If you are an eCommerce website owner or work for eCommerce SEO, then this post is a critical one to read and implement. There are various guides on how to rank any eCommerce website on Google, but far fewer understand the needs of entrepreneurs. Today, from this article, I would like to make you knowledgeable on eCommerce SEO with the best methods to go with. I will talk about the right ways to go for SEO. Why is it important for eCommerce? Where should you invest your money, efforts to boost your site’s visibility? So, in this eCommerce SEO guide, I am going to discuss each and everything you will require to know about best SEO practises. Without further ado, let’s start with the complete guide right away!
eCommerce SEO is the process of ranking online stores higher in the SERPs to boost traffic and sales. And when you make your online store rank higher, then only it will be visible to people. So, when someone searches for a product or service that you sell, your eCommerce website stuff should come first to get you more traffic. You can have enough traffic from paid search, but it is sometimes unbearable for many marketers. Plus, ad blockers can reduce paid search effectiveness which leads everyone to come for SEO regardless.
SEO for eCommerce involves optimizing your descriptions, metadata, internal links, structure, and UX. Each product on the site should have a dedicated web page specifically designed to attract visitors from search engines. Many eCommerce website owners think SEO is very hard or time-consuming. Also, a lot of people get frustrated at not seeing the desired results right away. Maybe you’re one of those who want results like from paid ads! But believe me, it's not that difficult with a good SEO strategy. The perfect strategy will be:
* Enhance your search engine rankings to get more clicks from the target audience.
This is it, the best SEO guide for an eCommerce website!
What do you generally do when you need a product/service? Surely, you will perform a Google search. Whether you may be looking for tips, comparisons, or other information, Google search will be your foremost decision. And this is exactly what other people do when they need something over the internet. It doesn't matter how amazing your website is if it is not appearing in SERPs. Stats show that the top three organic results account for 65.30% of all the clicks on that particular keyword. So, if you want good clicks and hopefully the sales of your eCommerce site – SEO would be your best friend.
If your website doesn’t display in search engine result pages, you will lose your valuable leads. So, the thing you want to sell should have a space on the web. The products should be findable so that everyone can access their required stuff easily. That’s where SEO for eCommerce comes into key role play. eCommerce SEO provides you with a way to reach potential customers without extra paying. Once you are able to attract visitors to your eCommerce platform, you can then delight them with your high-quality products and motivating calls to action.
Your site should rank on the first page of search results. Your aim should be to rank higher where most of the action happens. And by putting in the right efforts, you can get more organic traffic. Also, having plenty of traffic through SEO, you won't need to invest to do product ads. Effective SEO practises can help your business get active and found by the potential audience.
From an SEO perspective, your business website is optimized by learning the basics first and then turning the things in your favor. The correct eCommerce SEO strategy includes:
Keyword research to find the high-ranking words people are using on search engines.
Site architecture based on your keyword research.
On-Page SEO such as optimizing title, meta-data, and images.
Link-building to boost the authority of your eCommerce store.
Local SEO to build trust and credibility with Google & increase online presence.
Now, we can proceed to understand in detail these ultimate practises in the way of Search Engine Optimization.
Step 1 – Keyword Research
Choosing the right keywords is very important for any online store. You should only focus on the keywords that matter a lot. For choosing the best keywords consider the following key factors:
Volume
The higher the search volume of any keyword, the more chance is there of getting potential traffic to your site. The number of searches for any particular keyword can be tracked by various tools like SEMRush. Or you can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner to find the volume of data. High search density keywords usually have a lot of competition as well.
Difficulty
The higher the competition, the less chance there is for you to rank for the keyword. That's why you should opt for high search volume but the low difficulty and competition keywords. Again, SEMRush is the best tool to find keyword difficulty. Also, you can use a free Moz tool to estimate competition.
Relevancy
It is critical to check how relevant is your web page to the search term. Relevancy of your product/category page to the query is a ranking factor. However, it's often neglected by marketers. Always stick to the keywords that your selling commodity would genuinely satisfy.
Search Intent
You should only target the keywords that show some intent. Commercial intent keywords are used to describe the type of search query that everyone is looking for. These can be "how to" questions. For example "how do I repair the keyboard at home?". Or there can be searches related to direct purchase or facts on any particular topic.
Competitor Research
You must search for keywords through competitor research. Definitely, you'll have tons of competitors who rank higher than you. Just take the top 10 competitors of the search result from the first page to use their website to steal keyword ideas. First, enter your keyword into Google, and then your competitor list will appear there. Scan their product/category pages for target keywords. Always remember to not blindly use the same keywords as theirs
Step 2 – Site Architecture
The eCommerce website architecture is very critical. It must be easily navigated by the users. Also, a site should be easy to crawl by the search engine. Easy navigation is the starting point of offering a great user experience. Any eCommerce site has various web pages in its structure. And it becomes necessary to have a solid architecture. Then only the users can find something they want in the minimum possible clicks. A good structure offers speed optimization and more conversions.
Create Hierarchical structure With Three Click Rule
This one is a straightforward rule that you must follow. All your web pages with the product should be no more than three levels from the home page. A user should get into the product page with a maximum of clicks from the main page. This will only be called a great user experience. Deep site architecture is not considered ideal for eCommerce SEO. When users are looking for a product, being it just 3 clicks away helps them to be indexed easily. So, just take a look at the navigational structure of your eCommerce platform. If there are any pages away from the home page, consider shifting them to a higher category level.
Create a Simple Navigation
A simple rule is that the navigation must reflect the structure. If you have the right structure, your menus would be easy to follow for the viewers. There are some things to keep in mind when strategizing the navigation structure of your website. First, the design must be simple. You must avoid adding irrelevant web pages and make use of side menus. So, whenever a user chooses any category from the key menu, get them to a landing page with a side menu. It will help them to find the favourable products or services that you are offering. Other than that, always add filters like pricing and brands to narrow down the selections.
Make Separate Menu for Mobile
The majority of organic or paid traffic comes from smartphones rather than desktops. This means that it is important to consider the mobile responsiveness of your site. You should always give special attention to the navigation system for mobile users. Duplicating the desktop navigation isn't a good option to consider. It is because of the limited space available on smartphone devices. What you must do is create a separate responsive design for mobile. Try to include only those options which are very essential and easy to navigate.
Add Breadcrumb To All The Pages
A breadcrumb consists of all the internal links of any website to be present at the top for easy navigation. It is mostly used by eCommerce sites to go back to the home page or the previous section easily. This is extremely useful when you have more than 2 levels of hierarchical structure in your site. So, if a user can go back and forth between the products and categories, it is a good UX that can be considered as a ranking factor.
Create a User Sitemap
Having a user sitemap for an eCommerce website is always a good practice to do. It is completely different from an XML sitemap that is submitted for the purpose of easy indexing of a website. Instead, a user sitemap shows all the crucial categories and subcategories of a website on a single page. So, anyone can find what they want easily. Navigating yourself and comparing it with others will help you understand if yours is well structured. With experience only, you can be able to make any structural improvements if any.
Step 3 – On-Page SEO
Once you have researched the keywords and completed the site's architecture strategy, it's time to work for On-page SEO. It refers to each and everything that focuses on the website's elements to improve its rankings. Good On-page SEO for eCommerce sites can help you get enhanced quality and quantity of traffic, resulting in more converting leads. But have you wondered about how all of this actually works? There are many factors to consider for proper On-page SEO working. Let us look at some of the critical ones.
Choose The Right URLs
Choosing the right URL is often overlooked when we talk about website development. There are various things to consider when doing SEO practises choosing a correct URL. First, try to keep it as short and simple as possible. The ideal character length is below 60. You must use hyphens in the URL to separate words and avoid any kind of keyword stuffing to be distanced from a spammy look. Also, you can use keywords in the URL from your page title.
Optimize Title Tags
Title tags that exist at the top of every page should also be optimized well. These are also called HTML tags that help in enhancing your eCommerce site’s SEO. This is because they are mentioned prominently on the SERPs. An SEO-friendly title tag is around 50 to 60 characters long. Also, it should include relevant keywords too. Moreover, poorly written or duplicate title tags must be avoided at all costs. Also, make your URLs HTTPS. It is very important to make your eCommerce websites secure. It's an SEO ranking factor and a path to have users' trust.
Optimize Your Images
The next step after checking for title tags and URL is to check for images. Image optimization is the most important thing to consider for an eCommerce SEO guide. Most of the time it is often overlooked by businesses due to its significance. It is critical to optimize images because it affects the site’s load speed. eCommerce platforms with slow load speed generally have higher bounce rates. This is because visitors often don't tend to wait and probably switch to another platform. So, you must make sure to compress images to minimize file size. There is various software available online to compress images up to a size of less than 2 MB. Since it increases user experience, Google is bending towards making it a high-density ranking factor.
Include Effective Meta Description
When we talk about eCommerce On-page SEO, meta descriptions are ones to include necessarily. It can surely make all the difference. A meta description is displayed on the SERP that attracts users to improve your site's CTRs. It is shown below the page title. Generally, it's a paragraph that displays the summary of the content on a webpage. Its ideal length is between 150 to 160 characters. It must be concise, to the point, and include target keywords.
Schema Markup
The role of schema data is significant to successful eCommerce SEO. Understanding it is essential if you want to rank your eCommerce site. It's no surprise that schema data by showing additional information improves SEO. Schema markup is a technique used by Google to display the most relevant and descriptive content matching the search query. It helps the audience find the most appropriate information. But, putting it into practice manually can be complicated. That is why you should use Google’s Structured Data Markup. So, just try out this technique to boost conversion rates and be updated with SEO practises to rank higher.
Video
Displaying video content helps your customer develop more trust in your services. Adding a video to the product page or category page helps visitors feel more confident about their purchases. The video can have all the basic information about your product or services. Or the video can be a how-to guide on ways to use the product. These educational DIY videos are a great way to attract target audiences. Once they get into the working idea of your product, there will be more chances they'll buy your related products/services.
Customer Reviews
Positive customer reviews about your commodity are also a great way to enhance their confidence in the product they are buying. So, make sure to allow customer review options if you have a good product. Customers are more likely to buy higher-priced items rather than lower-priced items if it is having great reviews. And thus, it will boost your sales to the next level.
FAQ Content
Do people have any doubts regarding your products? Of course, they have. Everyone wants to ask some questions before purchasing something. Having specific FAQ content related to the product is a key to conversions. And if you don't fill your product pages with FAQ, they'll probably go somewhere else to solve their queries. And the chance is they may buy from the source where they find the related answers. So, it's a good idea to answer all the basic questions there. You can answer about your shipping options, return policies, payment methods, and more.
Step 4 – Link Building
Building links that point to your eCommerce site is another critical factor of eCommerce SEO. In fact, backlinks are one of the best three ranking factors for Google. Therefore, link-building is something you should do prominently. It should be on your priority list while making strategies on how to optimize your website.
Get High-Quality Backlinks Only
Target valuable backlinks to your eCommerce site. This is because low authoritative backlinks won't help your business anyway. Only the quality inbound links are proved to be beneficial for every website. A low-quality link tends to be stuffed with keywords and filled with ads. For checking, you can try using Moz's online tools for finding out the different domain authority levels. According to stats, the most amount of content published over the internet is getting zero backlinks. It is due to poorly written and spammy content. So, go with quality and forget that more is a better approach.
Identify Broken Links to Your Web Pages
Broken links in any of your eCommerce pages can have a negative impact on your website's SEO. For that, there are various online tools to help you out. You can use tools like SEMrush backlink audit, Ubersuggest, Moz, and more to find and reclaim broken inbound links.
Internal Linking for SEO
Internal linking is a great job to do in which you connect your content pieces to each other on your website. Internal linking of the articles is done with the purpose to give more information to the readers. Directing them to other related and interesting content can be very useful for them. It is not a necessity that all the links should come from external websites. Even linking on your website is a good choice to give them different information. So, you should focus on including internal links all over your posts. This can prove to be a best practice of improving SEO for eCommerce. This is because it helps Google to understand the structure of your website.
Improve Domain Authority
The best way to improve your eCommerce site's DA is to get links from trusted websites. For example, press releases are an excellent method to get as many backlinks as you need. As long as you are polite and succeed in building a healthy relationship with reporters, press release links will improve your site's DA. Other than that, you can guest post on a high DA site. Or you can outreach to an influencer and simply ask for inclusion on their ranked articles. What's more, is you can list out in the best web directories of your niche.
Step 5 – Local SEO
Till now in this complete guide of eCommerce SEO, I have referred to medium to big-sized online businesses. However, you may have a local business that you need to present online. Local SEO campaigns are slightly different.
According to stats, one-third of the total searches have local intent. What’s even more crucial is that 78% of those local searches convert easily. Anyone in this digital world uses a mobile device, so keeping this in mind you’ve to optimize your site.
Claim Google My Business Profile
Google allows you to feature your business on its Google My Business tool. This enables you to input all the important details of your business into Google’s database. Doing this will display your eCommerce store in local search results. You can input at Google My Business some images, website information, address, hours of work, reviews, and more. So, it's pretty cool! Isn't it? Just update information and get listed over the internet. However, building local citations is as important as claiming a My Business profile.
Build Local Citations
They are the links pointing towards your platform from other local websites. Many sites such as magazines, press releases, news outlets, and other local media can give you essential backlinks.
For instance, having your free listing on Yellow Pages is considered a local citation. Local Citations are heavily significant for local SEO. This is because they will make Google aware of your popularity in your area.
Get Links on Local Websites
Getting local links is a trick to make good DA and increase local rankings. Quick wins include charities you support, local news outlets, local blogs, and many more.
To stand out in the crowd of various eCommerce websites, you need to feed yourself with the best eCommerce tools. Till now, you're all caught up with the basic understanding of how to improve SEO for your eCommerce site. Now, this is the time to build some knowledge of the tools available in the market. I have concisely described a few of the best SEO tools used for eCommerce platforms. These are usually utilized to get backlink profiles, perform keyword research, and many more.
Ahrefs is a widely used tool in the market of this digital world. It is used by many popular digital marketing companies all over the world. This is one of the best analysis tools because it facilitates its user with an adaptive UI and UX. Furthermore, it offers quantitative results of all SEO metrics known to date. This tool provides many services such as competitive analysis, backlink profile, site ranking, audit reports, and a lot more.
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a well-known and constantly growing SEO desktop plugin. It offers a variety of features to ensure the well-being of a website. Screaming Frog focuses more on the technical and On-Page part of the website. It displays information about core elements like alt tags, title tags, 301 redirects, and more. The data given by Spider Tool is pretty useful in helping you to keep an eye on your store.
Moz Pro with a certain algorithm determines the keyword research based on DA, PA, domain level, competitors, rankings, and a lot more. It also does a comparison of keyword complexity and enables determining which keywords to target. It is best valued for content optimization that scores the significance of a given URL. Its indexing helps you in tracking the development and finding relevant link prospects.
SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO tool used widely over the globe. Various famous eCommerce companies are based on SEMrush to provide all SEO benefits. It's a complete suite of research software tools that gathers various useful information. It researches current rankings, backlink profiles, keyword data, anchor text, and a lot more. So, you can get here the best complete set of SEO tools for your organic footprint.
Google Analytics is a free tool by Google used to keep tracking of the traffic. You may be aware of this Google tool if you are having an online eCommerce store. Working on Google analytics provides visual representations of the traffic analytical records. It gives real-time updates to find out the area of improvement. It gives you a better understanding of how to achieve business goals.
Has your organic search graph become stagnant? Then, Google Search Console can be a great tool for you. Search console tools assist you on how to optimize your content using Google Search Analytics. More than this, it gives you an understanding of how Google actually examines and positions your pages. It helps you maintain and diagnose your site's presence in SERP.
Making a profile on Google My Business is a necessary one to gain visibility. Using this tool by any kind of business is a head start solution for online presence. Google My Business provides the facility to create a business profile that displays in Google SERPs. You can add images, reviews, contact details, and testimonials. This can boost your eCommerce site’s engagement to the next level.
When you want to do some awesome research on the target keywords, Google Adwords keyword planner is a plus. They can provide you with the best measures to organic optimization for some keyword ideas. Google Adwords gives you a list of similar phrases with its volume on the searches.
PageSpeed Insights tool provides you with a data-oriented report based on your page performance. Its API gives reports on every page to let you diagnose any issues causing harm to that specific page speed. You should use a Google tool named PageSpeed Insights regularly. This will surely assist you in ensuring the website loads at a fast speed to display quick results.
There are a lot of methods to get traffic such as paid ads, social media, or email marketing. However, the organic method is the only reliable and fairly free way of getting traffic. If you want your eCommerce website to get tons of monthly visitors, it requires learning SEO for eCommerce. A simple SEO campaign may succeed in getting you thousands of extra sales. Also, it doesn’t require years to achieve the goal.
You just need to follow the steps given in this complete guide to rank higher on the SERPs. If you found this post useful, do not forget to share it on your social media platforms. So, we can help more eCommerce businesses grow at a very fast pace!
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