What is SEO? Why should your shop care?

In today’s world, a business without a website is almost unheard of. With the majority of people now using the internet to search for local services, shop online, and even find new jobs, it’s important to establish an online presence. Not only does it help customers research and find your business easily, it can also drive valuable sales leads. But just having a website isn’t enough, you need to also think about how customers can find your business online. Simply searching on Google “heavy truck parts supplier” will bring up a long list of other suppliers and not necessarily show your website. How can you get your website to rank up there with your competitors? This is where SEO comes into play.

What is SEO?

SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimization”. Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website to increase the quantity and quality of your online “organic” traffic from search engine results. Basically, SEO works by demonstrating to the search engine that the content on your webpage is relevant to the searched topic. 

Now a big question is, which search engine should you optimize your web pages for? With different choices like Google, Bing and Yahoo, you definitely can’t optimize for them all, especially since they all use different search algorithms. When it comes to selling your heavy truck parts online, at ITrack we focus on optimizing our client web pages to meet Google’s ranking factors. Google has a market share of around 92%, making it the most used search engine and your best bet for customers finding your website and inventory.

Using SEO To Rank Higher In Search Results

Google has at least 200 different factors they use for ranking web pages. This means that each of your web pages needs to be optimized to meet at least some of these factors to even have a chance of ranking in search results. Once again, you can’t optimize for all of these ranking factors, so we have chosen a handful of factors that we hyper focus on for our client websites. Our main goal when creating websites for our clients is to help bring in traffic – both from marketing and searching – that will increase their online presence as well as their online sales.

Google Ranking Factors

• Crawlability
  • Crawling is where Google follows links on web pages they already know to web pages they haven’t seen. This means that Google will follow a link on another web page to your web page (also known as a backlink) and add it to their index of web pages. Google will then crawl the links on your homepage to find other pages on your site. This is a way to show Google that your site actually exists and is discoverable.
    
    One easy way that we improve the crawlability of each web page is by including internal linking. Internal linking just means that each web page will include links to other web pages from your website – like the navigation in the header or footer.
    
    We also create sitemaps and use pretty permalinks. A sitemap is a way to list all internal links on one page, making it easier for Google to crawl your site. Pretty permalinks are used to create easy to understand and easy to search URLs. 
• Mobile-Friendliness
  • Nowadays, around 63% of Google searches come from mobile devices (like cellphones and tablets). As the years go, that number will only continue to grow which is why Google has increased the importance of a mobile-friendly website.
    
    Our team works with the mentality of mobile-first – we design with mobile-friendliness in mind from the start. Web pages are designed to be dynamic, meaning that viewed at any size the web page will shift to fit and display the information in an easy to understand and aesthetically appealing way. 
• Pagespeed
  • A slow loading web page leads to an increased number of visitors leaving before even seeing what your shop has to offer. Google wants to keep its users satisfied (so do we!) so it ranks slow web pages lower, allowing the faster, more “satisfying” web pages to be ranked first.
    
    At ITrack, we use Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool to check the speed of websites we’ve created for our clients. This is a tool created by Google that not only checks a web page’s speed, but also creates a list of issues that are affecting the speed of your website.
• Keywords
  • Keywords are words that are included in your web page’s content that you want people to search for on Google and have your website display in the results. If you sell heavy truck parts, you probably want your homepage to rank for “heavy truck parts for sale”, meaning that someone can use Google to search for “heavy truck parts for sale” and your website will be listed.
    
    Each web page we create, we focus on relevant keywords and keyphrases, using them throughout the content. We also use two different tools to help our client websites rank even higher.
    
    For web pages and websites that use our Online Inventory plugin, we’ve created our own SEO plugin. It automatically assigns keywords that match what items you have listed for sale in your inventory, improving the ranking for each product web page.
    
    For websites and web pages that do not use our Online Inventory Plugin, we use the Yoast SEO plugin. This plugin allows us to manually assign keywords and keyphrases to each web page and provides a list of ways to improve keyword usage.
• Content Quality
  • Google looks for web pages that provide relevant information to what is being searched and will list the most reliable and useful results.
    
    We focus on creating content that is easy-to-understand, accessible, and proves that our clients are professionals in the heavy truck industry. Some tips that we keep in mind are shorter and easier-to-read sentences and paragraphs, links to useful resources and backlinks, and using images and videos. We also follow the popular concept of E-A-T. E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. This is a method used to help provide content that proves your web pages are “useful” for the current search. We make sure that any content we add shows a high level of knowledge in the heavy truck industry, proves the reputation of your business and shows legitimacy and accuracy.

Why should your shop care about SEO?

No matter the size of your shop, having an online presence and a website that is designed to meet Google’s Ranking Factors is a proven way to drive traffic to your site and increase your sales. In a world full of spammers, having a well-working website with relevant and accurate content is a way to prove to customers that you are a real, trustworthy business. That’s why we have an expert team of designers and developers dedicated to creating reliable and dynamic websites for our clients. We work with you to make sure that your website properly represents your business, not only in colors but also content. 

Let’s Talk Shop

Let’s talk about your shop website and come up with ideas together on how we can improve your online presence and sales.