Having a solid E-commerce SEO strategy is crucial to driving organic traffic to your online store. Still, a lot of people are doing it wrong.
While E-commerce sites are generally one of the most difficult sites to optimize for search engines, using simple yet effective E-commerce SEO tips will ensure that you are giving your E-commerce site the best opportunity to show up on searches.
In this post, we have listed the most effective E-commerce SEO tips that will help in increasing your site ranking potential. This can give you a baseline so that you could review your sites and identify what you need to focus on.
1. Conduct E-commerce SEO Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the first E-commerce SEO tips that you need to keep in mind when conducting an E-commerce campaign.
If you don’t get this part right, then two things will happen:
You’ll be targeting keywords that are too challenging to rank for. Thus, you won’t make it to the top page. You’ll be ranking for keywords that don’t get a lot of traffic, which won’t have an impact on your revenue. None of these situations is ideal. That’s why doing E-commerce SEO is crucial. You’ll be able to target keywords that are fairly easy to rank for, gain a decent volume of traffic, and generate higher conversion rates.
2. Set Up Your Ecommerce Sites Architecture
Once you understand the keywords that your target market is using, then another tip for an E-commerce website is to finalize the site architecture. You make an E-commerce website, utilize broad, high-volume terms as product collections or categories, then to more specific subcategories and individual products.
A site architecture will help set up the structure of your site, from your home page, collection pages, subcategory landing pages, to product pages. A site architecture will also inform how your primary and sub navigations will be structured.
3. Optimize Your Titles, Descriptions, and URLs
When it comes to E-commerce on-page SEO, you should start from the top to the bottom. You need to optimize Digital Marketing Companies in New Orleans your titles, descriptions, and URLs first. Although these are not direct ranking factors, they would help you stand out in search engine result pages (SERPs), making it highly likely to generate clicks.
Your click-through rates could be an indirect ranking factor as well. This is the hidden tip for E-commerce websites which a number of strategists forget to tell you.
4. Use H1 and H2 Tags
Both H1 and H2 tags signify both your headline and subheads of your content. It also allows you to insert your target keywords for additional SEO benefits, as well as help organize your content to make it easier to read.
It also improves the overall dwell time of your site, decreases bounce rates, and gives a good signal to search engines like Google that the content you are putting out is solving people’s problems.
5. Sprinkle External and Internal Links
External links are the links on your page that direct your users to another website. Meanwhile, internal links are links that point users to other pages on your site.
Now, you might ask, why on earth would you want to direct users to other websites?
Well, the thing is, Google utilizes these external links to know the authority and relevance of your page. If you’re citing references to high-authority websites, it’s easier for Google to determine relevance.
Apart from that, internal links are also great for directing site visitors to other helpful content that’s found on your site. This encourages people to stay on your site, continue their journey, and eventually make a purchase.
Linking your blog posts to your product or category pages, for example, can be a great way to show relevance and to promote a recommended product. Just make sure that you insert it as naturally as possible.
6. Optimize For Mobile
It was back in 2016 when mobile finally surpassed desktop as the most used device to access the internet.
Thus, the algorithm of Google is now giving higher priority (and rankings) to sites that are optimized for mobile. Meaning, if there is less mobile traffic to your site, this translates into a not so great mobile experience.
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So, if your site is not SEO friendly for a quick and seamless mobile user experience, not only will you end up getting penalized, you could also end up losing other factors that boost your E-commerce SEO strategy, such as lower bounce rates and dwell times.
You could utilize Google’s free Mobile-Friendly Testing Tool to check every web page on your website and look for issues to fix.
7. Create Unique Description for Each Category and Product
Once you have your keywords finalized, the next thing that you need to do is to come up with a unique description for every category and product.
Try to write a lengthy Digital Marketing Companies in Las Vegas product description of 200-300 words. It is easier for users to look for the category and products that they are looking for. Others would just use the manufacturer’s content for these categories and product pages, but ideally, you should come up with something new and unique to avoid getting a penalty for duplicate content.
Read Also:- Some recent changes made in Facebook algorithm
8. Use Rich Snippet
In a nutshell, rich snippets are additional information that allows search engines to identify extra information about the page. Most of these are used to know the value of a product page.
Pages that have a rich snippet are not only seen as trustworthy, but it also allows the user to make quick decisions to click through, improving the chances that they’ll satisfy the users’ needs.
9. Maximize Website Speed
It was announced back in July 2018 that speed will be the ranking factor for mobile search results of Google. Apart from having an impact on your E-commerce SEO strategy, speed also has a significant effect on your site’s user experience.
According to Google’s best practices, a good website should load in less than four seconds another E-commerce SEO tip
On your part, you could start monitoring your load time and bounce rate to know the status of your website speed. You could also use free tools like Web Page Test to know the bottlenecks of your website speed.
10. Keep Your Store Secure
It is already 2020, yet it is still shocking that there are still some E-commerce stores that have no HTPPS. The good news is that it is never too late to secure your E-commerce store.
Keep in mind that you run an E-commerce store and you are collecting sensitive data and personal information from your customers. That’s why all the information which is collected should be encrypted.
If you are looking for another reason why you should do this, Google declared that it is also another ranking factor for websites. Take measures to secure your store, and Google will reward you.
Fortunately, most E-commerce platforms nowadays already have an SSL standard or making it easily available to buy.
11. Build Backlinks
Building a solid backlink profile is one of the most effective E-commerce SEO tips for any website. Ecommerce sites are not an exception.
Inbound links (a.k.a. backlinks) are crucial in improving your ranking on SERPs. It will also help in bump up your site from the second page of search results to the first page.
12. Drive Social Signals
Your interactions on social media will help drive more branded searches, boost visibility, and help you create a community of active fans online.
While there’s no direct link between E-commerce SEO strategy and social media, social media remains to be a powerful traffic driver to the overall value and health of your website.
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Image Source: drive-social-signals
Apart from that, social media allows you to reach out and interact with your fans and followers. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram lets you answer questions and provide a more human side to your business.
Remember that the most powerful E-commerce brands on social media are the ones that genuinely connect with their audience and provides real value online.
13. Let Search Engines to Read Reviews
One E-commerce SEO tips is to boost your visibility and attract new customers is to craft unique and informative content for your product pages.
One way to develop a steady stream of content is through product recommendations and reviews. Customers submit these reviews, not knowing that it lets them serve as salespeople that would entice other people to convert.
In fact, 90% of customers trust the reviews they read online as much as they would from recommendations from friends and family members. Meaning, a couple of positive reviews can already go a long way in improving your conversion rate.
14. The Takeaway
Without a doubt, SEO is one of the best and reliable ways to gain targeted traffic to your site. Overall, you might think that E-commerce SEO might be challenging, but if you think about all the benefits, then you should know it is worth it.
Having a strong and solid E-commerce SEO strategy will drive you hundreds of extra sales. Because it is one of the most reliable sources of traffic out there, growing and scaling your business over time will be fast and easy.
All you need to do is to follow the steps that we have discussed in this post, and there is no doubt that you will dominate Google’s search results and gain more customers and sales in the long run.