Ranking at the top of search engines is a high priority for any ecommerce site. While paid search can put you at the top of the SERPs, the long-term cost to remain there may not be sustainable. You need the number one spot, and ecommerce SEO can help you attain this.
At some level, every online business is built on an ecommerce business model. They all have customers to serve, orders to take, a great customer experience to give and, of course, products, or services to sell.
As an ecommerce marketer, you can succeed by concentrating on boosting your search traffic and rankings. You do this by carrying out SEO best practices. Whether or not you have an ecommerce site, if you want to maximize sales overall, this guide will be your best resource.
In this expert-written ecommerce SEO guide, we will clarify everything you need to know about SEO strategy for ecommerce websites and provide tips and strategies that will help you optimize your site effectively.
So if you’re looking to get more targeted traffic (and customers) from search, you’ll love this guide.
Let’s dive right in.
Why SEO Is Important For Your Ecommerce Site:
SEO will help boost your organic search traffic, and enable your ecommerce site to rank higher in search engines.
SEO is a significant requirement for ecommerce websites. Your products need to rank higher than your competitors, and they need to display the right way so potential customers can find the products they need in the SERPs and choose your site to click on.
Optimizing ecommerce sites can generate an ongoing, free source of high-converting organic traffic to your site. It also enables you to rank higher, and your pages will provide the best solutions to a user’s search intent.
Keyword Research For Ecommerce Websites:
Keyword research is a very essential part of any SEO strategy. You need to understand who your ideal customers are and their purchasing behavior to conduct it properly. You will need to understand how they research new products and how they go about making purchase decisions.
Without keywords, it’s impossible to optimize your product and category pages).
The core of any effective eCommerce SEO optimization strategy starts with keyword research. Making sure you are targeting the right keywords is essential to your SEO efforts. Focusing on the wrong target keyword can negatively affect your impressions and bring low-converting traffic to your business.
How To Choose Keywords For Ecommerce Product And Category Pages :
Your list of keywords is probably pretty big right now. So, how do you narrow it down and focus on the keywords that matter most?
Use this 4-step checklist to identify the best keywords for your ecommerce site.
1. Volume: This is (by far) the most fundamental metric when analyzing a search term.
The higher the search volume, the more potential traffic to your site. High volume keywords often mean a lot of competition.
2. Competition: The lower the competition, the more likely you are to rank for the keyword.
3. Relevancy: How relevant is your product page or category page to the search term? This is a huge ranking factor that’s often forgotten. Stick to keywords that your products would genuinely satisfy. You’re not foolin’ Google.
4. Commercial Intent: Again, you want to target keywords that show commercial intent. Usually, you can evaluate intent just by looking at a keyword. For example: size 12 women’s red dress vs. 2017 dress trends
Which has more commercial intent? Which of these searchers is more likely to buy something on your site? The former, of course.
On-Page SEO For Ecommerce Websites :
1. Optimize Your Title Tags:
Title tags (also known as page titles) have vast SEO potential due to their huge impact on a page’s CTR, as they inform people and search engines what the page is about. You will have seen them as the blue clickable titles in the SERPs.
An optimized title tag should be between 55–60 characters long, descriptive, and use target keywords. Your store name shouldn’t be first; remember search intent. Many ecommerce sites choose to add their company name at the end.
2. Optimize Your Meta Descriptions:
Meta descriptions are the content that appears directly below the title tag in the SERPs, meaning they also play a vital role in click-through rates. But how do you optimize them?
Here are some quick tips for writing meta descriptions;
• The meta description length should be approximately 150 characters.
• Each description should be personalized to the page.
• Be precise.
• Explain exactly why a shopper should prefer your site. Featuring perks (free shipping, save X% on.. buy-one-get-one) is one of the ways you can grab a visitor’s attention.
3. Optimize Your Images :
Instead of adding an image to your product page called IMG65789.png, use the product name and a relevant keyword (if possible), such as jeans-red-polka-dot.png.
You should look at editing the filename for SEO purposes. By making the file name more descriptive, it makes it simpler for search bots to understand what the image is.
4. Add Unique Content to Each Page:
Search engines need content to be able to understand it and rank it accordingly, making it important for SEO.
If your site features thousands of products, adding unique content will take a lot of time, but there is, unfortunately, no way around it. You want and need an optimized ecommerce business given the huge amount of competition.
Focus on your most important pages first. For category and product pages, you should be looking at writing at least 250–500 words for each of them, and it needs to be unique.
5. Content Ideas:
Besides the product description and your chosen keywords, you can describe in detail any features the product has, awards won, comparisons to other products, and FAQ sections.
Focus on Internal Linking:
One of the nice things about ecommerce SEO is that internal linking is done almost automatically. That’s because your site’s navigation usually creates a lot of natural internal links.
The inter Linking can boost your SEO as you can choose your own anchor text, helping you to rank for your chosen keyword, as well as enhance the user experience by suggesting related pages to browsers.
Technical SEO For Ecommerce Websites:
Technical SEO is one of those things that’s essential for all sites, but doubly so for ecommerce. That’s because ecommerce sites manage to have lots of pages and all of those pages boost the changes that technical SEO issues will crop up.
Not only that, but most ecommerce pages don’t have that many backlinks pointing to them. This means that technical SEO is often the “tiebreaker” on Google’s first page. For example, if you and your competitor are neck-and-neck, a technical SEO issue can be the difference between the 4th spot and a coveted #1 ranking.
How to Identify Technical Issues on Your Website:
Fixing technical SEO site issues is crucial for ecommerce sites, as it can sometimes be the main difference in ranking between you and another very similar competitor.
For Ecommerce Sites, Our Site Audit Tool Can Help You Find:
• Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions: so they can be updated in order to create unique and relevant tags and descriptions for users and search engines
• Duplicate content: which can affect ranking, and link equity, and result in traffic losses.
• Slow page load speed: which can impact bounce rates.
• Broken internal links: which are bad for usability and can signal to search engines that a website is of low-quality.
• Broken internal images: which harm the user experience.
• Returning 4xx codes: typically due to broken links, which impact SEO due to crawlability issues.
• Low word count: which may not be satisfying the user search intent, impacting ranking in the SERPs.
• Links on HTTPS pages leading to HTTP pages: which could negatively affect page ranking.
• Pages missing Schema.org markup: having this markup increases the chance of content appearing in SERPS.
• Pages containing JavaScript and CSS files that are too large: which impacts page load speed time.
How To Fix Common Technical SEO Issues On Ecommerce Websites:
1. Duplicate Content:
Duplicate content is one of the most common ecommerce SEO issues and it’s one that can lower your site in Google’s search results.
Duplicate content should be avoided when at all possible. If you find them or it is unavoidable having them, here is what you can do:
• Use canonical tags to signal to Google which product page is the main page.
• Use indexing for pages that do not generate search traffic or robots.txt whilst carefully targeting offending parameters.
• Have an up-to-date Content Map to identify where duplicate content exists.
• Hide the duplicate within the original.
2. Thin Content:
Thin content is another common technical SEO issue that ecommerce sites have to deal with. So even after you solve your duplicate content issues, you might have pages with thin content.
You can fix this by creating detailed product descriptions to make your products stand out to users and search engines alike and aim to make content at least 500 words in length.
3. Deep Pages:
Pages that are more than three clicks away from the homepage are referred to as deep pages in your site architecture and are to be avoided. This is because a simple flat structure enhances the site crawlability and overall user experience.
There are numerous ways to fix this, including adding feature-based navigation (e.g.. featured products) to your homepage.
4. Page Load Speed:
Ecommerce sites can be affected by site speed issues for a variety of reasons, such as large image file sizes, slow hosting, and bloated code on ecommerce platforms.
Page load speed can be fixed by:
• Optimizing images with compression: through sites such as TinyPNG.
• Use a CDN: increase your loading speed, as well as make your site more secure.
Content Marketing For Ecommerce Sites:
Content marketing can help you get LOTS of targeted traffic and sales.
Here’s a step-by-step guide of how you can use content to get higher rankings and more traffic to your ecommerce website?
Step 1: Find Where Your Target Customers Hang Out Online:
Hanging out with your customers gives you extraordinary insight into their thoughts, dreams, fears, and desires. Because it’s not always possible to hang out with customers in real life, I recommend going to places that they tend to hang out online.
For example, if your target audience is made up of traveling, you’d want to check out the best places for them.
Step 2: Learn What Words and Phrases Customers Use:
Now that you’ve found your target audience, it’s time to stalk them. Don’t worry, this isn’t as creepy as it sounds.
You just have to keep an eye out for words and phrases that they use to describe their problems and issues.
The phrases represent keywords that your audience uses when they’re not shopping for products. These make great keywords for you to create blog content around.
Step 3: Create An Outstanding Piece of Content Around That Keyword:
Now, it’s time to create a piece of content that’s the bar-none absolute best on the planet.
When you consistently publish content on your Ecommerce site, you’ll find that all of these links, traffic, and social media shares help your product and category pages rank better.
SEO strategy for Ecommerce websites can be complex and take time to carry out, but if you follow our advice provided in this Ecommerce guide, it is certainly worth the effort.
