What is Dropshipping?

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In a dropshipping business, you don't hold an inventory. You forward the order that you received from a customer to the supplier. The supplier will then ship the order directly to the customer. The difference between the retail and the wholesale prices is your margin.

Benefits of Dropshipping

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• Investment is minimal. Since you don't have to keep an inventory, you can start this business with marginal capital.
• You can sell a large variety of goods. In a dropshipping business, you coordinate with suppliers across the country. This means the variety of goods you offer is not limited to what you hold.
• No dead stock. You get to experiment selling various goods without running the dead-stock risk. This way, you eliminate the risk factor in your business but, at the same time, keep the chances of profit.

Disadvantages of Dropshipping

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• Shipping is not in your hands. You have to depend on the supplier to deliver the goods to your customer. This might cause a delay in delivery. Also, you have to work with scores of warehouses with different shipping norms. This adds to the complication.
• No control over product quality. Since you don't handle the product, you have no idea about the quality of the product.

It seems you plan to start a dropshipping business. In that case, you must know how to drive quality traffic to your website.

Tips to Do SEO for a Dropshipping Store

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1. Find a Niche with SEO Potential

SEO potential differs from niche to niche. So, choosing the right niche will determine the fate of your SEO efforts in the future.
A good niche has a lot of varieties, is capable of customization, and has a marginal return rate. Furniture is an example.
It’s the most sought-after business niche.
They come in all shapes and sizes, you can customize them, and customers are less likely to return them.

How to Find a Niche?

For a start, get inputs from your immediate surroundings. Check what your family and friends bought online recently. Check each for their competition, return rate, shipping weight, and brand loyalty.
Another method is using tools, a few of which are:

• Facebook Audience Insights : It helps you find out the size, type, potential, and location of a niche.
• Google Keyword Planner : It shows you the search volume of your primary keywords.
• Google Trends : It tells you whether interest in a particular topic is growing or waning.
  You can check the audience interest location-wise too.
  

2. Find the Right Keyword

As a dropshipper, you need quality traffic to your website, people who are willing to buy things from you. You get such traffic only when you optimize your website for the right keywords.

What is the Right Keyword?

The right keyword is the one rich in user intent. For example, the word 'cycle' doesn't reveal anything about the intent of the user. Also, such 'headwords' are extremely competitive.
'Cycles for girls', however, tells you more about the user's intention. It is these 'long-tail keywords' that you need to target. They are also less competitive, giving you a chance to taste a piece of its sales pie.

Related : Frequently Asked Questions about Keywords and SEO

Related : Best Keyword Research Tools Used By Top SEO Companies

How to Find Long-Tail Keywords?

Enter the product name on Amazon, and you will immediately get many suggestions.
Similarly, you can find more user intent keywords from other online stores and keyword research tools.
Likewise, enter the product name on Google and scroll down to the bottom of the first SERP. On the 'related search,' you will find a box related queries.

3. Get Your Competitors' Keywords

As a dropshipper, you are wont to have competition. But, competition doesn't have to be always bad; it can help you too. Here's how.
If you are starting out, knowing which keywords works in the industry will be a great help. One way to do this is by checking which keywords your competition ranks for.
You can find your competition through a tool like Moz. When you feed your web domain onto Moz, you will get a list of your immediate competitors. You can see their domain authority and visibility score.
One more option to quickly find your competition is using the Alexa extension, showing you keyword opportunities.
Now, run their domain names in tools like SEMrush or Ubersuggest. And you will get a list of the keywords that they rank for. This is a quick way to find keywords that work.

4. Be a Consistent Blogger

Blogging is a crucial part of marketing products online. If you are consistent in churning out quality blog posts, you can raise your visibility on SERPs.
For instance, here’s an e-commerce store that produces regular blog posts. It lets them cover both informative and buyer intent keywords to pull the maximum audience.

Tips for writing blog posts

• Article length should be above 350 words
• Each blog post should address one topic.
• Refrain yourself from keyword stuffing

Remember, quality content is what Google and other search engines are after. Ensure this, and everything will fall into their places. Also, a blog helps you cover many topics and keywords in your niche.

Blog increases website weight

We know that a website with only a couple of pieces of content is a put-off. A blog is the simplest way to increase the amount of content on your website. For search engines, each new blog post is another page. So, the more posts you have, the more pages your website has.

5. Master Writing Metadata

Title tags and meta-descriptions tell the user what they would find on the website. Think of them as a teaser to a movie. The better they are, the better are your chances of getting traffic.
Try this free tool to preview how your website looks and keep a tab on the character limit.

What to Bear in Mind?

• The number of characters in a good title tag is fewer than 55.
• Each page of your website should have a unique title tag
• Save lesser important words to the end of the tag, and use the keyword only once

Meta descriptions appear below the title tag on the SERPs. Users appraise the relevance of the webpage by reading meta-descriptions.

Keep in mind :

• A good meta-description should be 120-155 characters long
• Describe the most important selling point of the product, like benefits or features
• Limit the use of the keyword to a maximum of thrice
• Avoid the use of symbols; keep it to alphabets and numbers

6. Focus on Earning Links

Once you have started creating quality content, seek link-ups from trusted websites. You can choose any of these techniques:

• Guest Blogging : You post content on another website and link it with your website's content.
• Broken Link Building : You find broken links (the ones that take you to 404 pages) on websites. You then offer your working links as replacements.
• Email Outreach : You send emails to trustworthy website owners, asking them to link up with you.
• Competitor links : Find out the websites linked to your competitors and contact them to add your useful resource on their page.
  

Backlinks are a great way to increase the domain authority (DA) of your website. The higher the DA, the higher you rank on SERPs.
Extra : Backlinks as the wormholes in cyberspace. They connect one website to another, making the web more navigable.

7. Reduce Your Bounce Rate

One aspect of SEO that many drop shippers forget is the bounce rate. If a user finds your website unattractive, they will leave it without taking action. And Google doesn't like websites with high bounce rates.

How to Reduce Bounce Rate?

Increase the user experience. Use rich images and videos of the products that you sell. Create compelling copies of the uses and benefits of the product. On the product pages, include reviews (even if they are bad ones!) so that you strike as an honest seller.

Load Speed

Ensure that your pages load fast. Try to hit the industry standard of three seconds for a landing page. You can analyze the load time of your pages using tools like Google's PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. The recommended loading speed of a website is below 3S. Anything beyond that requires a fix and might miss out on the opportunities.
It has options to analyze load time for both mobile and desktop screens.

8. Recommend Products Based on Buying Behaviour

Recommending products to your users based on their buying behavior increases user experience. It also helps you land more sales from the same customer.
Product recommendation is to ecommerce what a salesman to a brick-and-mortar shop. It makes your store look more human and makes a connection with each of your customers.

Common Recommendation Techniques

'Also bought' prompt : You might be familiar with this already. It tells a user who just added an item to the cart that 'users like them' also bought certain related products.
Bestseller/choice : It is a social-proof-based recommendation. People like to buy things that others have bought. 'Trending' products is a similar recommendation type. It is most common in apparel stores.
Upselling/cross-selling : Both these recommendations help you land easy sales. In upselling, you show a customer a product higher in quality and price than they already have. In cross-selling, you show products that enhance the usability of another product.

9. Avoid Adding Duplicate Content

Dropshippers rely on suppliers to provide them with product-related content. This, however, leads to duplicate content as multiple dropshippers sell the same product. Nonetheless, there are ways to overcome this issue.
Take your photos : Having your photos of the products sets you apart from others. Apart from helping search engines rank you, they also afford you a look of authenticity.
Give alt text to images : Alt text helps search engines understand what a photo is about. They also help you rank high on image searches, which is distinct from the normal search. You can also use the same text (or part thereof) for the alt text for file names and captions.

Related : Image Optimization Tips

Rewrite/improve descriptions : This helps you avoid duplicate content. It helps you optimize the descriptions for relevant keywords. Remember, the descriptions should be engaging and informative.

Dropshipping SEO FAQs

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1. Does SEO Work for a Dropshipping Business?

In dropshipping, you have to use content provided by your supplier. This increases the chances of your having duplicate content. In such cases, Google will not be able to rank your site properly. However, by doing SEO, you make the content unique for users and help search engines rank them.

2. What SEO Tools Should I Use for My Dropshipping Business?

• Ahrefs : This tool is second only to Google in its ability to crawl the web.
• Google Search Control : It's a free tool that helps you check where your website ranks on SERPs.
• SEMrush : A rising star among SEO tools, it helps you study your competitors and gain insights.
• KWFinder : This tool helps you find the best long-tail keywords in your niche.

3. What's the Most Important Thing to Know Before Starting a Dropshipping Business?

SEO. If you know how to do SEO for your website, you are halfway to success. SEO gets you organic traffic. So you don't have to spend any money on PPC and other forms of advertisement. This is extremely helpful to those who are on a shoe-string budget.
Are you looking to do SEO for your Dropshipping website? Drop your details here to know more.