In the breakneck competition among e commerce sites, all the owners of online stores want to drive more traffic and boost their sales. The easiest way to achieve the desired results is to implement SEO for e-commerce strategies and optimize your website for better visibility and growth.
With proper on-page, off-page, and technical SEO, your online store starts appearing on the top organic search results on Google’s first page. A better site structure with optimized content makes it more likely to be visited by potential customers. As a result, it leads to a better volume of organic traffic and more sales.
In this blog post, we have listed the guidelines that will help you understand the intricacies of ecommerce SEO and how to strategically implement it in your marketing campaign.
What Is E-commerce SEO?
SEO for ecommerce is the procedure that includes optimizing your online store’s website to enhance the organic search. The main motive of this SEO strategy is to help you gain a better rank on search engine results pages with the usage of relevant keywords and high-value search terms used by your potential customers.
Why Is SEO Important for E-commerce Websites?
Implementing a profitable SEO strategy for your ecommerce website can help you in more ways than one.
- Conversion Rate: When you apply SEO strategies to your ecommerce sites, it is bound to have better conversion rates.
- More Organic Footfall: As the conversion rate increases, your site gains more organic traffic which in a way improves your brand awareness.
- Profit: Since you have opted for organic search over paid ads, your marketing costs also reduce to an extent. Hence you are on the profitable side.
- Credibility: When Google ranks your page on the first page of the result pages, the online store starts gaining credibility.
What Are The 5 Key Elements of An Ecommerce SEO Strategy?
Several factors work in the background to help the ecommerce sites get better ranking. Listed below are the key elements.
1. Keyword Research
The most critical step in an eco-commerce SEO campaign is to conduct thorough relevant ecommerce keyword research.
2. On-page SEO
It is the optimization of your web pages consisting of the homepage, product pages, and category pages. It also includes internal linking and creating title tags, meta descriptions, and product images.
3. Off-page SEO
This aspect of SEO strategy ensures link-building and acquiring backlinks to create authority and credibility.
4. Technical SEO
The other important aspect of an ecommerce SEO is technical SEO. It comprises your site architecture and mobile-friendly landing pages. It also takes care of any duplicate content and broken links.
5. Site structure
Your website must have a concise and well-structured sitemap of your online store’s unique selling points. This makes the job easier for the visitors and the search engine bots to navigate.
How Can You Optimize Your Ecommerce Websites with SEO Strategies?
Given below are the tips for you to optimize the pages on your site with some of the best SEO for ecommerce strategies.
Perform Keyword Research
If there is one thing absolutely every e-commerce site owner needs to do is to perform in-depth keyword research. Your goal should be twofold.
First, you can find the most relevant, and high-traffic keywords and phrases with the most search volume in your niche. Long-tail keywords with a low keyword difficulty score make it convenient for people to search for your products online.
Second, use the same keywords so that it can optimize your product and category pages. Subsequently, it brings your website to a higher rank and enough traffic.
You can also take the help of keyword research tools to generate keyword ideas. It will help in searching commercial keywords and informational keywords based on your content.
Search Intent
The primary purpose of search intent is to make sure the content of your website aligns with the Google search queries. Otherwise, it will increase the bounce rate which is detrimental to your website.
Therefore, the task of an online store owner is to optimize his ecommerce site around the most common and relevant keywords, content, and user behavior patterns. With a more focused search intent, the conversion rate increases and you get more potential customers.
Design A Well-Structured Website
Always keep the design of an ecommerce site architecture seamless and easy. This ensures a better user experience. An optimized SEO-friendly website with a proper sitemap helps visitors find your products from your landing page easily.
After identification of the target keyword, the next step is to optimize your product page and category page. It helps the search engines like Google to crawl and index the content easily.
The best way of optimizing your website is by connecting the webpage to your ecommerce category pages and then to the individual ecommerce site’s product pages.
Creation of Top-Grade Content for Product Pages
Crafting well-framed, engrossing, and informative product descriptions by incorporating the target keywords is one of the important parts of an ecommerce SEO campaign. It will help the page rank higher on the search results. However, you must refrain from “keyword stuffing”.
You must always cater to the needs and requirements of the customers by answering their most asked questions regarding the products. The answers must be concise and lucid.
The focus has to be on showcasing the unique selling points of the product and the benefits of purchasing it. The product images on ecommerce sites also need to have the keyword in their file name and alt text. this helps the site to rank better.
Enhanced Page Speed
The basic thing to look after once you have created a website for your ecommerce stores is how fast your page loads. The faster the page speed is, the better the user experience.
The point here is that if you have a webpage that takes hours to load, it will have a negative impact on the conversion rate and hence the rankings.
To boost your loading site speed, you can resort to these 3 things –
- Remove redundant spaces and characters from your HTML
- Compress the images
- Usage of Content Distribution Network (CDN)
Optimize On-Page Search Engine Optimization
If you want search engines to rank your ecommerce site on the first page of Google, then you have to implement on-page SEO strategies on your product and category pages. Here is how you can do it.
a. Optimize Your Website’s Title Tags
The title tag appearing on the search results is a highly essential process in on-page optimization. A well-written ecommerce title tag must depict the contents of your website in one line. Google looks at the title tag and ranks it accordingly.
The title tag must have one of your USPs mentioned in it along with the main keyword. You can also mention some deals or attractive benefits.
b. Optimize Meta Description
Not a necessity for ranking purposes but optimizing meta descriptions is needed to grab the attention of the customers. If you mention the reason why a customer should purchase from your site and the target keyword in it, the number of clicks on the URL increases.
c. Emphasis on Internal Links
A proper ecommerce SEO strategy focuses on internal linking. It is one of the highly recommended ways to show related products on each of your product pages. Internal linking undoubtedly can help you rank better in search engine result pages. These internal links funnel authorities throughout your website.
d. Add Schema Markup
ecommerce site owners should make efforts to earn rich snippets and help Google understand your page in a better way. Therefore, adding a schema markup (product markup) to display additional information about your website is the best way to boost your click-through rate and visibility.
e. Utilize Content Marketing Strategies
Simply providing a collection of optimized product and category pages is not enough for marketing your products efficiently and ranking on Google search. One of the best ecommerce SEO tools is Content marketing.
You can start by investing in creating authentic, engaging, optimized, and SEO-driven Blog Posts for your category page and about your website’s products. When the blog posts are optimized around the informational keyword rankings with higher search volume, the search results on Google will show your content at a better rank.
Content marketing helps your ecommerce site by bringing you the target audience. When other sites find your page helpful, they link your content to them. Thus, it increases your visibility, credibility, and site authority.
f. Robust Link Building
If you want to rank higher on Google, link building is one of the stepping stones towards that success. It is an essential part of every SEO strategy for e-commerce. Building a strong backlink helps Google recognize your site authority faster and better.
You can use tools like the Brand Monitoring App of SEMrush to look for your unlike mentions. also, you can perform a regular backlink gap analysis to explore the websites that link your competitors but you.
All these tools will help you find what is making the other websites link to your competitors. In this way, you can make amends on your website accordingly and improve your ranking and search traffic.
4 Best E-commerce SEO Tools
Whether you are looking for keyword ideas, want to know about your SEO campaign performance, or want the search engines to rank your website on the first page, e-commerce search engine optimization tools will come in handy to guide you in every step.
Listed Below are the tools that are highly recommendable for you to use.
1. Google keyword planner
You can find out the rough search volume of the keyword and uncover the buyer intent by using this tool. You can also enter the keyword into the Google keyword planner to find related terms and phrases that you can use in your content.
Additionally, you can use Amazon search to look for Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords that are close to the main keyword.
2. Site Audit Tool
In the case of Technical SEO, you can take the help of this tool to audit your website for generic technical issues like, slow loading speed, duplicate content, or broken links.
3. Google search console
If you want to measure the organic traffic your site receives and which keywords play a part in it, you can use the Google search console tool. In case Google finds any issues on your site, you can fix them with this tool.
4. Google Analytics
All ecommerce site owners can get an insight into their website traffic and customer behavior from Google Analytics. it is a free tool that helps you understand the performance of your website vividly.
Spruce Your Sales with E-commerce SEO Techniques
SEO plays a crucial role in the development and growth of a successful ecommerce website. once you start implementing the guidelines we have mentioned in this article, you will gradually find improvement in your traffic and sales.
All you need to remember is to keep your webpage mobile-friendly, engaging, and original. make sure to regularly check for technical errors and new relevant keywords from your niche.
