Ecommerce retailers need to focus on SEO even more than the average business. If increased traffic directly impacts your bottom line, which it certainly will, eCommerce SEO needs to be an absolute priority when it comes to your overall marketing strategy. In fact, with online stores, you could be looking at the potential to double or even triple your sales with proper SEO implementation.
With an increasing number of consumers using the internet to research and make their buying decisions, there has never been a more important time to focus on your search engine rankings.
You can rely less on paid channels if you generate organic traffic to your product pages. Let’s dive into some effective eCommerce SEO best practices and tips that will help you grow your store traffic.
Key eCommerce SEO Tips:
1. Tracking Solutions
One of the most important and effective tools that you can possibly implement on your website that provides a significant amount of detailed information to make better business decisions is Google Analytics.
By using this free tracking tool, you will be able to effectively monitor users, potential customers, and anyone that visits your website. You will be able to see exactly what your visitors do when they reach a given page, where they click on it, and how long they spend on each section. This information provides significant value to create a much more effective and better-optimized experience for the end-user.
The reason this is so important for your search engine rankings is because search engines are placing more of an emphasis than ever on making sure that users are having the best possible experience. Thus, if your website is able to achieve excellence on-page/site statistics, not only will your organic visitors return more often as direct traffic, but you will be able to achieve a much higher ranking performance within search engines as well.
2. Quality Content
The quality of your content heavily impacts how well your website ranks in search engines. This is especially true if you are prone to using content that is also found elsewhere, like manufacturer’s product descriptions (duplicate content). This is a big no-no that you are going to want to avoid.
Always post unique, relevant, engaging, and high-quality content. Another important point to consider is to be sure that you are posting OTHER forms of high quality and engaging content such as videos and pictures. Make sure that these pages are properly optimized for users and robots, with their own keyword(s), internal links, external links, keyword count (so as to not over-optimize), and structure.
3. Avoid Content Cannibalization
It can be difficult to not duplicate content when running an eCommerce store. It can be difficult to differentiate between product descriptions and variations when you have so many products. If you do end up having duplicate content, it can be detrimental to your search rankings.
So what are you supposed to do? If you want to minimize the effect of this content having a negative effect on ranking, either add a 301 redirect for pages or a canonical tag.
4. Website Structure
A properly structured website can increase the chance of a purchase, as well as changing your ranking on the search engines. There are a lot of ways to improve your website structure, but first, let’s look at breadcrumb navigation and clean URLs.
A form of site navigation that shows users where they are in the hierarchy is called breadcrumb navigation. In addition to site mapping and the organization of your site structure, breadcrumb navigation can help with click-through rates for shoppers.
The second website structure would be clean URLs. What is a clean URL? It’s a readable URL slug for visitors. Clean URLs are intended to make it easier for people to navigate and find information.
5. Add Reviews
Another essential factor that you should implement on your website to increase your search engine rankings and visibility is reviews, both within the page itself and within your schema markup.
You want to make sure that you are adding product reviews to each of the products that you have listed on your eCommerce store in order to provide a sufficient amount of social proof to potential customers. It may not directly impact search engine rankings, but it will surely benefit your click-through rates and lower bounce rates. This helps your visitors be assured that your product is right for them. With proper implementation, Google will reward you with featured snippets that will assist in your pages standing out and driving higher clicks and quality traffic to your site.
For the average user, seeing positive reviews on a product from hundreds or even thousands of like-minded people can be among the strongest signals that turn a visitor into a customer.
6. Focus on Product Descriptions
A lot of eCommerce owners do not properly optimize each of their product pages and the detailed sections within them. As a direct result, you end up with boring product pages with content that nobody reads. This does not help to provide a positive user experience.
By crafting creative and optimized product descriptions, you should be able to properly create a more effective and easier-to-rank product page. This should help you achieve higher rankings for long-tailed keywords, driving highly qualified traffic with very high commercial intent.
7. Improve Website Speed
This topic can create an immediate impact on your eCommerce store and visitor experience. A lot of good tools can help you measure page speed and uncover what is slowing down your website, such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom.
The best part about both of these tools is that they can be used quickly and give you action items to help with improving your website’s speed. Just keep in mind that some issues are definitely more difficult and more extensive when it comes to fixing them.
8. Add Social Plugins
Our final recommendation to increase social proof is to add a social plugin or functionality into your eCommerce website platform that allows for sharing and “liking” across social media networks. These are plugins and features that effectively allow your users and customers to share their purchases and their favorite products they recently purchased. This will not only provide social proof, but it can help you achieve better visibility on social media pages and on the search engines as a direct result. This will, in turn, allow you to more efficiently manage your online reputation.
V Digital Services
Overall, there are many different eCommerce SEO tips that you can focus on and implement to maximize your brand’s visibility within search engines. By focusing on creating, sharing, and optimizing quality content, you can achieve outstanding results.
Be sure to focus on creating effective product descriptions with very high-quality copywriting for the best possible engagement, conversions, and rankings. And should you need help with that process, turn to the experienced professionals at V Digital Services. Please contact us for more information.
Featured Images: Sammby, WDnet Creation, and SFIO CRACHO/Shutterstock