Ecommerce SEO, or search engine optimization, is essential to increase the amount of website traffic to your site from search engines, typically Google. Organic search accounts for over 53% of all website traffic, whereas paid ads only account for 15%. SEO is the key to driving more customers to your online store. For this reason, it is crucial to focus on SEO for your eCommerce website. Here are some hints on how to improve your eCommerce SEO results;
1. Conduct competitor Research
If you have no clue where to start with on-site optimization for your eCommerce site, then your competitors are your best bet. Larger competitors, in particular, have probably already put in the legwork for optimizing their websites, and you can learn many of their secrets on their websites themselves. Keywords are what you need to focus on. You’ll mainly want to analyze the keywords on their homepages and top product pages.
2. Optimize on-page SEO for eCommerce product pages
In SEO you can’t just look at product pages in isolation, because search engines don’t view your store that way either. Pages affect one another (positively and negatively), so you need to look beyond product pages. Search engines evaluate your entire store and optimizing product pages requires you to focus on these pages without losing sight of the bigger picture. In addition to carefully adding in words that your customers see in descriptions, you should also pay attention to the on-page SEO elements. The three key elements of on-page SEO are:
- Page titles: The top blue line that shows up in each Google search result.
- Meta descriptions: The text underneath the page title in the Google search result. For a product page, consider this a preview of what they’ll see when they click.
- Images: Believe it or not, what you name your images before you upload them to your site makes a difference. Search engines “crawl” this information, which means they look through it constantly and use the data for ranking.
3. Organize your website in a simple, logical way
Another important aspect of eCommerce SEO optimization is site architecture. The way you organize all the pages of your store is called “architecture.” This is a really important tip to improve eCommerce SEO while also improving the user experience of your potential customers. An ideal website architecture has a clear, logical structure for how everything is organized. As you build your architecture and name your pages from category down to product, only include a few descriptive terms (and leave out unimportant words like “the, a, of” and other types of words that aren’t included in keywords.
4. Optimize For Mobile
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re at a serious search disadvantage. Evolving user habits make responsive design essential from both an SEO and user experience perspective. If you’re looking to take things a step further, Google’s AMP format can further optimize mobile experiences by reducing load time and improving mobile search rank. That said, mobile optimization is not just for ranking better on SERPs, it is also integral to capturing traffic. More users than ever are accessing websites through mobile devices.
5. Run an SEO audit to see where you’re at now
An SEO audit is a process of identifying problems or errors that can prevent your site from ranking on Google and other search engines. Multiple parts make up an SEO audit, including:
- Make sure your site is being correctly crawled, indexed, and rendered by Google
- Checking your website for on-page SEO problems
- Examining your off-page SEO for potential issues on others’ sites that relate/link back to your site
- Verifying that your site has a good user experience (for both mobile and desktop users)
- Keyword-optimizing your content
- Combing your website for duplicate or thin content
- Setting up and maintaining comprehensive reporting to track your website’s performance
If your site is already up and running, there are plenty of free and paid online tools you can use to run a quick eCommerce SEO audit. Even with the free versions, you’ll be able to learn a lot about how your website is performing and you’ll walk away with a good idea of the most important things you can fix.
Final Thoughts
It’s a hard truth, but SEO for eCommerce sites isn’t something you can master in a day. If you want to rank at the top, you’ll need to regularly set aside some time to keep building your knowledge base. To make your work easier, you could hire an SEO specialist like Charleson to work on boosting your visibility in search engines and also make your website and your customers’ user experience exceptional!
