eCommerce SEO Tips for Hong Kong Storefronts 🛍️

According to Statista, the revenue of online marketplaces is projected to grow to HK$46 billion in 2020-a staggering 24% year-on-year growth rate. Furthermore, user penetration is expected to climb to 81.5% by 2024. With a projected market value of HK$13 billion. fashion accounts for the largest percentage of eCommerce revenue in Hong Kong. Online marketplaces such as Amazon and Alibaba have thrived despite the economic uncertainty brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

While specialist marketplaces such as ASOS continue to invest in brand engagement strategies, large retailers with deep pockets can enter the field with the resources to steal your business long before consumers can even find your shop. Are you eager to ensure that your products and services are visible to your valuable customers? What can you do to minimize cart abandonment rates? We believe that incorporating SEO into every step of your eCommerce business may be the key to your success.

Here are 5 quickfire SEO tips to level up your eCommerce brand:

1. Sell Yourself in Your Title

Potential customers are more likely to check out your website if you appear at the top of their search results. To improve your chances of making a sale, mention your unique selling proposition (USP) in your title.

If you sell computers, simply stating that “We sell computers” won’t catch the attention of your target consumers. On the other hand, if you state that you provide the best customer service for the lowest prices, you are giving your consumers a reason to choose you over your competitors. This would lead to more visits, clicks, and sales.

Offer a solution that meets their needs, and communicate that solution loud and clear. You’ll see an increase in traffic to your website if you can narrow down on your target audience — be it luxury brands or local SMEs.

2. Do Your Keyword Research

Before you launch a digital campaign or a product, you need to ensure that you have done your research-specifically, keyword research. As fuel for the SEO engine, keywords that are meticulously chosen are the key to an SEO strategy that commands results.

While short, one-word keywords are sufficient when building out your SEO, take the time to research and develop long-tail keywords. This will make it much easier for your target consumers to find your products and services.

For example, instead of using “shoes” as your SEO keyword, consider adding descriptive words that supplement the basic keyword: “popular men’s urban tennis shoes for fashion”. The more specific keywords you apply to your product page SEO, the more likely it is for your online shop to skyrocket to the top of the search engine results. We also recommend including the location modifier in your keyword — such as, ‘tennis shoes Central’, ‘ eCommerce SEO services in Hong Kong ‘, or ‘buy fresh vegetables in HK’.

Now that you know the importance of long-tail keywords, how do you find out which to use? We suggest reviewing the search results of online marketplaces frequented by your target consumers.

For Hong Kong search engines, sites such as Taobao and HKTVmall are fantastic starting points if you are interested in conducting quality keyword research.

3. Improve Your Website’s Speed

A website that loads slowly is sure to turn away potential customers. In the age of high-speed connections, people simply are not likely to stick around and wait for your page to load. That’s why it is so important to ensure that your site loads quickly.

So, how can you go about this? The key is compression. Compress everything you can, and your page will load a lot faster. There are some incredible tools available that you can start implementing today that yield effective results.

Try to get your HTML files as small as you can. Images are another factor that can cause your page to be sluggish. Employ an image resize API to get those high-resolution pictures shrunk down. Many will retain the original image’s visual clarity while giving you a much smaller file to work with.

You may also want to look at the speeds you’re being provided by your website host. This can significantly impact your website speed, so it could be worth spending a bit extra on a high-quality host.

4. Make Buying Easy

Did you know that one of the main reasons customers back out of sales is due to a convoluted buying process? Too many additional offers and requests can hurt your business. Streamline your checkout so that customers can quickly buy your product or service.

The less hassle they are confronted with, the more likely you are to see sales go through. Ensure that your customers can clearly see what they have added to their cart, as well as a fast and easy way to get straight to checkout when they’re ready.

You can tell if your customers find your buying process difficult by looking at your abandoned cart rate. If it seems higher than it should be, your buying process could be to blame.

5. Link to Internal Pages

A great way to increase awareness about your brand is to provide links to other parts of your website. This allows customers to see things they might normally miss during their first visit. When used correctly, internal links can help to boost traffic and sales. But it’s important that you don’t overdo it.

Have you ever visited a page that has links nearly every other word? While it may seem beneficial to do this, too many links can overwhelm the customer, resulting in them going elsewhere to do business.

6. Get Under the Hood — Update Your SEO Schema

When you are searching for a product or service online, are you more likely to click-through to a site with reviews and stars, or one that has none?

That’s right — consumers are more likely to click on search results that have a preview of “average reviews” or “stars” on their search description. The best way to ensure that your high product reviews show up with your website is through structured data.

Structured data sounds technical and complicated, but it is actually an easy way to ensure that your website is better understood by a search engine like Google. With a simple bit of coding on your website, search engines can better search your pages and pull content reviews for searches. An easy way to get started is with a product such as Google’s Structured Data Mark-up Helper. Plug-in the code, and your site’s product and services will look even more enticing with legitimate reviews!

Continue to rise in the ranks when it comes to SEO in Hong Kong

With a strong, SEO-backed digital marketing strategy, you can help your brand break through the online blockades created daily by mega-retailers who want to consume and snuff out smaller entities. The good news? You don’t need to be a programming expert of business whiz to implement a great SEO strategy. Let’s take a look at a few tried-and-true practices you can implement today to build a competitive advantage in the Hong Kong e-commerce market.

As you can see in the list of steps above, getting started with SEO optimization isn’t hard. Yet, so many Hong Kong companies lose out on valuable consumer revenue by leaving their online shops and digital presence lacking in SEO. Right now, you can easily rise above the competition by simply implementing a couple of easy steps to help your site climb the search engine ranks.

If you begin to optimize your SEO alongside a powerful content marketing strategy, your competitive edge will overcome even the big-box retailers when it comes to online shopping!

Originally published at https://www.firstpage.hk on July 16, 2020.