search engine optimization of your site and your content remains natural, readable, and otherwise user-friendly.

Key concepts of SEO

The length of the content on each page of your website is very important for dropshipping markets. The more relevant keywords you add on content pages, the easier it is for Google to understand what is your page about. The first thing you should do is to include keywords in your text at an optimal ratio of the amount of the overall text. We recommend you to write an optimized text of 350-500 words for each page of your website. Also, don’t forget you must offer your visitors a useful content, that is able to provide a quality experience, so try to make it as natural as possible. If we are talking about a product page, then you can create detailed descriptions for every product.

H1 tags for dropshipping SEO

If you don't understand what exactly is an H1 tag and what's its purpose, try to think about it as the title of a book. This tag is one of the first things that will indicate to the search engines what are the users going to find on your website. If we are talking about a product page, then the H1 tag will be the product name. If it’s a category, it will be the category name. Also, try using intensifiers like ’’the best”, ’’on top”, ’’buy now” etc.

H1 tags shouldn’t contain too many keywords, because Google may consider this to be keyword stuffing and you can receive an over-optimization penalty.

Title Tags for dropshipping SEO

Title tags are very important in dropshipping SEO because they are the first thing that a user will read when searching for a specific keyword. Title tags shouldn’t have more than 65 letters and spaces and they must be relevant to the searches you want to rank for and enticing enough to make the customers want to access your website.

Meta descriptions for dropshipping SEO

Meta descriptions are the texts under the title tags. Try using between 120-160 characters and spaces and offer relevant information, that describe what are the visitors going to find on your website.

In dropshipping SEO, it’s highly recommended to use meta descriptions that encourage users to click your website. Make sure your description tags encourage clicks. Use your meta description to give the visitors a reason to access your site by letting them know what they’ll find there: add information about your prices, a short list of products that will get their attention or any advantages you have compared to the competition. Read the title tags and meta descriptions of higher ranked pages for inspiration and examples. How would you write yours to outrank the competition?

So, as you can see, title tags and meta descriptions are crucial in SEO, because they offer your website more chances to rank better in Google.

Internal links

Internal links are very important for a successful search engine optimization. These are links that point from one page on your site to another and they should always have the HTML tag ’’dofollow”. This way, you are telling Google what are the most important pages on your website and which of them you want to rank better on. Also, internal links help users to easily discover more pages of your website.

In dropshipping SEO, internal links indicate to the search engines which pages you want to rank for specific keywords. Also, they help in categorizing your site for the search engines and boost domain authority. If you have a really good blog post or an infographic page that has a high authority and many quality backlinks, you should add a related internal link to a relevant keyword, because it may help the page to which you are linking rank better.

However, the more internal links you have on a specific page, the less autority this pages will be able to transfer further. For example, if you add two internal links on a page, they will receive 50% autority each. For three links, you transfer only 33.3% autority to every linked page. Also, don’t forget about the navigation, category links, etc. because they are part of this equation.

Backlinks

One of the most important parts of SEO is represented by backlinks; these are links that point from another website back to you. Next to your content, they are the best modality that can help your site rank better on specific keywords. Here are some notions you should include in your SEO vocabulary:

• Dofollow: these links allow the authority transfer and sustain the ranking of your site.
• Nofollow: these are links that send the user to your website, but they don’t pass authority. However, this doesn’t mean you should have only "dofollow” links! You need to have a natural mix between the two kinds of links.
• Anchor text: this is a keyword that carries a link which sends the user to your website.

External links

External links are hosted by your website, but they take your visitors to another. If you are the owner of an e-commerce store, then you should use external links only in your blog posts. Also, before adding external links, ask yourself the following:

• Will adding these external links help my visitors?
• Is the website I’m linking a stable one, that’s going to last for a long time or is it possible that it will suddenly disappear?
• Does that website offer irrelevant or poor quality content for my readers?

If the answer to the first two questions is ”yes” and ”no” for the third one, then you should take into consideration adding a link to this website.

The reason why you don’t want to add external links on a web page where the users can buy certain products is that they will take your visitors off of your shopping page and their attention will be distracted from the main purpose they visited your website: your products!

Canonical Links

The next step you should follow in SEO is to understand what are canonical links. These links are useful if you have several pages with the same content because they show the search engines which page is the one to index in their search results. Suppose you have three different pages that contain the same products, content, and images. This means you have to use canonical links to indicate which one must be indexed because you don’t want all three competing against each other for the same space, nor you want to get a penalization from Google for duplicate content.

SEO instructions for Schema

Schema.org is a platform created by all the major search engines. This provides you with a code and snippets that can tell the search engines what’s specific to your business. For example, you can use a code to show them there is a video on a certain page. This way, you’ll be able to add on the search results page new features that can define a complete user experience, such as a video.

Data feeds in dropshipping SEO

Particularly, when you have a dropshipping business, you have to draw a lot of information about your products, from the descriptions of your photos to detailed descriptions about them. The data feed is a file provided by your supplier, which means it is available to all the merchandisers who want to sell certain products in their store. It’s important to reformulate this information because you don’t want it to be indexed by Google as being duplicate content.

How to do proper SEO

Knowing the key concepts of SEO, it’s high time you found out how to practically use all the information we’ve just presented to you.

Avoid duplicate content

If you have duplicate content it means there is another web page that has the same text as yours. Having in view that dropshipping stores don’t have their own inventory, they use other stores, warehouses and manufacturers’ data feeds. These are XML documents that supply product and inventory to their stores and they are used by any dropshipping store that sells those products. In other words, they are not unique, so the websites created with them end up with problems sometimes referred to as ”duplicate content”.

Unfortunately, search engines don’t know which of the websites should rank better, so those who won’t copy-paste the information from the data feeds will rank above those who will use them as themselves.

A great SEO means unique photos

Even if it might look a little bit complicated in the beginning, creating your own photos will really help you improve your dropshipping SEO rankings. This way, you’ll be able to distinguish your products from other markets who are selling the same dropshipped items as you (possibly even from the same suppliers) while also avoiding duplicate content. If you don’t have the possibility to make your own pictures, then download the photos from the data feed and rename them so they can describe the product in the image. After that, upload them to your database and server.

Don’t forget that it's very important how you choose to rename your pictures. For example, if you sell small and medium blue hats, try not to confuse the search engines by calling them the same. ’’Medium blue hats” and ’’small blue hats” are two names which will help your SEO and offer you more chances to rank better for certain keywords.

Add ALT tags to your images

The next thing you must do is to add ALT tags to your images. Search engines can’t visualize a picture, so they don’t actually see that a blue hat is a blue hat. Alt tags help them find out what a picture is about, so they can show your photo to the users. It appears in the HTML like this: "insert_alt_tag_here"

Optimize your image titles

The image titles should be similar or the same as their names and alt tags. Again, don’t add too many keywords because this could be seen as “keyword stuffing” and may result in penalization.

Be a master in describing your products

You already know that the unchanged descriptions taken from the data feeds are considered duplicate content and that a unique content can set you apart from the competition. This way, in order to achieve a complete SEO, reformulate the products descriptions so you can provide your users original, useful and real information. This way, you have more chances to rank better on strong and competitive keywords.

Offer the products specs

In dropshipping SEO, it’s very important to add the specifications for each product you sell. Of course, they must be unique, so don’t copy-paste them from the data feed. Find a personal way to change them, but without losing the essence of the information.

Things you must avoid in SEO

When you have a dropshipping business, it’s highly recommended to know that many of the black hat tactics can lead to your website getting penalized. Unfortunately, you risk not being able to rank again or you’d have to work even more just to get the penalty removed. More than this, if you do get a penalty, it can take years for it to be lifted. That’s why you should know what things you must avoid in dropshipping SEO:

• Link exchanges. Avoid reciprocal linking – this is one of the most harmful practices that can bring you a penalization from Google.
• Link farms.
• Sponsored posts. If you give money to other people or influencers just to obtain a “dofollow” link, then you should know that this practice may affect the ranking of your (and their) site. You may want to collaborate with influencers, but make sure that every link has the “nofollow” HTML, so your website can avoid a penalty.
• Automated links building. There are several softwares that can publish comments on blogs, forums and other communities for you. This can affect the image of your brand among the online communities and bloggers. Also, you can get penalized by Google.
• Directory submissions. You can do this only if they are 100% niche, content relevant and manually updated. Going with ‘nofollow’ is much smarter if you do choose to use these.

As you can see dropshipping SEO is more complicated and can take more time than usual. Also, once you’ll see the results of your work, it’s necessary to keep going, because otherwise, you’ll lose your high ranked position on specific keywords. Also, you may find out that it’s complicated to do SEO on your own, so the best thing you could do is to work with a professional SEO agency.