On-page SEO

With its large, fast-growing, and increasingly online population, Latin America is a priority market for e-commerce. This is ever more true since the beginning of the pandemic. More trustworthy payment methods and store pickup options have convinced a historically reluctant consumer sector to do more of their shopping online.

But entrepreneurs need to keep region-specific challenges in mind if they’re to make the most of an opportunity whose time seems to have come. Businesses who dedicate time and investment to on-page SEO services are amply placed to take advantage, while those without will fall behind.

On-Page SEO refers to all practices that make your web page rank higher on search engine results pages. This ranking depends on what Google finds when it crawls your page’s content. Relevant, authoritative, and clearly written content helps pages to boost traffic and engagement, but optimisations that streamline a site’s HTML source code are also important.

Google’s plethora of complex algorithms can now anticipate what users are actually searching for when they type a query, then produce searches which match that intent. Thinking these two or three steps ahead when producing content on your web page is now more essential than ever.

The choice and location of your page’s keywords is a primary consideration here. Putting content keywords in headlines and titles rather than just in the body of the text helps a lot, as does hyphenating them in your URLs.

Where there’s a clear match between your site’s content and somebody’s search, your page will move up the search rankings. Specific, authoritative content aimed at the kind of customers you are hoping to attract is one useful SEO technique here.

Finding the right content angle, whether in the form of a how-to, a recipe, a listicle, or a blog post will align your content with the needs and expectations of people searching near or within your niche of the market. Checking Search engine results page elements like the snippets bar and ‘People also ask’ bars will allow you to harvest strong, specific keywords to feed into your site’s original content.

High-quality, original content is favoured by Google’s algorithms, so writing compelling headlines with concise, relevant content in an active voice that appeals directly to readers will lift your page above the herd here. Using header tags make your content easier and more enjoyable to read. When this is kept in mind, users will be less likely to leave your site, and will even return to keep viewing your content.

SEO strategies extend beyond on-site content and into the architecture of the site itself. Large fonts, short sentences and brief paragraphs create more hooks for people skim-reading your page.

The more streamlined your site, the faster it loads – and a fast load time is important: well over half of all Internet users navigate away from a site if it takes longer than three seconds to appear, especially on mobile. This is an important consideration when it comes to breaking up walls of text with images. Photos need to be of high quality, but it’s important to compress them so that they will appear quickly.

The parts of your website which are visible only to search engines, such as HTML tags and structured data, also need attention. The HTML tag in the head section of your website is the first cue that search engines will pick up on.

The next is your site’s meta description, a tag that describes what the page is about. These appear just beneath the title of your page on the search engine results page. The clearer the description, the more prominently your page will appear, boosting your click-through and conversion rates.

To increase user engagement, focus on aspects such as site speed, user experience, and content optimization, among others. Clean, navigable site architecture allows Google’s algorithm to move more quickly and neatly through your page, in turn moving the site further up the search results. If content moves, use a 301 redirect for a permanent move, and a 302 redirect for a temporary one during site updates.

The average online buyer in Latin America tends to use Android over iOS, by a margin of about 80%, and they don’t spend much time window-shopping online. Almost half of all Internet users in Latin America never go past page one of the Google search results, with almost 20% never looking past the top three results, even if they’re just ads (Source: Statcounter). Making sure your brand name is at the very top of the first or second page of the Google search results, then, is paramount here.

Content that works at pulling in a consumer in the US mightn’t work in Latin America. Blogging and review sites are the top draws for US buyers, but market research shows that consumers in Chile, for example, are particularly sceptical towards this kind of content, whereas an average of seven out of ten buyers across Latin America favour review sites, even as they eschew blogs.

Across the region, e-commerce users tend to trust articles more than adverts or social media posts. Where this content is tied to a news hook, this will often be what wins over a buyer who is on the fence in Mexico, Brazil, or Peru, particularly if the topic relates to technology. Content-driven SEO, then, is vital for deepening trust within this burgeoning regional market.

In short, a synergy between SEO and e-commerce is vital for anyone entering Latin American markets — and there has never been a better time for doing so. The winners of the early race for dominance in the region’s e-commerce market may have been the usual dominant players, but the future belongs to e-commerce merchants who can match their SEO with a mobile-friendly user interface and content that Latin American online buyers will trust.