The primary goal of any eCommerce business is to increase sales. In order to reach this goal, you must focus your marketing efforts on improving the quality and quantity of your traffic and turning visitors into customers. One of the best marketing strategies you can utilize in such a case is the implementation of search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing and one of the strategies with the highest ROI of any eCommerce marketing campaign. Therefore, it can be the key to optimizing your website. However, many eCommerce websites still choose to rely on other methods, such as paid advertising, specifically product listing ads (PLAs). In fact, companies in the U.S. spend billions of dollars every year on ads. Although there certainly are benefits to such an approach, you’ll soon find that they require constant investment for linear results. On the other hand, with SEO for eCommerce, you can grow exponentially with time while also producing valuable content.
With this in mind, it is in your business’s best interest to implement SEO and unlock the website’s full potential. Whether this is your first attempt at benefiting from SEO or you’re looking to advance your strategy—there are several areas we can help you improve. Read on as we dive into some key eCommerce SEO tips you must know about.
Find Keywords That Are Useful to Your Audience
To rank at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) use relevant keywords that align with the searches and interests of your target audience. This optimizes your site’s content for your audience, drives traffic to your site, and potentially boosts conversions and sales for your eCommerce business.
Various tools for keyword research make it easier for you to find relevant keywords as well as provide the data needed to actually rank for them, such as keyword difficulty, traffic, and SERP analysis. Some excellent free tools include Moz Keyword Explorer and Google Keyword Planner. Whereas for others, like Semrush and Ahrefs, you’ll have to pay to access their services.
When researching keywords, you will encounter various types based on their intent. In order to optimize your products and the overall webpage, it is important to understand the concept of keyword intent, as it is undoubtedly the core of keyword research. The keyword intent will help you modify your content and landing pages to what visitors are most likely to do after visiting your site. The keyword intent can be:
- Commercial intent
- Transactional intent
- Navigational intent
- Informational intent
Once you have compiled a list of relevant keywords of a specific intent, it is time to incorporate them in various parts of your website, such as the descriptions, product titles, FAQs, category pages, and so on.
Make Sure Your Website Is Easy To Navigate
Acquiring visitors to your website is only the first step to increasing your sales. The experience visitors have when interacting with your site determines whether they believe your products or services are worth spending money on. It’s quite simple—a good user experience helps build trust, which leads to conversion, thus increasing your sales. So, although often overlooked, user experience is arguably the most important metric for any website.
Users’ perceptions of your business are often created based on how easy it is to navigate your site. After all, no person wants to go down a rabbit hole when they know exactly what product they are looking for. That is why you must ensure that all elements of your website, including the layout, text, brand, sound, visual design, and more, are concise, thus, creating a good navigation experience for all your visitors.
Create Product Descriptions That Are Optimized for SEO
Another element that can help your site rank higher on the result pages of search engines is the product description. For these descriptions to be effective, you need to include keywords and phrases that people might use when searching for products online. Through such keywords, search engines can better understand your page and content, thus ranking it higher and helping internet searchers access your site easier.
In addition to the increased visibility, product descriptions optimized for SEO are valuable because they provide the necessary information to potential customers, helping improve the overall user experience. By providing a unique, accurate, and engaging description of each of your products or services, you can easily persuade potential customers to purchase what you’re offering.
Structured Data Markup Is Essential for Rich Snippets
Usually, search engine results include the title tag, meta description, and URL for different websites. However, if you want to kick it up a notch, consider incorporating structured data markups that help your site stand out amidst the other results. By adding more information next to the elements listed before, you create a so-called rich snippet or result. These snippets include additional information such as reviews, ratings, pricing, shipping time, pictures, text, and more in order to create a more eye-catching display.
Allowing the search engine to provide more detailed information right away helps your site stand out from the others, thus leading to an increase in the click-through rate (CTR).
Improve Your Website Speed
If your website takes a long time to load, it can drive away visitors. In fact, findings show that users become impatient if a page requires more than 2 seconds to load. Furthermore, 7 in 10 consumers claim that a website’s speed impacts their willingness to purchase from an online retailer. That is why it’s best to keep monitoring and measuring various components through a thorough eCommerce SEO audit to ensure that your site is performing well.
Your website’s speed is tied to various components—optimize them, and you will improve your website’s speed. Begin by adding high-quality plugins. They can enhance your site’s functionality without slowing down your website. Remember the concept of quality over quantity.
Next, optimize your website’s content—compress images when possible, and minimize your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to avoid lengthy load time. In addition, you should utilize caching as it helps temporarily store specific information that users can directly access when they request the same page again. Other tips to improve your website’s speed include reducing redirects, using content delivery networks, and more.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Currently, the number of smartphone users is estimated to be 6.8 billion, showcasing the high number of potential mobile commerce customers. Statistics show that almost one-third of all eCommerce sales is done through mobiles. In addition, more than 60% of organic search visits come from mobile devices. Therefore, you should not ignore the benefits of improving mobile responsiveness.
In order to make your website more mobile-friendly, you must ensure that the site’s content is the same regardless of what type of device you access it from. Next, work on the site’s design so your visitors can easily navigate the mobile version of your website.
Some of the tools you can use to elevate the mobile user experience include AI and chatbots that can help guide your visitors and answer any questions they may have about the products you provide.
Finally, keep in mind to frequently perform an audit and see whether improvements are needed on the website’s loading speed.
Improve the Structure of Your URLs
The last tip on our list of the best SEO eCommerce practices is the improvement of the structure of your URLs. Generally, your goal should be to ensure there are no indexing problems. Avoiding such issues is vital for improving your site, especially when it comes to search engines trying to locate and retrieve certain pages within your eCommerce site.
It is best to minimize the number of alternative URLs that lead to the same content, including cases when the search engine treats upper and lower-case texts the same way. Additionally, ensure that all pages in paginated results have a unique URL and include descriptive words in the URL path that make it easier for the engine to understand the site and content.
The purpose of all these modifications is to ensure that visitors can easily navigate through your site, including the general menu, categories, subcategories, and even when using filters. A helpful element for page locations is the so-called breadcrumbs. The name is a metaphor that relates to the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel, who used breadcrumbs to create a trail showing the path they have followed. Similarly, website breadcrumbs are navigation links that aim to help users navigate from product pages to higher-level pages and vice-versa.
Conclusion
To sum up, you can improve your search engine rankings, click-through rate, and sales by implementing SEO for eCommerce sites. With the implementation of relevant keywords and product descriptions, you can increase your site’s visibility and attract more visitors.
Furthermore, you can boost your site’s credibility by improving the quality of content and the way it is presented. Another crucial factor to keep in mind is the page loading speed, as it can determine whether visitors continue exploring your site or immediately leave it.
