When you’re on the ecommerce side of things, trying to improve your site’s ranking in search engine results, it can be easy to forget the purpose search algorithms are created to serve: giving searchers useful, relevant, trustworthy results for their queries. You get caught up in SEO concerns like counting keyword occurrences, optimizing META tags and building incoming links. Meanwhile, you lose track of the fact that, ultimately, consumers will want to come to and buy from your site (and you’ll rank better organically in search engines) if you have something unique and valuable to offer. This has always been the case for businesses, and it holds true for web businesses today. SEO must go hand-in-hand with attention to customer experience.

So ask yourself: What does my business have to offer? Why should Google recommend my site for my target keywords? Perhaps you have the best selection of products out there or the most informative editorial content. Maybe you have a great user community offering each other reviews and advice. Or possibly your user interface provide the best, most intuitive, smoothest experience. Figure out what you have to offer and capitalize on it.

There is a reason Google recently updated their algorithm to weed out scraper and content farm sites. Nobody finds those sites helpful, so users don’t want to see them on SERPs. Make sure that your ecommerce site is one that consumers will be glad to have found in their search.