When most online business owners optimize their websites for organic search, they begin by optimizing their copy for search terms they’ve selected. They pepper those terms into their copy and add them to their meta-tags. But many stop their efforts there, and that’s a mistake. There are some fairly easy measures you can take to further optimize your e-commerce website to capture more traffic and make more sales.

Other Shopping Sites

Many online shoppers start shopping for a product by using a search engine. You can list your product data and photo at Google Merchant Center. Just open a free Google account first, if you don’t already have one. The info you post with the products you list will link back to your e-commerce site.

Always include a product photo with your listing. When possible, make it one you’ve shot yourself if you have the equipment to do it right. Otherwise your photo may look the same as those of your competitors.

Update regularly. Put a reminder on your calendar to update your listings so they always show the latest model, price, features, etc.

If you can, it’s best to vary the copy on your product listing from the copy on your website. That’s because Google looks for duplicate content and rather than listing all the sites with duplicate content, it picks what it thinks is the most valid and only lists that one. So if you change up the copy on your outside listings, you may have your products come up multiple times on a search, instead of having Google see it as a duplicate and leave it out of the results.

Blogs and Other Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter became much more relevant to e-commerce when search engines started to index them. Social media postings tend to affect search rankings only temporarily, though, so it’s best to post regularly. There are auto-posting tools on which you can pre-load posts for some social media sites to help you have a consistent presence.

Each social media site in which you establish a presence adds another touch point that can help increase public awareness of your website or products. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you start to realize the huge number of social media options available to you. The thing to do is start small. Pick two or three social media sites and get good at staying on top of them. Once you’re comfortable with them, you can add more to your social media repertoire and start to get a feel for which sites are doing the most good for your business. Then you’ll know how your time is most profitably spent.

Local Search

If you haven’t listed your business there yet, go to Google.com/Places and list your business. Even if your business is strictly online, your listing includes a back-link to your website—always a good thing. Additionally, people looking at Google Maps in your area will happen upon your listing.

Many metropolitan areas have search engines specific to their areas. Make sure your business is listed in those, as well.

Images and Videos

Product images are essential to your e-commerce site’s success. If you can add video, your conversion rate will likely go up. Photos can tell about your products far more quickly than copy, and video can do it even better.  

When you put images on your website, remember to incorporate rich ALT text for each image. Describe the image using the same keywords for which you’ve optimized your copy. Include those same keywords in the image file names, when possible. Finally, make sure that the image caption and all the copy around the image are highly relevant to the image.

Video reduces bounce rate by keeping customers on your site longer. That’s because it’s engaging. Instructional or how-to videos are best. Keep them short—two or three minutes—to increase viewership. Visitors will often stop a video or not even start it when they see it’s long. Remember to tag your video with appropriate keywords that will maximize searchability. In addition to putting your video on your website, upload it to other popular sites, as well, to get more exposure.