Simple SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Website to Increase Traffic

SEO plays a pivotal role in boosting eCommerce sales, backed by evidence demonstrating its capacity to drive substantial traffic to online stores. Notably, around 87% of individuals initiate their online shopping expedition through a basic Google Search. The significance of SEO transcends its high ROI value for eCommerce enterprises; it serves as a guardian for your “eCommerce” brand. Moreover, SEO facilitates local customer engagement, potentially translating into increased foot traffic at physical stores, thereby indirectly amplifying e-commerce sales. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a central part of winning marketing blueprints for marketers and business owners alike. SEO encompasses a suite of strategies aimed at enhancing a website’s search result rankings for specific keywords and phrases. While the primary goal is improved search engine visibility, the paramount importance of user experience must not be disregarded. Now without wasting time, let’s get started with our SEO Checklist for ecommerce websites.

SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Websites

The Right Use of keywords

Keyword research is to understand the “demand.” To do SEO successfully for an e-commerce website, you need to get the hang of “keywords,” what keywords people search for to find the products you offer. Most of the keywords have to be designed customarily according to the product searches, while the informational ones have their own place. Long keywords have been known to convert better than shorter terms while they are usually lesser competitive too. To keep things organized, it is best to save the finest keywords on a list for reference so that you may be able to locate and use them timely when required instead of trying to think up new ones on the go. We have a separate topic dedicated to “Keywords for eCommerce.”

Local SEO

We have seen that many e-commerce business owners have a casual outlook toward optimizing their business for “local search.” SEO stats show that SEARCH is the major contributor to website traffic to e-commerce websites, and 72% of consumers conduct a LOCAL search before making a purchase. Google My Business is the market leader in the local search arena. Setup up a Google My Business listing with detailed information about the business and products. Utilize all the features to the fullest. Encourage your customers to write testimonials about your services and products. Answer their questions.

Tips

• Put photos of your physical store, products, unboxing videos, etc.
• You can also add videos to Google My Business.
• Target local search listings by creating optimized “posts” in Google My Business for individual products to promote your products.

Search Engine Optimized Website Design

When designing your eCommerce website, SEO is in the design phase itself. Incorporating SEO in the design stage saves you a lot of hassle in the future. Having the right e-commerce website structure addresses most of the SEO-related issues. Choose a good content management system like WordPress with a good eCommerce theme. The items below cover the elements of websites in more detail.

Use “https” on the Website.

HTTPS has become a default standard in the internet arena. A website should always have an SSL certificate. There are various benefits of SSL (https) for an e-commerce site, the most important being data security.

Optimization of the Meta Title, Meta Description, and Keywords

The first item in the eCommerce SEO checklist is the title. Title and Meta descriptions let you communicate with your target audience and search engines. Before you come to optimizing the title and description of e-commerce pages, let’s see the relationship between keywords and titles. People are searching the keywords to find the products that you sell. So it is prudent to use the product name in the title. Your title summarizes the content of the entire page.

So it is critical to come up with a unique and intriguing title for the search engines and users as well. Good titles can increase your CTR, and improved CTR means more e-commerce sales. Good titles can generate more sales even at lower rankings in the SERPs. Since most products are optimized with SEO Title, by applying good SEO practices, one can create the best titles for e-commerce. Here are a few tips on how to write effective titles for e-commerce websites:

Tips:

• Meta Description is another important feature that summarizes your content. The word count of the description tag is more than the title tag. The meta description appears in the Google search engine results pages.
• The key use of the brand in the Title (Brand Optimization).
• Metadata and description are key to sustenance and tend to bring most of the success.
• Your product name is the “Key” Keyword in the Title and Description.
• Characters should not exceed 50-60 words.
• Words like “buy,” “online,” “discount,” and “Freebies” catch the attention of the viewers as well as the search engines, so it is important you use these tags.
• Attractive tags like “Free Shipping” in the title are also highly recommended.
• The principles of SEO are guided by real-life scenarios.

Optimization of Photos and Videos

Many e-commerce websites ignore the SEO of images and videos and pay a heavy price in the cut-throat competitive market. Photos and Videos play an important role in e-commerce branding and hence in SEO too. eCommerce buyers like to see the detail and clear product images before they buy them. Having an “on hover zoom” feature developed trust in the minds of the customers. Use the product names in naming the image files. TIP: – Make sure your images load fast. Use relevant alt tags, title tags, and captions to describe the images. For Rich media optimization, it is important to keep the following in tips:

Tips:

• Relevant use of words and substitutes.
• Naming the image file is also a critical step, and it makes a whole lot of difference ultimately.
• Promote the videos on Social Media and image-sharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest.
• Encourage your customers to upload their product images and videos and tag your business/website.
• It is suggested that one should reduce image and video size as much as possible with the help of multiple online tools that provide quick optimization options.
• It is suggested that embedded codes be used for videos hosted on external sites, such as YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, etc., in order to reduce the webpage’s load time.
• Optimize the content, title, and description of your video page on video-sharing websites like YouTube.
• Link back to your product pages from the video and image-sharing sites.

Improve the Page Load Time

While an average load time is approximately 7 seconds, some have been noted to have an impressive 2-3 seconds! To do so, it is important to reduce the redirects, have the images optimized, minimal HTTP requests, and of course, enable browser caching.

Tips

• Use online services like PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix to check your website’s/webpage’s load time.
• Use image optimization tools like EZGif, TinyPNG, etc., to make your e-commerce web pages load faster.

Navigation, Site Structure, and URLs

Use a simple website structure that is hierarchical. Group similar products under relevant categories. Create in-content links from product pages to these “category” pages to make them rank for the relevant keywords. Use the same website structure in the e-commerce website URLs and also in the breadcrumb navigation. A site with a sound website structure enables a good user experience which helps visitors and search engines in locating relevant information. Apart from this, internal connection of similar items and other pages of the store aids in indexing the web pages of the e-commerce site. Perfect structured e-commerce websites help search engine crawlers locate the site pages, and structured data is almost a necessity for most online businesses today.

Here is an example of an e-commerce website URL structure:

Category URL

https://www.example.com/category/

Sub-category URL

https://www.example.com/category/sub-category/

Product URL

https://www.example.com/category/sub-category/product-name

Tip

• Use the product name in the URLs.
• Make sure the keywords are present in the content, title, description, URL, and image names.
• Avoid having a complex site structure as well as data to be kept in order.

Creation of Unique Content

As an experienced Content Marketing Agency in India, we often notice that e-commerce content is repetitive, boring, and incomplete. Google is very particular and has strict measures against un-original content. Create unique for your e-commerce website, and be very realistic while describing the benefits of your products. Don’t use melodramatic language to describe your e-commerce products. Be a storyteller, describe your product in minute detail, and let your target audience know why they should use it and the benefits associated with it. Divide the content of your product into these sections – “What is it?”, “How does it work?”, “How to use?”, “Compare with other similar products,” “Instructions,” “Reviews,” etc. It is very important that the guidelines are followed in order to maintain a unique persona and descriptions of the product and its related details.

Tips:

• Content is king when it comes to eCommerce website SEO. Be creative and create affluent content to describe your products.
• Use a Question and Answers format to answer queries related to the product.
• Proactively publish a product review (through a blog) explaining the Pros and Cons of the product.
• Compare similar products and give your verdicts based on user reviews.
• Adopt a practice of regularly publishing blog articles that include commentary on new arrivals, e-commerce-related news, “buying guides,” and product reviews.
• Promote user reviews. Encourage your users to write reviews about the products.

Incorporate Structured Data

In plain terms, “Structured data” grabs your audiences’ attention. Structured data lets your e-commerce websites share vital information with search engines. Information like product price, availability, shipping, ratings, review count, etc can be shared with search engines. This information is displayed on the search engine results page along with your organic listings, greatly improving your click-through rate.

Guest Posting

The last point in our SEO checklist for ecommerce websites is “Guest Posting.” Guest posting is one long-forgotten aspect that was simply effective in all the right ways. It is still relevant since if one wishes to build the right kind of audience and traffic authority in any vertical, guest posting is the thing to look into. It is a great way of generating high-quality backlinks while generating an

Summary

By keeping the above-mentioned SEO checklist for ecommerce websites in mind, one can conduct an advanced e-commerce SEO in record time. If done poorly, it tends to have a negative impact on the online store’s organic search efforts and, of course, ultimately, the conversions and revenue generated. Sad, but true. So one important thing to keep in mind is whether Google can locate your site. If it can, then is your data structured within the page? If these are possible, then can Google crawl your site?

Google now a days quickly pace through options with the least amount of patience, and it is key that the above-mentioned SEO checklist for ecommerce websites is kept in mind in order to maximize the output and successfully let Google index as well as rank your website. If you are a business owner and want optimize your website properly, you can always seek the assistance of a Leading SEO Company near you.