The goal of every merchant is to drive high quality traffic to their store and convert those visitors into buyers. The goal of every major search engine is to provide users with the content they need by ranking the most functional and informative sites at the top.

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with the following topics before continuing:

• Optimizing for SEO

Optimizing Your Store for Natural Search

The ChannelAdvisor Store offers several ways to increase the visibility of your store on natural search. Here are several ways that you can drive more quality traffic to your store:

• Add META Keywords and a META Description for your Store Home Page
• Use a CNAME redirect for Search Engine Optimization
• Add META Keywords and descriptions to your Store Category pages
• Add  the META Description  to your individual SKUs in your store inventory
• Include Relevant Content on the Item Detail Pages
• Set up your Store Optional Pages
• Configure Google Analytics

Home Page META Keywords & Description

The META description and keywords on your home page tell a search engine the kind of content to expect on the site. The META description is also displayed on the Google search results page offering a summary of the site to the user. The HTML Title populates the title bar of the browser. The process requires much thought, as this involves developing an identity for the Store. Consider the products to be sold, the audience to be reached, the long term goals, and objectives for the store.

Go to Stores > Stores > Name and Logo

EXAMPLE:

CNAME Redirect Setup

A best practice for natural search / search engine optimization (SEO) is to contact your domain name provider (example: godaddy.com) and redirect your domain name (www.mystore.com) to your ChannelAdvisor store.

This can be accomplished by setting up a CNAME redirect to direct users that type your domain name to your ChannelAdvisor Store.

We offer instructions on both a Basic CNAME redirect tutorial (for users who are using ChannelAdvisor Stores for ALL of their store pages) as well as an Advanced CNAME redirect tutorial (for users who are using their primary domain name to point to their own hosted home page and category pages.

Note: Some domain name providers will call this URL cloaking or URL hiding which is the same function as URL masking. 

Store Category META Keywords and Description

In your ChannelAdvisor store, you can set-up categories and sub-categories. Give your categories names that are relevant to the inventory items assigned to the category, keep the names short, and if possible use dashes instead of spaces.

Once you have your categories set up complete the description fields. From Stores > Stores > Categories, go into each category and sub-category and complete both the short and long description fields with relevant content. The short description will populate the keywords META tag and the long description will be visible on the category home page as well as populate the description META tag with the first 200 characters.

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Inventory Item Details

The inventory item’s Store Title and the SKU are used in a few places in the store. The image ALT text (the text that appears when hovering over an image), the browser bar title, and the URL display the item title and SKU. All of this is used by search engines to determine relevance so it is best to align your title and SKU with pertinent keywords.

• Inventory Store Description - The inventory item’s store description displays below the item image and can include HTML formatting. You should use this field to include a description of the inventory item in a way that is appealing to buyers.
• Inventory Store META Description - The Store META Description is a separate field to summarize your item for search engines. This field should contain the same information as your store description, but it should be more concise and it should not include any formatting.

EXAMPLE:

Include Relevant Content on the Item Detail Pages

Customize your item detail page layouts to include relevant content that will enhance the buyer’s experience as well as help search engine rankings. Populate the Subtitle HTML and Layout HTML with content that will help sell your products, use template tags to make this content relevant to individual products. Go to Stores > Stores > Store Layout > Customize Item Detail Page Layout  and click on the link at the top to "Customize Default Layout".

EXAMPLE:

Set-up your Store Optional Pages

Every ChannelAdvisor Store comes with 5 optional tabs. The tabs can appear as links to pages. These pages might be your terms & conditions, about me information, contact information, refund information, payment methods, customer service or shipping information. Populate these pages with content that is useful to your buyers and helpful to search engines determining the relevance of your site. Fill in the META keywords and description for each of these pages too. Go to Stores > Stores > Store Layout > Customize Optional Tabs on your Storefront.

EXAMPLE:

Configure Google Analytics

What are people searching for to get to your site? By implementing Google Analytics on your site you will have insight into the keywords that drive quality traffic to your store. Use this data to optimize inventory fields, META data, categories, and static content on your site. Go to Stores > Stores > Tracking.

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