Let’s face it: every ecommerce business wants to rank higher than the competitors. However, if you don’t embrace SEO, you could be missing out on sales. Whether you’re getting started or you want to boost your existing site, there are a few things you can do to up your game. In this post, we’ll discuss the basics of e-commerce SEO to help you send the right signal to Google.
Let’s dive in.
What’s ecommerce SEO?
These are the strategies businesses use to make their online stores visible on the SERPs. To ensure potential customers can see your products, your website should rank higher than those of the competitors. When done right, the optimizations strategies can provide solutions that meet the users’ intent.
Generally speaking, ecommerce SEO involves the use of headlines, internal link structure, Metadata, and navigational data to increase user experience. Therefore, each product you sell should draw traffic to the search engines. With the right SEO tactics, you’ll spend less on advertisement – a plus for your online business.
Why Ecommerce SEO matters
When customers want to buy a product or service, they perform quick Google searches. So, if your website doesn’t appear on search engine results pages, you lose access to qualified customers. And this is where ecommerce SEO comes in. It allows you to do keyword research without paying for ads. Your goals should be to delight customers with high-quality products/services and motivate calls to action.
Benefits of ecommerce SEO for online shops
There are many reasons why you should incorporate SEO into your business. They include:
To get high rankings for keywords
While getting traffic from search engines is a crucial step, it’s not enough. Through ecommerce SEO, you can optimize long-tail keywords to get higher rankings.
To gain exposure to search engines
Search engines respond to millions of queries per day. Nevertheless, your business needs to grow over time. Besides going to amazon or eBay, the majority of buyers will use Google to search for products before they buy them. Through ecommerce SEO, you can get a fair share of traffic.
Helps to create a long-lasting online business
Unlike other marketing techniques, SEO helps to create higher ROI in the long-run.
Helps to build a user-friendly website
Most concepts used in SEO help to make websites friendlier to the end-user.
Increases the conversion rate
SEO will give guidelines on how to increase the conversion rate. This is a process that takes time to generate results but pays in the long-run.
How to develop an ecommerce SEO strategy
Ecommerce SEO can be a daunting task, especially if you have a website with tons of products. If you have a solid strategy, you can speed up the process. Here are some tips to help you develop an SEO strategy.
Check out the competition
Since an SEO strategy should be designed in a way that outwits the competition, you should keep tabs on what other companies are doing. Also, you should look for ways to make your efforts better.
Create a workflow
You should include a few things in your SEO strategy. This may include:
- Adding Meta-data
- Adding images and naming them correctly
- Incorporating related keywords
Prioritize pages
You should identify the pages on your website that get you the most traffic. If your customers focus on a specific product, you should prioritize it first.
Best practices for your ecommerce SEO strategy
If you want potential clients to find your products easily, you should have an ecommerce strategy in place. For example if you’re trying to focus sales in Jacksonville, FL if you don’t have the time to do it yourself you need to hire a Jacksonville SEO Expert. Without it, you could be losing out on clicks, sales, and impressions. Here are a few tips to help you rank your ecommerce site.
Keyword research
Before you start any SEO work, you should start competitor research. If you target the wrong keywords, you could end up generating low-quality traffic.
The first step in keyword search is identifying and mapping the keywords to target. For ecommerce keyword research, you should take into account the product category, blog content, and home page. Therefore, you should target keywords based on high research volume. The keywords can be:
- Transactional – the visitor has decided to buy the product and focuses on specific products.
- Informational – the user is targeting specific information that provides something a bit more complex.
- Commercial – the buyer is looking for a specific product but hasn’t made a decision yet to buy the product.
- Navigational – the visitor is looking for a specific website
Analyze keyword search volume, User Intent, and PPC
Before you do some keyword research, you should understand how often people look for it. How competitive are they in the advertising space? What are people searching for when using the keyword?
Let’s break this down further.
If your target keywords are competitive, you should find a long-tail alternative. A high-speed volume indicates increased competition, so you’ll get more active searches for the keyword. You should also look at the user intent.
If you don’t know where to start when conducting keyword competitor research, then you should put in some legwork to optimize the site. You should learn the secrets the competitors use on the website.
Another way of searching keywords is by using keyword research tools. Some of the common tools used in ecommerce SEO include:
- SEMrush keyword magic tool
- Amazon Suggest
- Google keyword planner
- Google suggest
Mapping the right keywords to your pages
A general rule of thumb is to avoid competitive keywords that are almost impossible to rank on. You should focus on less competitive ones that will help your brand get noticed on the SERPs.
Don’t forget to use the right LSI keywords. To evaluate their effectiveness, you should run them through a keyword planner. If you get traffic from the main keyword, you should try to slide secondary keywords as well.
Be a content machine
To ensure you max out on keyword research, you should focus on your content. A surefire way to rank for the targeted keywords is by creating an informational blog. To do this, you should focus on the keywords that customers search for. By proactively answering the buyer’s questions, you can quickly rise on page one of Google.
Content ensures more customers spend time engaging with the brand. Also, they feel much closer to your business than comparable brands. However, producing content for your ecommerce SEO doesn’t come naturally – you must have a working strategy.
With great content, your content marketing will increase traffic and sales in the long run. It also becomes much easier to build links for your site.
Link building for online retailers
Backlinks from websites with high domain authority will help improve rankings. From a statistical standpoint, links contribute to 60% of your SEO success. Because links are considered off-page SEO, you have to collaborate with website owners and bloggers. Other ways of building links include:
- Partnering with influencers
- Stealing competitor links
- Internal linking
- Broken link building
Let’s look at the effectiveness of each of these methods when it comes to ecommerce SEO.
Partnering with influencers
Influencers are people with a large following. Rather than pay an influencer to share your products on social media, you can link your website. Perhaps, you can use a blog post that features your products or use a link from a page on your site. Other strategies that you can use include:
- Sharing and commenting on content
- Giving free products
- Send customers to your influencers
- Reaching out to influencers and asking questions about their expertise
Broken link building
This is one of the easiest link building tactics. The idea is to use links to search for other websites in your niche. Of course, you may need a couple of emails to get a handful of links.
Stealing competitor links
In ecommerce SEO, you can improve your rankings while pushing out your competition. To do this, you should use a handful of tools to spy on your competitor keywords. And with an SEO tool like Ahref, you can steal the keywords and make them your own.
Internal linking
This is linking the internal pages of a website to other pages within the site – do you get the picture? For this to happen, you must have an anchor text. However, you should use them sparingly. You don’t want to do something that will make Google suspicious. If you don’t naturally place the links, Google will know through their smart algorithm.
Also, you should avoid using links with the same anchor text. Google will always be on the lookout for inbound and outbound anchor texts. Once you create a site map on Google, you should index each page.
Site Structure for ecommerce SEO
The way a website is structured affects the search engine rankings and user experience (UX). That being said, you should make it easy for visitors to find stuff in your store. However, as you add product categories, the site structure may get complicated. If you get it right the first time, you’ll save a lot of time down the road. Therefore, you should ensure:
- Every page on your website gets a few clicks from the homepage
- The site structure is simple
As you work on ecommerce SEO, you want visitors to find it easy to go round the website. If you run in circles, it will be much harder to go round the website. Plus, you don’t want to recognize your site every time you add a new product category.
On-page SEO for ecommerce
If you want your site structure to rock, you should optimize two-page values:
- Product pages
- Product category pages
But first things first. You must follow the right URLs. There are a few guidelines to follow:
- Short URLs are better than long URLs
- The URL must match with the page title
- Keyword stuffing won’t do the trick
- The URL should be easy to read
Another tactic is to reduce thin content pages with long product descriptions. Generally, Google uses the content of other pages to see how they rank for each keyword. This explains why some keywords have longer reviews and descriptions.
Therefore, you should focus on writing long descriptions so that Google can work its magic effectively. When you write more, the search engines will be more accurate at ranking your keywords.
Focus on Homepage SEO
If you want to excel in your ecommerce SEO, you should focus on the homepage. Some of the key things you should pay attention to are:
Homepage title tag
This is an important element of on-site optimization. A good title tag should have 70 characters and must be appealing to the visitors.
Homepage Meta Description
Your homepage should show less than 150 characters just beneath the title tag. You should put it in a way that encourages visitors to get to your website.
Homepage content
If you want to have a successful ecommerce SEO, you should help visitors learn about your business- avoid overloading them with too much information. For instance, you can consider featuring a few products on the homepage. If you have cluttered pages, you may end up confusing the search engines.
Google could also be struggling to identify the products you offer if you’re not specific about them.
Ways to boost your sales with ecommerce SEO
If you want to compete with giants like Walmart or Amazon, you can’t underestimate the power of SEO. Through ecommerce SEO, your product will be discovered online, and most importantly, customers will make the right decisions. Here are a few ways you can better your ecommerce SEO.
Get organized
Just like in PPC, SEO matters too. If the content is scattered on your site, you have to work to improve site traffic. If you want to earn the NO.1 spot on the SERPs, you should put the most important content at the top and the least important at the bottom.
Establish Authority
This is an important concept to consider in your SEO strategy. One surefire way to establish authority is through influencer marketing. It helps to broaden your reach, improve credibility, and better ROI.
Make your site faster
Site performance is a crucial element for SEO. If the load speed is low, visitors will abandon your site. This is a critical element of ecommerce SEO. A faster website translates to a better user experience, which leads to higher conversions.
Final thoughts
If you want to increase sales on your e-commerce website, then SEO is a critical step. You can be sure of the discoverability of products. So, if your competitors are ranking higher on the SERPs, you should follow the above guide. It’s time you give your customers a reason to come back for more.