The secret to your e-commerce store’s success is constantly getting qualified leads. And an effective way to reach those users is through optimizing your e-commerce site for search engines.
E-commerce SEO is an effective digital marketing strategy that would help you grow your business and get the highest ROI possible.
Although the complexities of SEO might be daunting at first, just imagine how your site could have consistent, quality traffic that you do not have to pay for!
In this post, we will talk about the ways on how you can optimize your online store for organic search:
1. Create a targeted keyword list
If you want your prospects to find your store via organic search, then you have to target and incorporate the right keywords on your pages. That way, your website could rank higher on search engine results.
Keyword research is vital because it guides your content production in order to meet user intent. Just keep in mind that when creating your keyword list, pay attention to relevant metrics like ranking difficulty, relevance, search volume, and location-based popularity.
Also, keep in mind that just because the keyword is relevant does not mean that it is a good fit for your online store.
You can focus on generating quick traffic from keywords with low competition and high-enough traffic. Doing so allows you to establish your brand immediately, as well as generate as much quality traffic as possible.
2. Create unique product descriptions
While it might be more comfortable on your part to just copy-paste the manufacturer’s description of your products, the best strategy is to create a unique description for every product on your website.
After all, low quality and redundant content can have a negative impact on your e-commerce SEO efforts. That’s why a unique content description for your products could go a long way.
3. Ensure safety and security
Hackers all over the world are looking for ways how to steal people’s credit card information and other confidential data from e-commerce sites.
To ensure the security of all of your customers’ payment-related information, see to it that your site has HTPPS encryption.
An SSL certificate will also serve as another layer of protection by encrypting important information. This protects your site from all kinds of theft, hacks, and other fraudulent activities.
4. Keep URLs SEO-friendly
URLs are important for user experience and search engine optimization. It helps describe a web page to prospective visitors and search engines, so they have to be enticing, accurate, and well-structured at the same time.
You also don’t want your URLs to be messy and contain a lot of information that’s confusing. Based on the URL, it should be clear for an online customer where they are on the site.
5. Make it mobile-friendly
Building a mobile-responsive site is vital especially for an e-commerce store because its navigation is highly complex.
That said, you should provide your customers with excellent user experience through highly responsive design and a sleek user-interface.
Providing users with an interactive app draws new customers in and create customer retention.
6. Choose the best e-commerce platform
A lot of e-commerce platforms today offer a variety of features that will allow you to optimize your e-commerce store for major search engines.
So, considering that SEO involves many factors like meta tags, page load speed, usability, mobile-friendliness, etc, you need to pick a platform that does well in most of them.
7. Consider blogging
Search engines love fresh content. That’s because it’s a strong indicator that your website is active and relevant.
Publishing regular blog posts help you stay on the radar of search engines. It provides more opportunities for your prospects to find you or return to your site.
Also, if your articles are helpful and relevant to users, they would want to spend more time on your site.
8. Promote product reviews
Top sites like Amazon, Snapdeal, and Flipcart encourages users to publish reviews. In addition, search engines love to see content that’s unique and high-quality.
Hence, you should ask your customers to post product reviews on the product page. Through this, you get the opportunity to produce unique content on your online store. Not to mention that product reviews can help convert site visitors into paying customers.
Apart from that, you can also boost your sales by providing your clients with more insight into the reliability and quality of products that you sell.
9. Optimize your site’s loading time
Do you know that users will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load? Moreover, both Google and Bing take into consideration loading speed as one of the main criteria for ranking websites.
A slow-loading site increases dwell time and bounce rates, while decreases the number of pages that are viewed. All of which can hurt your rankings.
Moreover, having high-resolution images can significantly slow down your site, and is bad for your SEO efforts.
While it doesn’t mean that you just have to settle with low-quality product images, this means that you need to optimize your web images. That way, you can maintain the image quality and speed up your site’s loading time.
Adding a “zoom-in” feature will allow users to see a closer look at the products that they wish to buy. This will make sure that your site’s running its optimal speed.
10. Use internal linking
An important aspect of link building, especially if you have an e-commerce site, is internal link building.
The idea behind it is linking one page to another on your site. Doing this properly can have a significant effect on your search engine rankings.
The basics behind internal link building are to link pages of specific topics to other pages in your site that have relevant content. This allows search engines to know what these topics are, group your pages, and rank them appropriately.
Say, you have a blog post about the current make up trends for summer. You can opt to add a link to relevant product pages in your online store.
Building an effective internal linking strategy should be something that is well-thought-out and planned. You do not want to simply link every keyword on a page that has absolutely nothing to do with a specific word.
There you have it. Follow the tactics listed above and you are well on your way to creating a successful e-commerce site. It will help your store rank higher on search engines and to be noticed by prospective customers.
About the Author
Jake Rheude is the Director of Marketing at Red Stag Fulfillment, an ecommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of ecommerce. He has years of experience in ecommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.
