SEO for eCommerce Websites
SEO tips for eCommerce | eCommerce SEO techniques | Best Practices
If you want to skip the intro and read the eCommerce SEO checklist, click here. SEO drives eCommerce sales. Infact stats prove that SEO drives the most traffic to eCommerce websites. Stats also show that almost 87% of people start their online shopping journey with a simple Google Search. Not only does SEO services offer the highest ROI for eCommerce businesses, but also projects your business as an “eCommerce” brand. SEO helps build brand credibility and establishes higher brand awareness. SEO also encourages local users to visit the physical store after the search is complete, which is indirectly affects the sales figures of your ecommerce business. In case one is a marketer or business owner, they’re likely to be told that they should be opting for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) more than just a couple of times. That is due to the fact that it has become an essential part of most successful marketing strategies. This is the process of improvising on a website in directions that help it rank better in search results when users try to search for certain words and phrases. Below is in detail a little bit of information that might prove to be helpful in terms of SEO for an Ecommerce website: Of course the goal of SEO is to rank well in SERPs, but one must keep in mind that the user experience is the key to efficient SEO. While optimizing for search engines, one has to be extra careful in not ruining the overall experience of the website. Here is a checklist of SEO checklist for ecommerce website.
SEO is not a domain as such rather it is a framework that spans across multiple domains, most important being website design and content.
Right use of keywords
Keyword researching is to understand the “demand”. To do SEO successfully for ecommerce website, you need to get the hang of “keywords”, what keywords do people search for finding the products you offer. Most of the keywords have to be designed custom 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 organised, 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 of new ones on the go. We have a separate topic dedicated for “Keywords for eCommerce”.
Local SEO
We have seen that many ecommerce business owners have a casual outlook towards optimizing their business for “local search”. SEO stats show that SEARCH is the major contributor of website traffic to ecommerce 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 to 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 in the design phase itself. Incorporating SEO in the design stage saves you a lot of hassle in the future. Having a right ecommerce 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 details.
Use “https” in Website
HTTPS has become a default standard in the internet arena. As per the new norms of 2019 your ecommerce website should be SSL ready. There are various benefits of SSL (https) for an ecommerce site, the most important being the 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 ecommerce pages lets see the relation 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, improved CTR means more ecommerce 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 ecommerce. Here are a few tips how to write effective titles for ecommerce 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. Meta description appears in the google search engine results pages.
* Key use of the brand in the Title (Brand Optimization).
* Metadata and description are key to sustenance and tend of bring most of the success.
* Your product name is the “Key” Keyword in the Title and Description.
* Characters should not exceed above 50-60 words.
* Words like “buy”, “online”, “discount”, “Freebies” catch the attention of the viewers as well 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 ecommerce websites ignore the SEO of images and videos and pay heavy price in the cut-throat competitive market. Photos and Videos play an important role in ecommerce 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 tag, title tag and captions to describe the images. For the 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.
* To reduce the webpage’s load time, it is proffered that embedded codes are used for videos by hosting videos on external sites, like YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo, etc.
* Optimize the content, title and description of your video page on the 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 enabled 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 ecommerce 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 link from product pages to these “category” pages to make them rank for the relevant keywords. Use the same website structure in the ecommerce 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 indexing the web pages of the ecommerce site. Perfect structured ecommerce websites help search engine crawlers to locate the site pages and structured data is almost a necessity for most online businesses today.
Here is an example of an ecommerce website URL structure:
https://www.example.com/category/
Category Url
https://www.example.com/category/sub-category/
Sub-category Url
https://www.example.com/category/sub-category/product-name
Product Url
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 SEO Company, we often notice that ecommerce content is repetitive, boring and incomplete. Google is very particular and has strict measures against un-original content. Create unique for your ecommerce website, be very realistic while describing the benefits of your products. Don’t use melodramatic language to describe your ecommerce products. Be a story teller, describe your product in minute details, 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 about the product and it’s 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 which include commentary on new arrivals, ecommerce related news, “buying guides” and product reviews.
* Promote user reviews. Encourage your users to write reviews about the products.
Siloing
Incorporate Structured Data
In plain terms “Structured data” grabs your audiences’ attention. Structured data lets your ecommerce websites share vital information with search engines. Information like product price, availability, shipping, ratings and review count etc can be shared with the search engines. This information is displayed in the search engine results page along with your organic listings greatly improving your click-through rate.
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 details in mind, one can conduct an advanced Ecommerce 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 can Google locate your site ? If it can, then is your data structured within the page? If these are possible, then can Google crawl your site ? Because from experience, Google has been known to quickly pace through options with the least amount of patience so it is key that the above mentioned clauses are kept in mind in order to maximize the output and successfully let Google index as well as rank your website.
