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Though it’s not as widely used as content management systems like Shopify or Dupal, Volusion is a popular choice for highly trafficked ecommerce websites. Nearly as popular as Joomla and more popular than Wix, in fact:
As more ecommerce shoppers start the buyer’s journey with a search engine, more Volusion sites are attempting to capitalize on the opportunity for traffic. To do it, they’re using a proven digital marketing strategy known as Volusion SEO.
What is Volusion SEO?
Volusion SEO (search engine optimization) — a type of ecommerce SEO — is a digital marketing strategy that uses tactics like keyword research and link building to improve the position of Volusion websites on search engine results pages (SERPs). By doing this, Volusion SEO can improve organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Since SEO is an organic digital marketing tactic, it requires less budgetary commitment than paid advertising strategies like PPC (pay per click), making it a highly effective strategy for both small businesses and enterprises. What’s more, it can deliver compounding ROI over time.
Is Volusion SEO-friendly?
Out of the box, Volusion offers features to help you improve your SEO. These include tools for enabling canonical tags, search-friendly URLs, meta titles, meta descriptions, editing robots.txt files, and more.
Compared to other ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce or Magento, it offers a fair amount of flexibility. Where some content management systems for ecommerce require workarounds for advanced SEO tactics like canonicalization and robots.txt files, Volusion makes these possible to edit in the platform. The company also offers in-house digital marketing services for online businesses that use its platform.
The best SEO tactics for your Volusion store
Though an SEO-friendly ecommerce platform can help you improve your search engine rankings, it won’t do all the work for you. For the most part, where you rank in search engines is up to you.
So, how do you succeed with Volusion SEO to improve the organic traffic of your ecommerce business? With proven tactics in the areas of on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
On-page Volusion SEO tactics
To succeed with on-page SEO, you need to improve the visible content on your website. Here are some SEO tips that will help you do it:
Content marketing
Content marketing is about not just creating content, but creating content that satisfies specific audience desires throughout the buyer’s journey. Through blogging, product page creation, video marketing, email marketing, etc, an ecommerce store can develop many different ways to accommodate the needs of its various audiences. Use a tool like Google analytics to discover which are your most popular pieces of content, and which could use improvement.
Keyword research
By doing keyword research, you can find out what words people are using to find your product. Then, you can put those words in key areas on your pages, signaling to Google that you have relevant content that searchers should see.
Detailed image alt text
Image alt text is text that accompanies your images, intended for screen-reading software which reads aloud to visitors with impairments. Alt text is also used by search engine crawlers to better understand your page. Write image alt text in sentence format and be descriptive. Include your focus keyword in the text but don’t force it. Google may mark it as spam if you do.
Search intent satisfaction
There’s a difference between someone searching “bike helmet” and “how to pick a bike helmet.” One is looking for a product and the other is looking for information. This is known as search intent. What does the searcher want to find when they search a keyword phrase? Studying page one of search results for the term, and knowing the various types of search intent will help you figure it out. And when you know intent, you can create hyper-relevant content to satisfy it, which will improve the likelihood you show up on page one of search results for the term.
Meta tag optimization
Search engine listings are made up of meta titles and meta descriptions. These are what your visitors see on SERPs. The better they are, the more likely visitors are to click through your results. And SEO experts believe that SERP CTR (click-through rate) is a factor that contributes to search engine rankings.
Off-page Volusion SEO tactics
Google doesn’t just measure the SEO on your pages. It measures how the rest of the internet interacts with those pages, too. This is called off-page SEO.
Mostly, Google looks for backlinks. Backlinks are links back to your web pages from other pages. When you get a backlink from another site, it means the site trusts and values your content enough to send its users to it. To Google, this is an important indicator of authority and credibility.
The more high-quality backlinks you have, the better you will look to Google. And so off-page Volusion SEO tactics are mostly about trying to earn backlinks to prove your value. Here’s how to do it:
Social media marketing
Links from social media don’t count as backlinks, but they have been shown to help you generate more backlinks. This makes sense, as the more social links you generate, the more likely it is people consume your content and link to it.
Partnership building
Ecommerce brands have a number of outlets to generate more exposure. Influencer marketing, PR releases, product features in relevant publishers, brand cross-promotions, etc, can all contribute to backlink generation.
Link building
The tactics above are about improving exposure to boost the chances you get a link back to your site. Link-building tactics are specifically for building links. They include fixing dead links, finding unlinked mentions, creating coupons, and more.
Technical Volusion SEO tactics
Technical SEO is about improving your site’s unseen backend to make it perform as well as it is designed. If your site doesn’t load fast, or if search engine crawlers can’t find all your pages, it doesn’t matter how good your content is — nobody’s going to see it.
Since it requires knowledge of website architecture, technical SEO oftentimes necessitates the help of marketing experts in an SEO company or in-house SEO team. Here’s what a technical SEO strategy includes for Volusion stores:
An XML sitemap
Submitting an XML sitemap makes it so crawlers don’t have to find your pages manually through internal links. They’ll know exactly where to find your pages, which means none of them will be missed and left out of search results.
Create a robots.txt file
A robots.txt file allows you to tell Google how to specifically crawl certain pages, or even to leave some out of search engines — like admin pages and shopping cart pages, for example.
Improve page load speed
Google has made it clear that page load speed is an official ranking factor. Still, many sites load slowly, which in turn increases the odds of user bounce. To improve your page load speed, consider using a cache, lazy loading, minifying JS and compressing CSS, or even building pages with AMP’s lightweight HTML.
Use canonical tags on duplicate content
Google won’t penalize you for creating duplicate content (identical pages with unique URLs), but it will only index one version of your page. If it’s the wrong one, it could negatively impact your rankings. Canonicalization will allow you to tell Google which page you want showing up in search engine results.
Prioritize mobile website design
Google wants to send users to sites that prioritize mobile-friendly web design, since more users access the web via mobile than desktop now. Today, new sites will be ranked by their mobile user experience before their desktop one, which means your content should accommodate users of several device types and screen sizes. Without high-quality mobile functionality, your rankings will suffer.
Label your content with schema
To make our content easier for search engines to process, you can use schema. Schema is a kind of labeling language, and it can help your content show up on SERPs as “rich snippets,” which are more robust search listings that can include things like reviews, images, and more.
Create SEO-friendly URLs
The best URLs are ones that are easy for Google and your users to understand. They’re simple, but descriptive, they use your keyword, and they don’t contain long random strings of letters and numbers. Visitors should know what the page is about based on the URL.
Get a complimentary Volusion SEO audit
Though not as flexible or powerful as WordPress for SEO, the Volusion ecommerce platform does come equipped with some basic SEO tools for your online store. That’s especially true in the case of robots.txt files and canonicalization, which other popular platforms require workarounds for.
Still, when it comes to moving up search engine results pages, it’s ultimately up to you. The SEO tips above will get you started on your mission to reach page 1.
Want to see how you’re doing with Volusion SEO? Get an instant SEO audit below. Or, schedule a free consultation to see how intent SEO can boost search traffic revenue by 700%.