E-commerce has changed the way businesses operate for better by offering a global marketplace at the fingertips. However, to survive and grow in this competitive industry, having an effective e-commerce SEO strategy is crucial. This post will try to walk you through the e-commerce SEO to help you gain visibility and traction for your online business. Start with a commitment towards e-commerce SEO best practices and you will take your online business to new heights.
What is e-Commerce SEO?
E-commerce SEO is the process to optimize online store so it can secure a rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), hopefully more than just the first ranking. A well-optimized e-commerce website not only attracts more organic traffic but also increases conversions, resulting in higher revenue as best eCommerce SEO also covers some parts of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). To understand the importance of e-commerce SEO, let’s look into the industry’s best practices that have ensured longetivity of business for a lot of owners.
1. Look for the right and the important keywords
Keyword research is the cornerstone of SEO and it is the same for e-commerce SEO as well. You need to start by identifying relevant keywords for your products and product categories that potential customers may use to search for products that you offer. You will need to integrate these keywords naturally into your product descriptions, titles, and metadata to enhance search engine visibility. If you have category pages, you need to integrate relevant keywords on those category pages as well.
Your keyword can be informative for the category pages but search intent of your product page keywords shoud be purchase oriented.
2. Clear, Unique and Adequate Product Information
Ensure your product details are easily clear and concise, they should be presented in easily understandable language. And if you are selling internationally, it is necessary that you maintain your multilingual portal. Provide accurate information for each products such as sizes, colors, material, prices, and measurements. Maintaining a simple and clear pattern while explaining your product information makes it easy for both shoppers and the search engines to understand your products better.
More importantly, if you are reselling products, try to create your own version of the product descriptions. Using the same texts that supplier has provided you will not help you rank your product higher in SERP
3. User Experience foucsed Front-end Design and Site Architecture
A user-friendly website is crucial for E-commerce success. This is something that you should do before you make your e-Commerce website live. But, even if you missed it, you can always conduct A/B tests and multi-variate tests to ensure the best user experience. Prioritize responsive design to ensure your website functions seamlessly on various devices. Simplify navigation, enhance site speed, and create a visually appealing layout to engage visitors and encourage longer stays.
Site search and breadcrums are extremely important for e-Commerce SEO so they should be included in the design on every pages.
4. Leverage Rich Snippets
Implement schema markup to create rich snippets that display additional information in search results. This can include ratings, prices, and availability, enhancing the attractiveness of your products and encouraging clicks. If your products have the tendency to collect user feedback, it is a great leverage for your e-Commerce SEO.
5. Product Images are your Assets
High-quality images play a pivotal role in E-commerce. Optimize images for speed without compromising on quality. Use descriptive file names and alt tags to help search engines understand the content of your images. Even Amazon prioritizes a 1000 px image to enable the image zoom feature. Furthermore, as you are the controller of your website, if you maintain a consistent background for all of your product images, that will help in further CRO activities.
Apart from the product images, you can also publish blog posts in your e-Commerce website with different usages of the products or product categories. Optimize those images with proper caption, image description, and alt texts to benefit from SEO.
6. Create Engaging Content
Produce valuable content such as blogs, guides, or videos related to your products and industry. Engaging content not only educates and entertains your audience but also attracts backlinks and improves search engine rankings. Again, do not miss out on the opportunity offered by the user generated contents such as feedback. Encourage your buyers to leave feedback for your products on your e-Commerce site.
Even if you are running your e-Commerce marketing on a multi-channel marketing model, the citations of your website and products on the marketplaces will help to improve your eCommerce SEO.
7. Prioritize Mobile Optimization
With the ever-increasing surge in mobile usage, ensuring your e-Commerce site is mobile-responsive is crucial. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites in search results, making mobile optimization a vital component of E-commerce SEO. If your website is based in WordPress CMS, you could even use some plugins to create a progressive web app.
This will allow your customers to save your website as an icon on their mobile devices. And in result, you will have repeating visitors which will further improve your e-Commerce SEO.
8. Harness the Power of Reviews
Encourage customers to leave reviews for your products. If you are a new e-Commerce business, you could even run promotional offers for customers who leave reviews for your products. Positive reviews not only instill trust in potential buyers but also contribute to higher search rankings. Respond to reviews promptly to show your commitment to customer satisfaction.
As per the negative product reviews, they are not a matter to be scared of, rather take them as an opportunity to show your dedication on ensuring customer satisfaction.
9. Implement Local SEO Strategies
e-Commerce business holds the potential to grow beyond the national boundaries but still an e-Commerce business can benefit from the local customers. So one should never underestimate the benefits that can be derieved from Local SEO.
Claim your Google My Business listing, Bing Places listing and ensure your business details are accurate. Focus on building citations in relevant local directories to boost local search visibility.
10. Monitor and Adapt
Regularly analyze your E-commerce site’s performance using tools like Google Analytics and Search Console. In order to track your visitors from bing, make sure to integrate bing webmaster tool in your site also. Track keyword rankings, traffic trends, and user behavior. Use this data to make informed adjustments to your E-commerce SEO strategy.
If you want to use the tools that make it easier for your SEO activities, you can opt in trial or premium of Ahrefs or SEMRush also.
Finally…
A few confusion about eCommerce SEO which needs to be cleared…
1.”SEO is a one-time fix.”
This may come as a surprise to many but e-Commerce SEO requires devotion and ongoing optimization for success. Take it this way: The people get tired of the same thing and they start to think differently, then they act differently, so the search engine algorithms have to be updated, and to get the favor of those algorithms, the changes in your website needs to be made. These will not be the drastic changes very often, but will be minor changes regularly. For those who carry this misconception, should understand that even if you rank for certain products, you will need to carry out the ongoing activities in order to maintain your rank.
2. “More keywords mean higher rankings.”
Quality over quantity – focus on relevant and natural keyword usage. Keyword stuffing is punishable by the Google’s algorithm. Further, it is the thought process of your customers that you should integrate in your contents, more keywords will do you no good.
3. “Paid ads replace SEO.”
Paid ads complement SEO, but organic search traffic is essential for long-term success. You can even collect accurate data from the paid ads for how much can you increase your sales if you rank organically in certain keywords. Or you can also run paid ads to run your A/B or Multi-variate experiments when optimizing for CRO.
4. “Any backlink is good.”
Quality backlinks from authoritative sites matter; spammy backlinks can harm your rankings. For this reason, you will need to run your backlink audit process and perform links disavow activities at a regular interval.
5. “Meta keywords boost rankings.”
Meta keywords hold little value; focus on optimized titles and descriptions. Your URL should be user friendly, meaning, easy to remember and people will remember that what they searched for.
6. “Duplicate content is harmless.”
Duplicate content can lead to lower rankings and confusion for search engines. Write original and unique product descriptions. And for e-Commerce SEO, ensure that two urls are not pointing to the same product. For eg: /tag/product1, /category/product1, /product1
7. “Focusing only on Google is enough.”
Optimize for other search engines and platforms, as well as voice search. Apart from optimizing for Google, you will need to work on off-page SEO for ECommerce also. This means, you will need to submit your products to Facebook marketplace, create product tags on Instagram, submit your products on Google Shopping and other comparison sites also.
8. “SEO is a secret formula.”
The act of SEO is a blend of science and art. SEO best practices are accessible; it’s about strategic implementation and continuous learning. Apart from that, it is about understanding the business and the customers and their needs and wants and consistently working to deliver them.
9. “Site speed isn’t crucial.”
Slow loading times can lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings. For this reason alone, you need to look into the Technical SEO. Some of the quickly identified culprits are uncatched contents, un-minified css and js codes, unnecessarily bulky images, server location and quality, multiple url redirects.
10. “Social media doesn’t impact SEO.”
Social signals indirectly affect SEO by driving traffic, engagement, and brand visibility. In publicly published social media posts, we can only guess how many search engine bots are gathering information and sending out the singal to the algorithms.