Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with brief but valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter, so we get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information that will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps. Episode 45. Been almost a month since our last episode, so I'm excited to jump right in. In this episode, we're gonna talk about SS e o. We're gonna talk about what it is, what you can do with it, and how you should think about it as a brick and mortar retailer. As always, our podcasts are designed for independent retailers.

Many of our lessons involve e-commerce. So I thought that this would be a really great topic 'cause we hear about it a lot internally. So first of all, what is ss e o? Ss e O stands for search Engine optimization. It's the practice of optimizing your websites that it appears higher in the search engine rankings, primarily Google 'cause everybody's on Google, which can drive more traffic to your website. It involves a variety of strategies and tactics ranging from optimizing website content and metadata to improving site speed and user experience. So yes, that was a whole lot of words, but in my own words, what is ss? E O S E O basically means improving the data on your website so that more people can find your website using Google or other search engines. S e o can be extremely important because you know, there's a few ways that people are gonna find your website.

One of them may be from your store, customers in your store, they know your brand and they're gonna find your website anyway. Another way could be through your social media channels or your posts on Instagram and Facebook and people are just gonna come to your website because they find you on social. Another way can be paid ads. So maybe you're paying for some ads on Google or Facebook and people find you website that way. And another way, which is basically what we're talking about is through organic search results. So I go on Google and I type something in, let's say, you know, blacks sleeveless dress, or I type in, you know, clothing store in New Jersey and you know, Google show me relevant results. And if your business pops up, I may get introduced to your business for the first time, not only online, but also in store, right?

Google has maps and things like that they could show me. You know, that there's a clothing store two blocks away from me. So let's talk about the easiest ways to get some ss e o benefits for your brick and mortar store and for your website. So first of all, someone with a retail store. Definitely wanna focus a lot on local ss e o. So most of that is gonna be on Google Maps. If you go on Google and you type in clothing store near me, you'll see Google shows you, you know, 10 listings with a map, uh, to the right of it. Um, it'll show you their hours, their phone number, their website, their reviews and things like that. So you're gonna wanna get a Google My Business account. Um, and you're gonna wanna just update that listing, make sure it's up to date. You're going to want to put a nice long description. They allow you to put 750 characters, use all 750 characters

And all the services that you do and everything like that. Um, and also very important people tend to forget this, get customer reviews. Google does a lot of things to figure out who they're going to recommend in their search. One of those things is how many reviews you have. You know, if all things are equal and Google's deciding, should I put, you know, Elliot's clothing boutique or Justin's clothing boutique at number one. If Elliot's clothing boutique has 207 5 star reviews, but Justin's only has seven five star reviews, you better believe they're gonna put Elliot's in front because Google trusts me more because Google trusts the reviews. So get reviews, get reviews, and get more reviews. The next thing you can do in ss e o that really helps get more customers to your site is, you know, a lot of the data on your site is in the product pages.

So you think about your website, right? You have, let's say, you know, an about us page, a homepage, maybe you have a blog, maybe not, maybe you also have like a thousand product listings on your website. Each of those product listings has a lot of data in it. When you think about it, it has a title. So let's say we have a black sleeveless crew neck dress, we have a vendor, let's say that dresses from Z Supply. We have a description. That description could be super long, five six sentence description. Um, and then we have some maybe tags and, and meta fields and stuff like that. All that data is gonna get past Google and Google's gonna use that data to learn about your site and try to put those results in front of a customer. So don't sleep on product descriptions and things like that.

Don't just copy and paste product descriptions from your vendor's website. Um, really focus on those product pages. Next thing I wanna talk about is just, you know, overall having an optimized website. So Google definitely tends to give preference to sites that are more mobile friendly. Um, but overall you just wanna have a great website. Google is going to Google may push you further down the results. If your website is just not great, um, you wanna have quality content, so it's very hard. So, so it's very hard to fake it. You gotta have good content, you gotta have original content. Your words have to make sense. You can't just type in a whole bunch of keywords just for fun, right? You are not gonna get ring. Another big factor could be social media. Um, it's not going to be a direct factor ss e o but it definitely helps build a lot of brand awareness, which maybe gets more traffic to your site, which then will help Google rank you higher.

Because one of the things that they definitely take into account when showing customers web results is traffic. Before we end, a couple things I wanna call out. One of them is just expectations on timing and then like, scams out there in terms of timing. I c o. There's no quick fix and it's not a one-time thing. It's just things that if you want to make a difference on your web traffic based on ss e o, you always have to keep it top of mind. You always have to be improving your website, improving the content in your website, adding to it, creating back links, doing everything that you can over time. And even in the best case scenario, you might be looking at a six to 12 month, uh, lead time before you start seeing results. Um, so keep that in mind. It is definitely an investment that you should be making, but you, it's definitely there's no overnight success here.

The last thing I wanna talk about is just scams related to s e o. So in a lot of areas of e-commerce, especially in s e o, because it's very hard to track, there's lot of scams out there. You'll get a million emails about site audits and you know, you're not showing up on Google and all these things and people guaranteeing results and most of the time it's a whole lot of bss. Um, you should be very careful who we work with. There are probably some, there are definitely, there are definitely some reputable s e o agencies out there. Um, you definitely want to get references. You definitely want to know exactly what you're paying for and what you're gonna get. If anybody's guaranteeing you results, most likely it's fake. You wanna make sure that they're been in business a long time. Um, you wanna make sure that everything's just super clear and you may decide that you don't even wanna make that investment. Many times, like if you're gonna pay an SS e o agency, say a thousand bucks a month, you'll get a much better results if you just take that money and buy paid ads on Google. Well, that's it. Hope you learned something. I definitely learned something while doing research and talking to boutiques about this. So looking forward to the next episode. Thanks so much.