Are you a dropshipper struggling to get Google traffic to your website?
You’ve probably asked the question in Dropshipping FaceBook groups and the like “how do I get more visitors to my website?” and you’ve been told that you need to do some search engine optimization (SEO), and so you’ve typed “SEO for dropshipping” into Google and here you are. You’ve probably become so bamboozled with all the “do’s and don’ts” of marketing that you might have doubts about whether dropshipping is worth it or not?
I’m an SEO consultant, copywriter and I have been a dropshipping store owner too. I understand how important search engine ranking is for dropshipping websites that carry the same products as competitors and I’ve learned the best tactics to use to get search engines such as Bing and Google to take notice.
So, in this blog I want to share with you the lessons I’ve learned along the way about SEO, dropshipping, ecommerce businesses and how you can improve your search rankings to attract potential customers to your website and make more sales.
Why does SEO matter for dropshipping?
Dropshipping is a highly competitive way of selling products online. As a drop shipper, you advertise products you don’t actually make or have yourself, and when you make a sale the manufacturer/wholesaler sends that product directly to your customer.
Literally anyone can start a dropshipping business with little capital, and many people do. It doesn’t matter how big or small your dropshipping operation happens to be; you have a ton of competition selling exactly the same products at you, at similar profit margins trying to send Google users to their website instead of yours (other major search engines exist but Google is seen as the gold standard within the industry).
And to stay ahead of your competition without cutting into your profits too much, search engine optimisation is important. It’s a natural way of getting high on search results pages through having a well-designed website that works well, and optimised copy and content that shows what your potential customers want to see, so the search engine algorithms see your website as better than the competition.
It is a little more complicated than that, but essentially that’s what SEO for dropshipping is all about and why it’s so important.
SEO vs Paid Ads for Dropshipping Websites
Pay per click adverts are an expensive way to promote your website.
Yes, they can work well when you stumble across the right combination of graphics, messaging, offer and call to action but it takes time, trial and error and hard work to achieve that. And, you have to replicate the effect with most of the products you sell (which btw is impossible, you’ll probably find only a handful of products work well when it comes to paid advertising through Facebook Ads, Instagram, Pinterest or Google Ads).
As you probably started your drop shipping business because you don’t have the capital to hold inventory, chances are you don’t have a high marketing budget either, at least until you’ve sold a few products and started generating a profit.
With paid ads you also run the risk of your competition clicking your sponsored links to run down your daily budget and get their adverts shown instead. Yes, PPC fraud and dodgy competitor tactics is a real thing and can hit you hard in the pocket.
SEO traffic is “free” in terms of cost but does take time and effort. In the early days of your dropshipping business you probably do have more time to spend on getting your website optimised for search engines so it’s a valuable use of your time. If you implement the right strategy, it’ll have long-lasting benefits for your dropshipping business that can scale up with you if you decide to change your business model to holding stock instead.
And so I’m going to talk through the kind of SEO strategy you should be using for your dropshipping website and what that will actually involve for you.
SEO helps customers to find you
When a potential customer enters their search terms into Google or another search engine, what determines the first page of results they’re shown?
How does a customer find your shopify dropshipping website rather than the 100 other shopify websites selling the same products?
When Amazon, eBay and other large ecommerce websites are selling dropshipped products through third parties but have the budgets in place for paid advertising and retargeting campaigns, how can you compete with that?
Ok, a lot of questions there, I know. But I’m trying to get you to consider 1) what your customers are looking for and 2) how your website gets in front of them. And yes, SEO is the answer because a website that is optimised with your potential customers in mind will meet what the search engine bots are looking for when they scan your website, thus ranking you higher on those search results pages.
And the number 1 SEO strategy for this is to make your website better than your competition and offer more.
Amazon and eBay don’t have blogs (I can guarantee you that few of your competitiors blog and when they do, they’re probably quite low quality) yet reading content is how potential customers decide on the products they want to buy for the problem they’re trying to solve.
Have a better designed website that’s easy to use and understand, have better product descriptions that go into detail about the item(s) and why they meet your visitors needs and desires, have better quality images, etc.
It all comes down to user experience (UX).
User experience is at the heart of Google algorithms. If you meet the needs of your potential customers and they buy from you, Google sees that as a strong indicator your website is good and worth sending more visitors too. If, for whatever reason, your website doesn’t fulfil the need of your visitor and they click back to search results and to a competitor instead, Google will see your website isn’t quite as good as it should be and drop your ranking.
It’s a very simple view of how it works, of course there are hundreds of search engine ranking factors, but it is the key one to be focused on when performing SEO for your dropshipping sites. If you take anything away from this blog make it this – focus on user experience above all else to increase traffic, improve conversion rates and make more revenue.
SEO for dropshipping stores will generate revenue
I’ve seen so many myths about SEO when it comes to dropshipping, things like “it takes 3 months for Google to index your website” to “it takes 6 months for Google to rank your website”. These are both complete and utter rubbish.
Google will index and rank your website much more quickly than that, it is possible to start appearing in search results in just a few days.
To make this happen, you need to start working on your SEO as soon as you can. Preferably, before you start writing your website and product copy and uploading products to your store.
But I often hear people tell others that “SEO isn’t worth it for dropshipping stores” as it “takes too long”. And yes, it may take longer than paid ads to get people on to your product pages and buying from you because it focuses on user experience and being better than your competition, it’s a long-term strategy that pays off with much higher returns on investment and works in tandem with your paid advertising.
So, if you have the money available to you sure, invest in paid ads straight away but ensure you’re working on your SEO strategy at the same time because what happens if FaceBook pulls the plug on your ads? Are you generating visitors and revenue without them?
And if you don’t have the money, focus on your SEO. You can always add paid ads in later as an additional form of marketing for your website.
Either way, the following steps are crucial for optimising your website for user experience, search engine algorithms and ensuring that the traffic you do get, whether through ads or SEO, will continue through to the checkout and buy from you.
Do your keyword research first
I see so many dropshipping business owners use the information their suppliers give to them through the product data feeds rather than doing their own independent product and keyword research.
The problem is, this information tends to be very basic, sometimes just the product name and colours it comes in. And, your potential customers are unlikely to be searching for it in this way.
How we buy is an emotional process. We tend to add feelings to things and often have a specific purpose in mind when we want to buy something – like a dress for a weddings, or we’ve seen copy that taps into an emotion to make us buy something spontaneously – like a cute dog t-shirt that make us go “awwww”. The basic product information from data feeds isn’t emotional, doesn’t tap into buyer psychology and therefore isn’t the best way to describe and talk about the products you’re selling.
You need to understand how your target audience are looking for the products you’re trying to sell. The only way to do this effectively is by carrying out some keyword research using a reliable tool like Google keyword planner, SEMrush or UberSuggest.
Use the keywords and phrases that are being searched for to describe your products as you write your website copy and product descriptions. Make your content easy to read and relevant to what your target audience is looking for rather than going into detail over the many features your supplier tells you a product has.
Your audience is looking for benefits of the product they’ve been searching for, not the features.
Use title tags effectively on your web pages
The H1 tag, usually the title of your web/product page, should be a summary telling Google, and your audience, what they are going to see and read when they visit that page.
I see a lot of dropshipping websites where they cram the keywords into a title tag in an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible, using titles like
“Fun blue hat festival hat summer party hat for outdoor events in blue”
It’s nonsense. Google will see it as nonsense, your audience won’t be interested in it and a competitors’ website will get the traffic instead.
Pick the strongest keyword from your research “blue festival hat”, for example, and just use that instead. You can mention its other uses in the product description and naturally include those keywords there.
Write good quality content for your product descriptions
Above all else, do not use the product descriptions given to you by your supplier.
This may count as duplicate content by Google, which means your ranking may be affected by the other dropshipping businesses using the exact same descriptions who may rank higher than you if their SEO is stronger.
Most supplier given copy is basic, a few bullet points and little more. This is not enough for your target audience to make an informed decision about, so most website visitors will choose to go elsewhere. Think about Amazon product descriptions – do you trust the descriptions with just two lines of text or several paragraphs?
Well written content that explains what the product is and how it’ll help your target audience meet their needs is what you need to do to rank highly on those Google search results and convert your website traffic into paying customers.
If you don’t think you can write good product copy and descriptions yourself, outsource it to someone who can. You’ll soon make your money back.
Always optimise your product images
If you’re using the images your supplier is giving you, you have a lot of work to do to make them SEO friendly.
Image optimisation is one of the easiest and quickest ways to get your website ranking higher on Google, especially as many dropshipping business owners don’t know how to do so effectively.
- Always rename each image with a relevant keyword to the product
- Reduce the file size and remove metadata to speed up page loading times
- Add image alt text to describe the product to Google and assist visually impaired buyers who cannot see it
- Use your own images if you can
Just like duplicate content, duplicate images tell Google that there’s nothing special about your website, it’s just the same as the rest and therefore doesn’t deserve to rank any higher.
It’s your job to distinguish your dropshipping website from all the others that are selling the same products as you and that means you need to change the copy, content and images to reflect what makes you better than your competition.
Making the images relevant to the webpage by renaming the files and adding appropriate alt text gives Google those much needed clues that your website is more valuable to your target audience in terms of giving them what they’re looking for.
Clean up your webpage urls
Another place you should be using your researched keywords is in the URL.
I often see ecommerce websites with URLS like https://dropshippingseo.com/category1/ujhiuhuifsdhiuhu5656. It tells Google nothing about what that webpage is about, and it just looks messy if you try to link to it elsewhere.
It doesn’t look great for potential visitors either.
Carefully consider how your url will look and use a keyword rather than an alphanumeric string of nonsense. It makes it easier for Google to understand what the page is about and looks better on social media and promotional content too.
It also helps with your linking strategy, whether that’s internal links from other pages and products on your website, or if you’re linking from an external website like FaceBook, for example.
Use canonical links
If you have the exact same product page listed under several categories, it will flag as duplicated content.
While Google does allow for this to some extent, a really easy to way to deal with this is by using canonical links.
A canonical link tells Google which page is the original and which one to index. This means making a decision over which page performs better for conversions and sales or works better in terms of what your target audience is looking for and setting that as the indexable page with the canonical tag.
It doesn’t mean your other product descriptions and pages won’t get indexed, it just means that you’re giving yourself the best chance of getting your best products/content ranked highly rather than diluting things.
It’s better to avoid duplicate content at all by ensuring you have different content for each product that appears under more than one category, you can do this by using different image optimisation and product descriptions quite easily but where you can’t do that, always use a canonical tag instead.
It also means that if a competitor decides to steal your copy and use it for their own, Google will see you have the canonical tag and should favour your content. The dropshipping industry can be cuthroat at times so it is worth doing all you can to protect yourselves from others wherever possible.
Build links to your dropshipping website
One of the best ways to improve the SEO score for a dropshipping website is by link building.
Internal links are important for helping Google figure out products that are related to each other and the context of the information on your website. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create blogs related to your products and the information your target audience are looking for, linking to your products where appropriate.
External links where you link out to other websites is important too.
Linking out to other websites to provide your visitors with more information (such as the manufacturer of a product, or a media review) helps Google see that you provide valuable and helpful content for your visitors which they see worthy of ranking higher for. It makes a better user experience too.
Backlinks are where other websites link back to you and are critical for good dropshipping SEO.
You can get high quality backlinks for your website by writing guest posts on websites, having websites link back to your blog articles or directly to product pages if they’re writing a round-up of the best festival hats, for example.
One of the best ways to get the chance of backlinks is by connecting with influencers in your market and introducing them to your website, offering them free products to review, etc.
Just make sure you never pay for a link back to your website, Google may penalise your website for this. Paying for someone to build links for you is ok, though few companies are good at this as many use spam links for an easy win, these links can give Google the impression that your website is spammy too which is never a good thing.
Start blogging for your dropshipping store now
At the end of the day, you’re limited to how much content you have on your website by the number and type of products you sell.
Unless you start blogging.
Blogging is a fantastic way to generate high-quality content for your website that’s helpful for your visitors and related to the products you sell. If you sell festival hats, then you could write a whole range of blogs about attending festivals, the best festivals for different music genres, festival fashion styles, etc.
The key with blogs is not to drop product links in each and every one. There’s no need.
Writing blogs around a topic relevant to what you sell that can be linked to each other with the occasional “best products for x” style post is more than enough to boost your SEO and get noticed by your audience.
If blog writing isn’t your thing, do outsource to an experienced SEO content writer. High quality matters when it comes to Google ranking you well in search results and an excellent piece of content really can generate hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your website.
Make sure you’ve got a sitemap for your website
I find a lot of dropshipping business owners build their website and expect Google to start ranking them straight away.
While it might not take 3 or 6 months to be indexed and ranked on Google, creating a sitemap and submitting it to Google Search Console is one way to speed up the process. Not doing this relies on Google discovering your website in its own time, and that can be anything from a few hours to a few days.
There are several SEO plugins for WordPress and Shopify websites to help you do this and it only takes a few minutes to do.
SEO for dropshipping is a continual process
One of the biggest myths I see around SEO is that it’s a one time fix.
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that needs you to continually use these strategies whenever you upload a new product, image, blog article or webpage. Google is constantly updating its ranking algorithms so not keeping on top of your SEO could lead you to slip down those search results and help your competition get ahead.
If you’re not sure how to go about improving the SEO of your dropshipping website and need an effective strategy or expert pair of hands to take care of things for you, get in touch with us here at Zebra Business Solutions.
