8 min read
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is something foreign and scary to many people. To others it is familiar and a skill set they use to make a living. After working on websites for a variety of companies for the past 20 years I can tell you that you will get as many opinions about how to handle your SEO as people you talk to. It is a science and an art. In either case SEO is an activity you need to do if you expect orders on your website.
EVEN YOUR FRIENDS NEED IT
The reality is you cannot just sit back and assume the smart scientists at Google will help people find your website on the Internet. Ever your customers will not always know how to find you and a little bit of SEO goes a long way in helping them.
Make sure your full address and phone number are listed on your home page. Here is a statistic for you: 59% of consumers use Google every month to find a reputable, local business. Make sure Google knows where your business is located and your chances rise to come up when shoppers look for uniforms and gear in your area or state.
Be sure to go to Google My Business and claim your listing. Make sure the address, phone and hours are correct. We are surprised how many companies never claim their business on Google.
ADD UNIQUE CONTENT
A big challenge that uniform store owners face is creating content that goes above and beyond what a manufacturer supplies. Once you start to think about SEO efforts you realize that Google will not reward you with any first page search results because your product descriptions are the same as 500 other websites out there. There are two ways to overcome this obstacle.
The first method is to set up some global content that will appear on all your product pages. These can be a few paragraphs about how awesome your products and services are. The content can be about your customer service, delivery promises or general marketing about your company. Pepper the text with some keywords that shoppers might use to try and find you. When you place this content on all your product pages the percentage of original content versus manufacturer content has improved, so Google will pay more attention.
The second method takes more work but will provide the best results. Go into your website content management system and adjust the manufacturer descriptions. You might change the name of product some and make it more unique to your website. Consider changing the description of the product. How much should you change? A good rule of thumb is to try and add at least as many original words as there are from the manufacturer, so your original content to duplicate content is 50/50.
BUILD LANDING PAGES
Another quick win to improve your SEO is to build dedicated landing pages to specific target niches. If you sell uniforms and accessories to a lot of hotels in your area, create a page on your website that can be found at “yourdomain.com/hoteluniforms” for example. Then add descriptive text about how well you sell and service hotels in your geographic area.
Add some products you might recommend as a sample offering on the new Hotel Uniforms page as well. A great idea is to show pictures of actual uniform programs you have prepared and managed over the years. This will let the search engines know that you have original material related to Hotel Uniforms. That is the page they will likely then show in search results in your area.
These suggestions apply to any website that is looking to sell uniforms and achieve better rankings in their search engine results. The Sellers Commerce platform at UniformMarket has easy to use tools to accomplish all of the above, and users are encouraged to attend the free training sessions twice a week to learn more.
