Internet eCommerce is expected to account for more than 90% of all purchases in the next 15 to 20 years, with around 20 million eCommerce sites currently online.
You've probably gotten a sense of how Amazon, Flipkart, and other start-ups grew into market leaders in a short period of time by reading this. Yes, this is because of the growing popularity of shopping online.
However, did you know that dominating the e-commerce market necessitates more than just offering high-quality products and first-rate customer service?
This is where eCommerce SEO comes into play: your online store must rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs).
For eCommerce websites, eCommerce SEO is more critical than ever before. To maximize organic visibility in search engines, outrank competitors in search results, and attract new customers from major search engines, an eCommerce SEO strategy must be implemented.
You want to be in the top five results when customers search for your products or brands online. In our experience as a leading eCommerce SEO agency, we've seen first-page SERP rankings drop like a stone when a client's site does not appear in the top five results.
Optimizing your website's rankings, driving traffic, and promoting your brand are the primary goals of SEO. In contrast to other types of websites, optimizing an eCommerce site is a lot more complicated. As a result of the constantly changing inventory in eCommerce, SEO can be difficult.
Brands with a lot of influence already enjoy an advantage in terms of recognition and customer loyalty. However, if they don't use proper SEO brand strategies, their competitors will swoop in and steal customers and sales from them.
Does that sound like something you have been doing on your eCommerce website?
If yes, do not panic! In the coming section, we will discuss some amazing eCommerce SEO practices that will work well to make your eCommerce business a success story!
When it comes to eCommerce SEO, there are numerous SEO strategies for eCommerce sites to improve your page ranking. Here are some tried and tested SEO strategies for new websites to increase brand awareness and sales of your products.
If you're looking to improve your e-commerce site's search engine optimization (SEO), you'll need to keep a close eye on keywords. Use the keywords that are most closely associated with your products. Determine the search volume, cost per click, and user intent for using a specific keyword before using it on a product or category page.
You can also get ideas for keywords by looking at your competitors' websites.
In addition, long-tail keywords are a good choice because they are more likely to match a user's specific needs and thus increase the likelihood of conversion. You can use a variety of keyword research tools to find the most relevant and optimized keywords for your website.
Additionally, you can use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords on the web page to enhance your search engine rankings. Also, don't try to cram too many of these keywords into the page.
Popular Keyword Research Tools:-
A site architecture for an e-commerce site is concerned with how the site's categories and products are organized. Both users and search engines should find it simple and easy to get to. Remember this important rule when designing the site architecture: Each product page should only require three (or fewer) clicks from the homepage.
When it comes to providing a better user experience and making it easier for search engines to index and categorize pages, this is a win-win situation.
A website's ranking on search engine results pages has always depended heavily on its on-page SEO. On-Page SEO is primarily concerned with optimizing an eCommerce site's product and category pages to rank higher for specific keywords and bring relevant traffic and conversion rates to the site.
There are some similarities between eCommerce websites and other websites when it comes to On-Page SEO; however, you must keep in mind a few more techniques. The following are some of the most important On-page SEO techniques for an e-commerce site:
The use of high-quality images and other infographics can also help you achieve better results. The user experience is just as important as the search engine rankings when it comes to On-Page SEO for e-commerce websites, so don't just focus on the search engine rankings.
Looking to Optimize your E-commerce Website?
When it comes to eCommerce SEO, this is the most overlooked aspect. However, it's understandable, given that an e-commerce platform may have a large number of products in the same general category, making it difficult to craft unique product descriptions.
As a result, your site's traffic and conversion rate will suffer as a result of content duplication issues. Because of this, it is even more critical to craft an intriguing and distinctive product description for each one offered. Here are a few pointers for writing a product description:
You should also avoid plagiarizing content from other sites, as this can harm your SERP ranking and erode customer trust in your brand. Additionally, you should ask your visitors to share their thoughts on your site's content, such as product reviews or service testimonials.
If you're in the mood for some online shopping, you might turn on your smartphone or laptop. As a result, you type in the relevant keywords when searching for a smartwatch. The first e-commerce site you open from the SERPs takes a long time to load and is difficult to use. What will you do now?
Definitely, you'll switch to a new website. That's when things begin to change. Even if your company offers excellent products and services, a slow-loading website can cost you a significant portion of your customer base. It's not just about how fast your site loads for the user; search engines also factor in speed when determining a website's ranking, so a faster site gets a higher ranking.
High-resolution images are a major contributor to the slow loading time of e-commerce websites. It is not recommended to compromise the quality and standard of product images on e-commerce platforms in any way. As a result, optimizing images and reducing file size are both possible without sacrificing image quality.
As far as an SEO strategy for eCommerce websites goes, backlinking has always been regarded as the most genuine and worthwhile. More so than ever before in the world of eCommerce SEO, the audience's trust in your platform can result in a flood of visitors to your website.
Authentic third-party resources and links relevant to your niche should be considered when building backlinks because spammy or irrelevant links can result in a penalty for your site. Guest blogging is the best way to get high-quality backlinks from search engines. You can simply post blogs relevant to your niche, but you must make sure that the content is also useful to your readers.
Because an e-commerce platform handles the personal data of millions of customers and conducts a large number of transactions each day, it is imperative that the site's security be upheld.
Users are also becoming more cautious and preferring a more secure website as the number of cyberattacks on eCommerce platforms, such as the leakage of financial credentials and account hacking, increases rapidly. As a result, the search engine considers your site's security when assigning it a ranking position on SERPs.
Your e-commerce site must have an HTTPS and SSL certification as a first line of defense in order to safeguard sensitive data and information. In addition, you should always keep a copy of the site's data in case it gets corrupted or disrupted so that you can restore it without causing any inconvenience to your customers.
As an additional precaution, you can remind your customers to change their passwords frequently and keep your website current.
You're at a serious search disadvantage if your site isn't mobile-optimized. User habits are constantly changing, which necessitates responsive design in both SEO and user experience.
For more than a decade, optimizing your website for mobile devices has become more and more critical. The mobile experience should take precedence over the desktop experience if you're running an eCommerce business. Websites that are designed to adapt to the screen size of the device they are being viewed on are known as responsive websites.
We've known for years that Google is moving to a mobile-first index, which has a significant impact on eCommerce SEO strategy. In light of Google's emphasis on mobile usability, your eCommerce store would be wise to follow suit. Plugging your site into Google's Mobile-Friendly Tester Tool is a good place to start.
Monitor Google Search Console to ensure that your site is always up-to-date. In addition to broken links and indexed 404 pages, there may be errors in sitemap files as well. While not all errors are created equal, fixing them can help Google better index your site and improve your search ranking.
To tell search engines that a page URL actually represents the default master page, canonicalization (also known as canonical tagging) must occur. When you have multiple URLs for a single page, this is especially helpful. What happens is that your website’s SEO credit gets transferred from URLs that share the same canonical tag to the page you want to rank.
Google is a big fan of user-generated content (UGC). Make sure to include a field for users to leave comments and reviews. User engagement is an essential factor that affects search engine rankings when it comes to customer reviews.
Adding customer reviews to your new website SEO strategy can significantly improve the user experience and add third-party credibility to your company. Encourage your customers to leave reviews by implementing an incentive program.
Rather than just relying on online reviews, you should make it a priority to stay in touch with all of your customers. Repeat customers are extremely valuable in the eCommerce arena, and online customers respond well to incentives.
If you're an online retailer, you can provide search engines with product details like price, availability, and customer reviews right on the search results page. New formats for search results are being aggressively implemented by Google and other search engines.
Visitors are now more likely to click on Rich Snippets and Knowledge Graphs-featured sites. As a result, more people will visit your page if you appear in this section of the search results.
Today's eCommerce stores tend to overlook the importance of a good user experience. Work on making a website that's simple to use, especially on a mobile device. From the home page to the checkout, create the shortest path possible.
In addition to increasing your conversion rate, this should also raise your rank in search engine results. Your site's usability and navigation play a major role in whether or not a user returns to the search engines after visiting your site.
Your website will be penalized if it receives high rankings on Google, but all of the traffic it receives returns to Google to search for a better site. Find a way to reduce your bounce rate if you'd like to boost your eCommerce SEO campaign.
Are you curious why some Google searches yield more results than others? In order to achieve these improved outcomes, webmasters often use structured data on product and category pages. CTR (click-through rate) on eCommerce websites can be improved by using this method.
Computer code that has been formatted to make it easier for a search engine to understand the content of a page is known as structured data. Behind the scenes, specific elements are marked up on any given webpage in its source code rather than being displayed to visitors.
Structural data refers to the practice of labeling specific elements of a web page as "rich" data for search engines to process and pay more attention to. You can help Google and other search engines understand the data on your website by providing structured information to them.
Isn't it interesting to know how Google displays things like star ratings, availability, and price on the search engine results page?
Structured data is how the webmaster gives search engines like Google this information.
In the event that you need to remove an item from your website, don't simply delete it. Many options exist, but none of them involve deleting the previous page. You might want to consider the following options based on the current situation.
Simply add a message to the product page stating that it has been discontinued, but leave the product page active and listed on the category page (and any subcategory pages). Include relevant product links in the on-page description of the old product pages.
Implement a 301 redirect to the most relevant page, such as a new product page, a blog post about the old product, or a category page. Ideally, the most relevant page should be used to replace the old URL.
You can use these SEO strategies for a new eCommerce website to boost your SERP rankings and, as a result, increase traffic and improve conversion rates. If you are
In addition to the above, here is a crucial SEO strategy for a new eCommerce website.
Include your brand name in all of your marketing materials, including videos, emails, and even the meta tags on your website. Despite the fact that it appears to be a simple idea, many companies fail to take advantage of this opportunity to build their brand. As a result of its importance, your brand will naturally rise to the top of the SERP after you add it.
If you are a beginner in creating an SEO strategy for a new website, here is something that can help you a lot. It's pretty simple to follow as well.
#1 The most important page element is the title tag, which is used by both search engines and users. You should ensure that there is only one per page, that it's unique, and that it's relevant to the product.
#2 SEM relies heavily on Meta Descriptions. Keep the character count between 120 and 155 to make it easy for people to read. Also, they should be clear and concise for users to understand the relevance of your products.
#3 Use H2 headings naturally. Search Engines use them to determine the relevance of a page to its visitors. Use 70 characters or less for H2 titles.
#4 Add ALT text to images and graphics. In order to improve your search engine optimization, use tags to include detailed information about your product, such as its name and model number.
You can also go for e-commerce SEO services if you need a kickstart.
This brings us to the end of the how and what of an SEO strategy for an eCommerce website. By following Google's best practices, you can make your pages easier for search engines to find and boost your ranking. Despite the fact that Google's algorithm is constantly changing, these pointers should still hold true for the time being.
Taking the help of an eCommerce SEO expert will give you an advantage over non-optimized sites in the market. More importantly, your customers will have an easier time locating what they need and completing the purchase process. Therefore, it is possible to sell more frequently if you use these SEO techniques properly.
J
What would you suggest if I am a beginner? Should I go for SEO services or start myself?
J
Thanks for your feedback Jorge, for queries kindly contact info@janbaskdigitaldesign.com
B
What are the common tools one can use for keyword research?
C
How often should one change the page content of their website?
J
Are there any tools to generate optimized Meta titles and descriptions?
J
Thank you! For more queries you can contact on info@janbaskdigitaldesign.com
E
Nice blog, it was quite detailed and insightful.
a
I agree! SEO is the best and most important part of any business. Thus, as SEO strategy, I mostly use guest-post backlinks. This helps in generating more traffic to my site and increases the rank. In fact, to help me further, I also use a tool called Postifluence, which helps me finding the best high-ranking guest posting sites and saves my time. Greatly benefitted by this tool.