SEO Strategy: 5 Tips to Implement SEO On Your Vape Shop’s Website
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If you’re still struggling to get your e-commerce vape shop to rank high on Google, we created this blog just for you. Search engine optimization is not a mystery, especially SEO for vape shops. In this blog, you’ll find five vape SEO tips you can implement to boost your ranking in search engine results pages. So if you’re ready, let’s get started.
Table of Contents
- Start with a site audit
- Keyword Research
- Avoid getting penalized by Google
- Take a look at your competition
- Make it mobile-friendly
- Conclusion
Start with a Site Audit
The first tip is to start with a site audit. A site audit will let you know the areas that need improvement. With a site audit, you can begin fixing the broken things and start ranking higher on Google. But how do you perform a site audit?
Site Audit Tools
To perform a site audit, you’ll need a site audit tool. There are dozens of audit tools online, and they all serve the same purpose, finding inefficiencies with your website. We suggest using the free versions of a couple of the audit tools to see what areas you can fix. Some of the best audit tools in the market include:
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog
- SEMrush
- NETpeak Spider
Website audits themselves tend to be a complex topic, but if you follow the instructions on each of the software or audit tools, you’ll find many areas to improve (here’s an article with an in-depth guide on how to perform a good audit in 2020). One of the main areas that require improvement often tends to be keyword research, so that’s what we’ll explore next.
Keyword research
Keyword research is the act of looking for phrases and words that people are actively using in search engines. In our case, phrases and words that people are using to find vape shops. The more of these keywords your website has, the higher you will rank in Google. But how do you perform keyword research, and how do you find these vape seo keywords?
Google Suggest
The idea of keyword research is to find words or phrases that people use. The best way to do this without any tools is to see what people search for in Google.
For example, if I were to go to Google and type “vape,” many other phrases would drop down below; these are all a goldmine of ideas that people are actively using, which you can also use to create your list keywords. But you can still get more keyword ideas using Google. To reach the full potential of using Google as a keyword research tool, we have to go to the “Searches Related to” section.
Let’s say we are searching for the term “e-cigarettes” on Google. We input it and then scroll down to where the Google page numbers are. Above the page numbers, you’ll see the “Searches related to” section, and here there will be eight long-tailed keyword phrases. These are great keyword phrases people are actively looking for (and which you can add to your list). If you want more keywords, click on any of these and scroll down again to find another eight keyword phrases. Repeat this process until you have a large selection of keywords.
The topic of keyword research is quite complicated, and we could go down a rabbit hole here, but if you find yourself short on keywords to rank for, later on, this guide we’ll show you how to use your competitor’s website to find keywords you can use.
Avoid getting penalized by Google
If you did the site audit, you might have noticed a few areas where you can improve. These areas, if not addressed promptly, could be penalized by Google. In this section, we go over some of the most common Google penalties and avoiding them.
Duplicated Content
Google immediately penalizes duplicated content. Duplicated content means content that appears more than once online. If your content appears on more than one website, you might have a problem. For example, if I used an article found on another vaping e-commerce website, I have to make sure every word is unique, and I am not merely copying and pasting the content.
The best way to battle duplicated content is to create original content. You can also use a plagiarism checker to make sure your content is 100% original.
Keyword Stuffing
Another practice to avoid is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the act of using a keyword multiple times without context or reason. Let’s say your keyword is “vapes for sale.” A sentence that was keyword stuffing would look something like this:
“Welcome to our vape store where we have vapes for sale. Vapes for sale are our bestsellers. Vapes for sale are also one of our most popular items. You won’t find cheaper Vapes for sale.”
As you can see, the phrase was forcibly used in the paragraph, making it sound clunky and repetitive. If you’re using your keyword more than 3 or 4 times in a section, consider changing it to avoid getting penalized by Google.
Slow Loading Website
A slow-loading website can kill your Google rankings. To rank high on Google search, you need to check your website’s loading speeds. If your website takes longer than 8 seconds to load up, you’re in trouble. You can use many tools to check your website speed; for example, we recommend using SEO Analyzer by Neil Patel.
Although the tool will give an idea about how fast your website should be, you’ll need to contact a website developer to provide you with a full audit and to make your website faster, an investment worth making, in our opinion.
Also, having too many pop-ups in your store can kill speed. Pop-ups are a common pitfall that slows down your website. For example, having a pop-up for sale on rebuildable atomizers, email opt-ins, or holiday sales can impact the speed.
Take a look at your competition
Another tip to implement on your vape shop website is to take a look at what your competitors are doing. To do this, you can do competitive keyword research.
Competitive keyword research is a keyword research method that looks at your competitor’s ranking keywords to get ideas for your keyword research plan. A great tool to conduct this type of keyword research is SEMRush.
By logging in to SEMrush and inputting a competitor’s website, for example, “vaping.com,” you can find all the keywords they rank for; you can then use them to find keywords that rank high but have lower competition levels. For a full overview of how to do this, check out this video by SEMrush.
If you don’t want to spend money using SEMrush, we recommend using Google Keyword Planner, which is 100% free.
All you have to do is go to the Keyword Planner website and access the tool. Once you’re on the main page, there will be a box on the left side of the screen that says “Discover new keywords.” click on this box, and then a pop up will appear. There will be two options “start with keywords” or “start with a website.” Click on “start with a website” and input your competitor’s URL. Voila, now you have a set of new keywords you can use for ranking. Again the idea here is to use keywords that rank high but have low competition.
Make it mobile-friendly
The last tip is to make your website mobile friendly. If you want to check if your website is already mobile friendly, you can visit Google’s mobile-friendly test. If you find out your website is not mobile friendly, you’ll need to make it mobile friendly. To do this, you have a couple of options: change to a responsive design, do the dynamic serving or create an entirely separate mobile version of your website.
Responsive Design
Perhaps the best option and the one Google recommends, the responsive design readjusts the website’s dimensions to fit any screen, whether mobile, desktop, or tablet. This design is probably the best option and the one you should use.
Dynamic Serving
Dynamic serving “serves” a separate HTML page for specific browsers or particular devices. Dynamic serving is more expensive to implement since you need to think of all the devices available that may access your page and create a separate HTML for each device.
Mobile Version
You can also create a separate mobile version of your website for mobile. Whenever a user tries to access your website through mobile, they’ll be redirected to a different URL (for example, m.vapestore101.com), and from there, they’ll see a brand new version of your website you created. Again the downside of this is that a separate page must be made.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization for vape shops does not need to be complicated. With these tips, we hope you gain more traffic, rank higher on Google, and convert more visitors into customers. Most importantly, remember that SEO for vape shops takes time, and your ranking on Google and the amount of traffic you get will vary from month to month. So don’t despair. As long as you continually add new content and follow SEO rules, you should start seeing results.
