8 SEO Strategies We Use To Rank an E-Commerce Website

7 months ago today my girlfriend and I launched an online makeup store targeting the Philippines. Before even launching the site, we already know that the way to go for this website to have long-term success is through search engine organic rankings. There was no other way around. This is a bootstrapped business so paid marketing is only the second option. The aim really was to gather free traffic through Google.

Fast forward today, the website is enjoying free organic traffic. We will share to you the top 8 search engine optimization strategies that we employed to be on the top. At the end of this post, we will also show you some of the keywords that are currently ranking.

1. Keyword Research
Keywords are the foundation of a successful SEO campaign. We used the Google Adwords keyword tool to see which makeup-related keywords are being searched by the people from the Philippines and their corresponding search traffic. Since Keekay.ph offers only makeup products, it is best to choose the keywords below to target the homepage.

• online makeup store philippines
• makeup online shop philippines
• buy makeup online philippines

2. On-Page SEO
There are lots of things to consider in doing onsite SEO. We made sure that the website has unique text content of considerable amount, has keywords in the meta titles and descriptions, has image alt texts, has no broken links, has XML sitemap and robots.txt. Another thing that we optimized is the pagespeed making sure that the website loads fast.

3. Email People in Authority
The moment the website was launched, we started emailing people in authority to let them know about our website. These people are beauty bloggers, makeup artists, and models. Included in our email was a discount coupon for them to try to buy from our website.

These people in authority usually have their own websites or blogs. If they like your business or products, they might include a link to your website in theirs. One example of this strategy can be found here.

4. Comment on Relevant Blogs
Blog commenting still works as long as you are doing it right and if you are doing it in with the relevant blogs. We commented (conversed) with bloggers in the niche. An example can be found here.

5. Business Listing Submission
We submitted our website information to Philippine-based business listing websites. There are a lot of these websites already gaining popularity. Since our website is targeting only the Philippines, it is best to submit it to local directories. You can check out an example here.

6. Regular Blog Posting
Search engines like to fetch fresh updates from websites. We make sure that we post at least 1 blog per month. We have found some ways to get creative in our posts including interviewing some popular makeup artists in the Philippines. Every blog post we published is then emailed to our list so our subscribers can read it. If they like the article, there is a chance that they will interact with it or that they will share it thereby gathering some earned links. You can read our makeup artists interviews here.

7. Social Media Presence and Postings
Although it is still an open debate if social signals impact organic rankings, we believe that having profiles in major social media websites can in one way or another impact the authority you have in the niche. We set up profiles in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus and included a link back to our website. Not only that we set them up, we regularly post updates to engage to our followers.

8. Link Earning
Doing the above strategies have increased the authority of Keekay in the makeup industry. Some authoritative websites have linked to Keekay without us telling them. Check out some examples below:

• Top 10 Ecommerce Websites in the Philippines
• This Forbes article
• This Manila Bulletin article

Currently, Keekay is ranking for about 800 makeup-related keywords. Some of the keywords are:

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SEO is an on going thing. So, we will still keep on implementing the above strategies to make sure that we are on top of our game.