Workstand Blog

SmartEtailing's Commitment to SEO

By Ryan Atkinson

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At SmartEtailing, we understand that the first step to winning in-store is your business being found online by interested shoppers. As we have worked to update our template infrastructure and to define our marketing packages for this year, we have focused on key ways to improve your business’s visibility in organic local search.

Your business winning at local search is important because more than 35% of site traffic originates from organic search traffic. Today’s consumers research their purchases online before visiting a store. At SmartEtailing, our job is to help your bike shop win at organic local search to grow your business.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

When we say “organic local search,” we mean that your bike shop will show up in search results in your area when consumers enter search terms related to the products and services you sell. Improved organic local search can be achieved through what’s called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO involves both the technical components of your site as well as the content on your site. SmartEtailing is uniquely positioned to help your bike shop create and maintain a website that excels in each of these areas.

SmartEtailing has delivered the industry’s best catalog enabled websites for nearly two decades. With our new innovations, we are adapting to ensure that your business can attract, inform, and convert local cycling customers in this fast-changing retail market.

SmartEtailing Template Enhancements

Building a website is like building a physical structure - without a solid foundation, it doesn’t matter what you build above ground. As we’ve overhauled our template structure, we’ve made many key improvements to strengthen the core of your bike shop website and to provide you with best-in-class SEO building blocks.

  • Responsive Templates. With our new mobile-first responsive templates, all users - regardless of the devices with which they are viewing your site - have a consistent, exceptional experience. This improved experience raises your website’s pages’ quality scores, increasing your ranking in future search results.
  • Embedded Structured Data. According to Google, “when information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways.” Our new templates include this structured data that allows Google and other search engines to find and understand your site and include it in search results for your potential customers.  
  • Faster Page Load Times. Page speed affects how your site ranks in search results in addition to being very important to user experience. We’ve made structural improvements to help your site load faster and decrease your bounce rate.
  • Individual Location Pages. Every new template now includes unique pages with content specific to each store location for better local search results.
  • On-Page Enhancements. From our navigator to our slideshow, we’ve updated important on-page elements that not only improve load speed and searchability, but also provide an improved user experience for customers on any device.

SmartEtailing Marketing Packages

We’ve done the heavy lifting to remodel the structure of your site to improve your SEO. With that foundation in place, we also offer bike shop SEO services as part of our Marketing Packages. All of your marketing efforts directly or indirectly improve your visibility online, as fresh quality content leads to a better user experience and better quality scores. We’ve included specific tasks and objectives to each of our marketing packages focused on SEO best practices for bike shops.

  • Site Settings Configuration. We review and configure site settings for all marketing clients to ensure that their business information is accurate.
  • Homepage Maintenance. We review and update the header, body, and footer of all marketing clients’ homepage to ensure that information is up to date, important data tags are included, and navigation and on-page links are effective.
  • Keyword Rank Tracking. We use industry-leading software to track the performance of keywords that represent products and services relevant to your business. We use this information to update page titles, page meta descriptions, and page content to continuously improve your ranking in the area’s most important to your business.
  • Custom Content. Including rich, relevant content on your site is critical to reaching and keeping interested customers. Our marketing experts proactively help you develop unique, keyword-rich content to improve your site’s SEO performance that is informed by the work we do with hundreds of independent bicycle retailers across North America.
  • Local Listings Management. For our Elite marketing clients, we use a specialty software to create and maintain business listings on the sites, apps, and directories that factor most into local search engine results. This ensures that customers encounter consistent and accurate information about your business no matter what site, application, or device they are using.
  • Google Management. Being in control of your business information online is important to ensuring that your customers can find you. As part of our Elite marketing package, we help you configure and manage Google My Business and Google Analytics.

What All This Means For You

If some of the language above is new to you, you’re not alone. Search Engine Optimization can sound like a complicated issue to many business owners, but we can help you simplify it.

Our software development and marketing teams are proven experts in their fields and are making constant investments in our core product - your website - that will improve your SEO behind the scenes. We’ve put together comprehensive marketing packages, and it’s not too late for you to sign up as a marketing client for 2017 so that we can continue to help your business be found and be successful online.

Learn more about our marketing packages and contact us for more information.

Let SmartEtailing be your complete website and marketing partner. We’d appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and to help you find the service that best suits your needs.

Topics: Client Updates

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