The Beginner’s Guide to SEO for Dropshipping Businesses

You won’t need any prior knowledge to learn SEO here if you are completely unfamiliar with the concept. Anyone looking to gain a basic understanding of SEO for beginners will gain invaluable tips for increasing the amount of organic traffic their store or webpage receives.

This beginner’s guide to SEO is tailored to those working in the dropshipping industry or who have data feed-based stores, but it is also appropriate for those who are unfamiliar with the concept. The use of search engine optimization (SEO) for your business is something that you as a dropshipping store owner should be aware of before creating your website because dropshipping sites have a different set of SEO challenges to overcome than stores that maintain their own inventory.

In other words, creating quality writing that adds knowledge and presents information in a way that is helpful to your readers is also important for SEO. This SEO guide is divided into two main sections; the first section covers key SEO concepts, and the second section delves into specific SEO best practices that you should adhere to in order to succeed.

Before you learn how to use SEO for your business, it’s important to keep in mind that there are many different factors to consider as Google is becoming more sophisticated in its analysis of quality content, so it’s crucial to comprehend the various factors the algorithms are using to rank your content.

SEO for Beginners

What is SEO

Since this is an article on SEO for beginners, and we did say you don’t need any background knowledge to get something out of reading this post, let’s first talk about the fundamentals of what SEO actually is. The goal here is to increase organic traffic to your site, i.e. It is an incredible strategy for increasing sales without having to heavily rely on forking over cash for a sizable marketing budget by acquiring traffic that you acquire without the use of paid advertising.

Why use SEO for dropshipping business

With dropshipping ecommerce becoming a more and more well-liked business model, knowing how to use SEO effectively can be a crucial component of standing out from the competition. SEO is actually used for several different types of content searches, including photo, video, news, and even academic papers.

Use SEO effectively

Incorporating thoroughly researched keywords into your content is one fundamental aspect of SEO. SEO is made up of many different interrelated practices, and it only works best when you account for all of them. Examining your site for errors or issues that may be preventing it from rising in the Google rankings is another crucial step in learning how to use SEO effectively.

Websites like Screaming Frog can help you identify such issue factors as slow loading time and mobile friendliness to the URL structure and formatting of your content. It can be tempting to stuff those keywords into the article as much as possible, but SEO strategies are really about striking the best balance possible among a number of different factors, such as originality, writing quality, internal linking, site structure, social proof, and more.

This is one of the most important aspects of understanding how to use SEO to the advantage of your business, but you should be cautious about doing so. Above all else, you want to make sure the piece of content remains natural, readable, and otherweise user-friendly. It can be tempting to stuff a piece of content with as many instances of a given keyword or to stuff it with a ton of internal links, but as you become more familiar with the various concepts and factors that are key to SEO, you’ll quickly realize how important it is to optimize your product page with keywords, links, and so on.

Also keep in mind that learning how to use SEO for your company is a process that takes time and commitment; the best results come from a long-term approach and a commitment to learning about and staying current with the various aspects of SEO practice, which are constantly changing as the internet develops more sophisticated analytical capabilities.

Now that you have a basic understanding of SEO and how Google determines rankings, let’s explore some of the key SEO concepts in more detail to see how they can be used to successfully increase rankings and organic traffic. You can use this knowledge as the basis for your understanding of the best SEO practices.

SEO Guide: Key Concepts

We must first discuss a few key ideas because without them, no SEO guide would be complete, especially one that aims to explain SEO to beginners. Then, we will discuss the practical ways you can improve your SEO rankings.

SEO Guidelines for Keyword Counts

This is in fact one of the most important and well-known elements of learning SEO. The number of words you use on your content page affects how well your website performs in SEO.

One of the most crucial steps in learning how to use SEO properly is to make sure that the content is useful to your user so that they will have a beneficial experience when visiting your store. You can start optimizing the text itself with keywords, links, and other techniques to raise your rankings. For this reason, as part of this SEO guide, we advise that you include at least 350 to 500 words per page. The first aspect of using keywords in your web text is including them at an optimal ratio with the amount of text overall.

Instead, make an effort to be careful with the content you include on your website. If you’re looking to include more content on a category page, for instance, try adding content in the form of an introduction to welcome visitors. However, if it’s a product page, you can add content that thoroughly describes each product. Stuffing content at the bottom of a page or burying it under a menu or another expandable field can cause site penalties because you want the text to look natural and be helpful to visitors.

If you’re stuck for words, ask yourself these questions: What is it? Who is it for? Where can I use it? When is the best time to use it? Why should my customers use it? How should they use it? Don’t forget to describe your product’s competitive advantage.

H1 Tags for Dropshipping SEO

Let’s talk about titles and tags now. Your H1 tag, which search engines read like a book’s title, is one of the first things that describes what a visitor will find on your webpage. If it’s a category page, the H1 tag will be the name of the category. Try using modifiers like “Best,” “Top,” and “Buy.” Here is a list of modifiers you can use to get started.

Don’t stuff your H1 tags full of keywords, as Google might consider this spam and you might even get penalized for over-optimization, just like we did with image names and alt tags, which we will talk about later. In the poor example below, “blue hats” is used repeatedly; this is an example of “keyword stuffing.”

A useful H1 tag:

Blue Hats

Negative H1 tags:

Buy blue hats from your local blue hat store right now.

Title Tags for Dropshipping SEO

It should also be pertinent to the search terms you want to rank for while still being compelling enough to get someone to click on it. When someone uses a search engine, the title tag is what appears in the search results; according to Moz, the title tag should be under 55 characters.

With so many uses, it is crucial that you make the title tag descriptive, succinct, and user-friendly. The title tag also appears in a person’s browser history. When someone bookmarks a specific page and uses the browser buttons in the top left corner of the screen to navigate forward and backward, the title tag is also what appears in the Bookmarks tab.

How to Use SEO in Your Meta Descriptions

You’ll really stand out from the competition if you master this portion of our SEO beginner’s guide. When you use a search engine, meta descriptions appear immediately below the title tag. Keep them between 120 and 155 characters, and they should be pertinent and describe what the user will find on the page if they click through.

Read the title tags and meta descriptions of higher ranked pages for inspiration and examples on how to do this. You could do this by including information about a great price, a how-to guide, or an attention-grabbing list in the meta description. How can you produce work that surpasses them? Make sure your description tags encourage clicks, especially when it comes to dropshipping SEO. Give the person a reason to want to click through to your site by describing what they’ll find in your meta description.

How to Use Internal Links for SEO

Internal links, which are links pointing from one page on your site to another and are distinctly different from backlinks and external links, are another crucial component of understanding how to use SEO. In other words, internal links help your customers find other pages on your website while also informing search engines about which pages to rank. Internal links must always have the “do follow” html tag to instruct search engine web crawlers to visit the page they are linking to, which passes ranking authority from that page to the following.

Internal links in dropshipping SEO help categorize your website for the search engines and increase domain authority. They also let the search engines know which pages you want to rank for particular keywords. A related internal link to a descriptive keyword may help the page to which you are linking rank higher if you have an excellent blog post or infographic page with a lot of high authority, quality backlinks.

If you have three internal links and one is high up in your content and the other two are lower, the higher one may get 60% of the authority and the bottom two may get 20% each. The creation of an effective internal linking structure is explained here. Keeping this in mind, the more internal links there are on a page, the less authority each of them can transfer.

As you can see, internal links are crucial to SEO. Include them when they are pertinent and related, and be careful not to overdo it. This way, you’ll achieve the right balance for boosting rankings without making your content seem unnatural.

Backlinks in SEO

Avoid buying backlinks to raise your domain authority because your site will be penalized. Search engines go to great lengths to ensure that a website’s backlinks are organic. Backlinks, or links that point from one website to another, are one of the most crucial ways to get a website to rank highly in search engines and they play a significant role in directing traffic back to your site when learning how to SEO.

The key terminology for backlinks that you should be aware of is as follows:

1. Do follow: These pass authority and help your site rank better.
2. No follow: These link to you, but they do not pass authority so they will not help your website rank. They contain rel=”nofollow” somewhere in the <a href=” “> tag. You need a natural mix of do and no follow links.
3. Keyword rich (anchor text): These are links off of specific phrases or keywords (anchors).
4. Natural: Natural links will be based off of your company name, your name, or a variation of your URL or brand.
5. Unnatural: Unnatural links are when you have tracking parameters attached, do follow links in sponsored posts, or anything that wouldn’t have occurred naturally like links to a category page on an ecommerce site, for example, an affiliate link.

Don’t build too many backlinks that are keyword-rich or unnatural; keep the percentage under 20%, ideally even 10%, of your total backlink profile.

How to Better Use External Links in SEO

Understanding how external links factor into the equation is another crucial component of this beginner’s guide to SEO. If you operate an ecommerce site, only use external links in blog posts. When you reference a website or make a point that will be of interest to your audience, you should consider including an external link.

Read Google’s guidelines on do follow vs. no follow links before adding any external links, and then consider the following:

1. Will linking to this website benefit my reader?
2. Is the page I’m linking to going to be around for a long time, or could this site go under?
3. Is there other content on the site that might be irrelevant or not good for my readers?

It’s probably a good idea to link to this website if you answered “yes” to the first two questions but “no” to the third.

External links should not be placed on a shopping page because doing so will direct visitors away from the page, which may discourage them from making a purchase.

Canonical Links in SEO

Canonical links are links that inform search engines which page to index in their search results if a website has three pages that all have the same product, content, and image. You might also want to use canonical links if you’re conducting a split test experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of a few of the pages in your store. Notably, you don’t want all three competing with one another for space, nor do you want duplicate content issues as we discussed earlier in this SEO guide; instead, you would use a canonical link to indicate which is the right one to index.

Create a Sitemap for Your Dropshipping SEO Strategy

Make sure your sitemap does not contain any pages with a 404 or 301 redirect. You can make sitemaps in a variety of ways with links, and XML feeds, among other straightforward methods; they’re broken down from the highest level pages on your site and include categories, subcategories, and product pages. A sitemap, which is essentially just a list of all the pages on your website that Google should be aware of, is a crucial SEO beginner tip.

How Paginated Pages Can Boost Your Rankings

Rel prev and rel next allow you to direct a user’s attention through a paginated series without fear of being penalized by Google for duplicate content, as was mentioned earlier in this beginner’s guide to SEO. Previously, you would have needed to use a canonical link to a page that contained all of your products, but now that Google has created them, you can do so. Pagination, which is a term for a set of pages on your website, is an additional crucial component of learning how to use SEO. Consider a product category page that has pages 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.

SEO Guidelines for Schema

For instance, code is used to indicate that a video is present on the page. The following information on Schema is essential for anyone learning SEO for the first time: Schema.org is a tool created by all of the major search engines, and it gives you the coding and snippets you need to describe your page to the engines.

In particular, adding schema markup to your pages will help the major search engines understand what the page is about (it’s much simpler than you think, so don’t let it overwhelm you). You then give them new features to show in the search results (videos, images next to a result, and further define the user experience) as well as what the end user will find on your page. As a dropshipping and data feed site, schema can help you gain an advantage over competitors. Schema is a significant and frequently disregarded component of SEO.

Data feeds and Dropshipping SEO

Data feeds are without a doubt very helpful for ecommerce store owners, especially when the products are being dropshipped, as they are a file of information made available by your supplier that is accessible for merchants to use as they import items into their stores. You may have noticed the phrase “data feed” mentioned a few times throughout this post before we move on to the practical tips and techniques you can use to improve your rankings and organic traffic for SEO. Just keep in mind that copying and pasting a data feed’s contents into your store without making any changes will be viewed as duplicate content. Particularly if you are dropshipping, it is likely that you are getting a lot of information about your products from an existing product data feed, including descriptions, photos, and basic product data.

How to SEO: Tips & Tricks

The second part of this SEO primer for beginners is full of practical advice you can use to put the knowledge we’ve covered so far to good use. Now that the key ideas behind using SEO effectively have been covered, you can put it to use.

Avoid Using Duplicate Content

Duplicate content, which is when two websites have the same content (and, in extreme cases, the exact same code), should be avoided whenever possible, is something that should be emphasized in every beginner’s SEO guide.

Dropshippers rely heavily on data feeds, which are the XML feeds and spreadsheets that supply product and inventory to their stores, since they typically don’t hold inventory.

Because the content, images, descriptions, and everything else in the feed are shared with every site using it, it isn’t “unique,” and as a result, the duplicate content issue, which affects some websites, occurs.

Data feed sites seldom achieve good SEO rankings if they use the feed provided (duplicate) content, for this reason it’s also important to follow our SEO beginner guidelines using the additional tips below to make up for any usage of this data feed information in your rankings.

To help distinguish your website from other retailers who use the same feeds, start with the following.

Improve Your SEO Rankings with Unique Images

Taking your own original product photos is the next tip for improving rankings on this SEO guide, and while it might require a little extra work at first, it will really help you improve your dropshipping SEO rankings. While avoiding duplicate content, you’ll be able to differentiate your products from those of other retailers who are selling the same dropshipped items as you (possibly even from the same suppliers).

Remember that the names you give your images matter; if your e-commerce site sells medium-sized and large blue hats, you don’t want to confuse the search engines by giving them the same name. Even though it might seem insignificant, this crucial step in our beginner’s guide to SEO is something you shouldn’t overlook because it will make the image medium-blue-hat.jpg and large-blue-hat.jpg more search engine friendly.

Add Alt Tags to Your Images

Here, it can be seen in HTML: The next actionable tip in this beginner’s guide to SEO is to make your alt tag reflect the name of the image, as this is one of the factors many search engines use to determine what an image is about and when to show it to a searcher.

Insert your alt tag here: img src=”image_url”>

Optimize Your Image Titles

Adding image titles and captions, which should be similar to or identical to the image name and alt tag if you decide to use them, is another essential component of understanding how to use SEO effectively. The HTML title=”insert title here” section needs to contain the title attribute.

Again, this could be interpreted as “keyword stuffing” and lead to punishment, so don’t go overboard here either.

A third-party app like Minifier can be used as an alternative to optimize your image filenames, ALT tags, and Titles.

Become a Master of Product Descriptions

One of the more crucial issues you’ll want to address is that the product descriptions you import, if left unchanged, are also regarded as duplicate content. As we’ve already established, having original and helpful content on your pages will help you stand out from your rivals. Think about rewriting your lengthy and concise product descriptions to increase your dropshipping SEO.

If you can nail your product descriptions, then you’ll be well on your way to knowing how to SEO for your ecommerce store. Writing original, helpful, and accurate descriptions will be key in getting these pages to pick up both long tail and highly competitive keywords. If your product descriptions are the same as everyone else’s, you run the risk of not being found in search engines, so one of the many crucial SEO guidelines is that both the long and short descriptions must be unique.

Display Your Product Specs

Although the search engines expect the specifications to be equal in nature, that doesn’t mean you can’t give details about what they mean or display them in a unique and more helpful way. If your products have specs that come with a data feed, in dropshipping SEO, find a unique way to display or talk about the specs rather than merely copy-pasting the information.

Analyze Competitors

As we mentioned before, knowing how to use SEO effectively for your ecommerce website can be a crucial component of standing out from the competition. Thus, it’s important to know exactly who you are competing with — and for what — before publishing or optimizing any pages aimed at ranking for a specific keyword.

SimplyTrends, a spy tool designed for ecommerce seller, makes locating your most relevant competitors in your niche easy with competitor-surfacing metrics like “Discover competitors” and “ Timeline View” From here, you can keep a watchful eye on your competition — existing and emerging — and discover any website update they make.

Beginner’s Guide to SEO: What Not To Do

There are a ton of SEO beginner tips available with side steps and shortcuts for obtaining quick backlinks or otherwise increasing traffic without having to make the commitment to learning SEO in-depth.

Here are a few more tips on what to avoid doing when attempting to optimize your online store and increase organic traffic to it. However, many of the blackhat techniques you’ll come across in dropshipping SEO may eventually result in your website being penalized, which would unfortunately result in you being unable to rank again and requiring even more work to have the penalty removed. The last point to make in this guide on how to use SEO for your business is that it’s crucial you don’t cut corners. If you do receive a penalty, it can take years for it to be lifted.

As you build links, REMOVE the following:

1. Directory submissions: Unless they are 100% niche, content relevant and manually updated. Going with ‘no follow’ is much smarter if you do choose to use these.
2. Blog comments: Don’t use these, especially off of keywords.
3. Forum comments and links: Because they’re so easy to do and anyone can get them, the search engines frown on forum comments and links.
4. Automated link builders: These are software programs that use bots and spiders to comment on blogs, forums and communities for you. Using this method can create a bad brand image within relevant online communities and among bloggers. Also, the backlinks are easily mapped to your site, making you more likely to be penalized.
5. Link exchanges: Try to avoid reciprocal linking. Too many of these look unnatural and is actually one of the first SEO malpractices to be made into a penalty by Google.
6. Link farms: Sites and services that go out and create link farms are another way to get mapped and penalized.
7. Sponsored posts: Giving people or influencers money or products in exchange for a post with a ‘do follow’ link may cause your website (and theirs) to get penalized. You probably will want to work with real influencers, but make sure everything is ‘no follow’ so that your site doesn’t increase its risk of getting penalized.

SEO for Beginners: Conclusion

The basics of better optimizing your store through SEO are covered in this SEO guide, regardless of whether you have a data feed, dropshipping ecommerce store, or you warehouse the product.

You are already on the right path to getting started with SEO if you practice and follow these beginner’s guidelines! Dropshipping SEO is not a quick or easy way to boost traffic; it can take a complex level of knowledge to truly master it, and it requires a long-term approach. However, it is important to keep in mind that part of making these tips and key concepts work for you is that you update your content frequently.

Additionally, once you start to see the results of your efforts, you’ll realize that SEO is essential to increasing organic traffic to your e-commerce site, so be persistent and never give up!