Building an eCommerce site without following the best SEO practices is like building a home without walls. It’s pointless. SEO is the key to generating targeted traffic to your store so that you can sell more products.
Here’s everything you need to know about eCommerce SEO best practices for your online store success,
What is eCommerce SEO?
Ecommerce SEO is the search engine optimization of your online store so that you can get listed in the search engines. You want your website to be listed in Google every time someone performs a search for your product or service.
In order to do this, you’ll want to write long descriptions that consist of relevant keywords on all of your product pages, get backlinks from relevant websites, and make sure that your online store is easy to navigate.
Of course, this is just part of what you’ll need to do in order to get listed above your competitor or show up at all.
Why SEO Is Critical For eCommerce Success
An SEO strategy isn’t an option when it comes to building a successful online store, it’s a necessity. It’s how you get listed in the search engines, it’s how you beat out your competition and how you drive targeted traffic to your website so that you sell more products.
But that’s not all. Ecommerce SEO also,
- Build your brand value.
- Boosts customer loyalty.
- Reduces your marketing budgets, significantly with paid advertisements.
- Improves business growth and the sales of products.
Gets You Listed With Organic Searches
Organic searches rank you naturally in the search engines and are one of the best ways to generate sales. There’s no denying that Google search results are responsible for most of the traffic to eCommerce stores. And is the majority share of profits-generating website traffic.
Getting listed in the search engines for keywords and phrases that you didn’t optimize for is like getting free targeted traffic and profiting from it.
Increased Visibility Is Key To Building Sustainability
The more effort eCommerce marketers put into their SEO the less risk they are of losing their online visibility. Working towards a high search ranking and staying there doesn’t come without work. If your competitor outworks you then you can expect lower search ranking and fewer visitors and sales. Staying one step ahead of your competition is the key to a successful SEO marketing strategy.
Paid Search Become Very Expensive
Paid searches are a good way to generate traffic to your store, but it can become very expensive if this is the only way that you drive traffic to your website. This is why SEO is so crucial to your business. Most E-commerce stores will allocate a certain percentage of sales to an advertising budget and this is good, and if you develop and implement an SEO strategy you’ll improve these efforts without spending more money.
Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts Are Long-Lasting
When done correctly, your SEO results will be a long-lasting investment that continues to pay for itself. And the best thing about this is that the results are measurable, cost-effective and conversions can be measured. This is how you continue to improve your marketing.
eCommerce SEO continues to grow over time
While there is no magic wand to speed up the process your SEO efforts will begin a trickle effect and continue to grow naturally over time. The search engines list you for more and more keywords and keyword phrases. And it can feel like magic when you find the right keywords. Optimizing your product pages to the exact phrases that your customers are using is a gift that keeps on giving.
Building Authority and Trust
When you get listed high in the search engines you build authority and trust with the visitors, because the search engines have the users’ best interest in mind. They do not want to provide them with poor search results or scam websites. That isn’t good for their business.
It’s the search engine’s mission to find trustworthy websites, and this is determined by the quality of your content, the structure of your website, how quickly it loads, how many websites link to it, and more. And if you want to build trust and authority with search engines, you’ll want to be sure that you are giving them what they want, and following the rules of search engine optimization.
10 best practices for eCommerce SEO
1. Use important keywords
Keywords are the foundation of your SEO efforts. This is how your potential customers will find your products and services when they search on Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Finding the right keywords can be a time-consuming task, but it is a critical aspect of any SEO strategy.
When people are searching for products there are a few different reasons that they might be searching – just for information, navigational reasons, product comparisons, and ready-to-buy.
By understanding the user’s intent you are able to provide them with the right content based on the specific keywords. For example, if someone is searching for “types of running shoes” you wouldn’t send them directly to your product page. It would be beneficial to send them a blog post that talks about the different types of running shoes. This builds trust and authority.
If someone is searching for the “cheapest pair of running shoes” you send them directly to a product page. These users are looking to purchase running shoes right now.
2. Secure your site
If your website doesn’t have HTTPS in the URL you’re likely losing a ton of potential customers – this is one of the major causes of high bounce rates. And high bounce rates will affect your SEO efforts.
People will not purchase from a store that isn’t secure. This puts their valuable information at risk.
3. Optimize product pages
By optimizing the various SEO elements of the product page you’ll improve your chances of getting listed in the search engines. Remember your product page keywords will be geared toward people who are ready to purchase right now.
Add a title that is focused on the product name.
You’ll want to include a manufacturer name, SKU, and some information about the product such as size.
Add a unique description of the product.
Avoid using the description that is given by the manufacturer. There are hundreds of other websites using that exact same description. Duplicate content is associated with a low-quality website according to Google.
By creating unique content you improve your SEO efforts and produce great product descriptions that surpass your competition in the search engines.
Add a meta description to invite them to click.
Create unique meta descriptions that make people want to click on your product page from the search engine results. Your meta description is an opportunity to get even more information and keywords to your potential visitor.
Add high-quality, well-optimized images and ALT text.
Impress the viewer with beautiful images of the products, and alt text to add more valuable and unique content to the page.
4. Avoid cluttered, complicated URLs
You want to make everything clear and concise and this is no different when it comes to how your URLs are displayed. URLs can contain category names, product names, file types, or even actions, and most importantly can contain keywords that are relevant to the page.
Here is an example of the type of URL that you’ll want to avoid:
http://www.websiteurl.com/cat?=328/product?=237828/main.html
This doesn’t offer the search engine any information about your page, which isn’t good for your ranking. Plus, this looks ugly to the visitor.
Instead, you’ll want to use something like this:
http://www.websiteurl.com/running-shoes/air-zoom-pegasus-39-oregon-track-club-mens-road-running-shoes.html
This provides the search engines with the necessary information and can easily be read by the user.
5. Use alt text in images
Every time you add an image to your store, you’ll want to include alt text. Alt text can be used in a variety of ways. You’ve likely seen ‘alt text’ on broken images on a web page. The image isn’t displayed but when you move your cursor over the broken image you see text that often describes the image.
One of the best reasons for using “alt text” is because it allows you to add additional content and keywords to your site. When it comes to SEO the more content you have, and the more use of your keywords naturally the better.
Search engines cannot read images, and by adding the text to the alt tag you are telling them what the images are and why it is relevant to your page.
Be sure to include alt text on all of the images on your site, buttons and thumbnails.
- Be sure to optimize the product images for site speed and include the appropriate keywords.
- Keep the text short to maximize its impact. Shorter alt texts often get indexed better by Google.
- Be sure to mention the topic within the alt text.
- Do not use alt text for keyword stuffing. This will get you penalized.
6. Allow customer reviews
It’s a proven fact that reviews help to boost conversions on your product pages. But this certainly isn’t the only reason you want to include reviews on your pages. They also help improve your ranking with Google, because Google is all about authority and social appearance.
7. Add social proof
By adding social proof to your store you build credibility and trust because you are showing evidence that supports your marketing claims. Here are some examples of social proof you can add to your store:
- Testimonials.
- Endorsements.
- Client and partner logos.
- Data and statistics.
- Social media shares.
- Awards, certifications, and memberships.
8. Simplify Your Site Architecture
Keeping the architecture of your site easy to navigate allows the search engine bots to discover all of the product pages on your website. Clear internal linking is the key to getting more pages listed in the search engines.
So as you add products and categories to your store you’ll want to be sure that they do not go too deep that the bots won’t find them. You’ll want to set it up so that from your homepage you can find the product categories and from the categories, you will find the products listed.
This simple structure helps your visitors to find anything that they might want within three clicks, increasing the time that your visitors stay on your site and ultimately boosting your page rank.
9. Create unique content
You will have a really difficult time ranking for selected keywords in the search engines without unique content.
There are a ton of content marketing strategies that will aid in creating unique content to boost your rankings and improve your SEO. Some of these content writing strategies include how-to guides, long-form blog posts, and articles.
10. Win trustworthy backlinks
Backlinks are extremely important to your SEO efforts. These are also known as incoming links or inbound links. The more quality backlinks that you have from web pages and websites that are considered reputable the higher you will rank in the search engines.
Essentially a backlink tells the search engine how well your site is liked. They are willing to vouch for your content by placing a link from their site to yours.
Getting backlinks can be a time-consuming task, but building these links will prove to improve your ranking. By doing competitive backlink research you can examine your competition and discover the collection of pages and domains that are linking to their website. Then you can request backlinks to your website to match what your competitor is doing.
Here’s How to Implement these SEO eCommerce Tips
At Inflowlabs, we know how to build an effective SEO eCommerce strategy that gets results. Creating high-quality eCommerce websites that convert, a content marketing strategy that builds authority, and competitive market research to beat your competition.
Keeping up with the SEO industry can be overwhelming because it’s constantly evolving. But in order to maintain your rankings, you’ll need to stay on top of these latest trends.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew. We’ll help you implement SEO solutions that allow you to reach more people and increase your revenue online.