In today’s world of E-commerce, visibility is key, a wider reach means even more money, after all, it’s all about profit right? This being the case it would be a nice idea for brands to leverage SEO to help put their e-commerce stores in front of an even larger audience.
This article explains what SEO for E-commerce is, why it is important, and provides valuable tips on how to carry out SEO for online stores.
WHAT IS SEO FOR E-COMMERCE
SEO for E-commerce is the process of working on certain elements of an online store to enable it to rank high on search engines.
BENEFITS OF SEO FOR E-COMMERCE
Positioning your store to rank high on the search engine result page (SERP) comes with the following benefits:
i. Better Brand Positioning
With the ever-increasing amount of E-commerce stores, standing out amongst a large number of rival stores might not be easy, a sure solution to this challenge is for brands to outrank their competitors on SERPs, this is more because more than 90% of people do not go beyond the first page of search engines while only 0.63% of people click on the 2nd page of search engine results.
So the lower your store ranks on SERPs the less possible it is that it would be clicked on or even seen by potential customers and so the need for proper positioning through Ecommerce SEO.
ii. It is Cost Effective
Positioning a business and acquiring Customers via search engine results is free, and so reduces the cost of acquiring customers when compared to using the Search Engine Marketing model.
15 Tips to Improve E-commerce for SEO
For E-commerce stores to rank favorably on search engines the following tips are advised:
- Use commercial keywords
Unlike regular SEO where people impute search queries aimed at gaining more information on a given subject matter and typically use queries with words like “what is”, when, how, etc, in e-commerce searches words like “buy”, “where to get” “high quality” “best” etc are typically used in the search query, to the end it is a great idea for online stores to intentionally use these keywords as many times as possible on their product or description page, this way they will rank for commercial and not merely informational queries.
There are a slew of both free and paid tools to help content creators find the most appropriate keywords to use such as Ubersuggest, screaming frog, Google keyword planner, etc. In planning your keywords it’s also a good idea to check your competitors and see which keywords they rank for.
- Use Long Tail Keywords
As I noted earlier the aim of carrying out SEO for online stores is to help get better visibility over their competitors or reduce their competition as much as possible, using a short tail keyword might not achieve this aim, as there might be too many people ranking for it, using long-tail keywords, on the other hand, helps an e-commerce store make the search engine’s index for a much more specific search which has less competition when compared to its short tail counterpart.
For example, the search query “women’s bags” when searched will bring a wide assortment of results showing different types of women’s bags from several stores, however, the phrase “women’s shoulder bags in Texas” when searched will bring a smaller result with fewer competitors. So, it is advised that online stores should leverage the use of long-tail keywords to enable them rank for more specific queries, these queries are known to have a better conversion rate than their long-tail counterparts.
- Leverage on and off-page SEO
It is good SEO practice to mention your primary keyword in the following places
- Your Product Headline Description – your product headline description not only announces your product but also has a positive ranking value for your online store on SERPs.
- Meta Description- to the extent possible try to provide your keywords in your meta description, this helps not just in ranking your store but gives potential buyers a glimpse of what’s on offer in your store, also, embedding words like discount, express shipping, etc, in your meta description will further serve to soar the click through rates.
- Use keywords in your image tag- instead of uploading generic image captions, try to include the name of your store and a brief description of the image, e.g instead of just uploading “IMG 09783549” you could tag an image as “Laurie’s Shoulder Bag” before uploading.
4. Use Latent Semantic Index (LSI) keywords.
LSIs are related keywords to the main keywords used on your product and description pages, one good way to decipher the LSIs to your main keyword is through the use of keyword tools or by typing your keyword on search engines and looking up the words used in related searches. These keywords not only help search engines understand your page better but also increase the scope of keywords your page ranks for putting your store in front of a wider audience.
5. Get backlinks from other websites
Building valuable content on your website or product page will make it easy for you to get backlinks from other websites, the more backlinks your site gets, especially from well-established sites, the more it poses as an authority in the field, giving it the chance of ranking high in SERPs.
6. The site layout
The general user experience (UX) of your site should be nice and simple, it should generally not take too many clicks to get to the homepage of your website, it is recommended that at the very most 3 clicks should get any user of your site to the home page from any other location in the site. Also consider adding breadcrumbs to the site for easy navigation, The less confusing a website is, the higher its chance of ranking.
7. Add Valuable content to your site
Most Ecommerce stores rely heavily on pictures and do not usually focus on providing content around their products, Keeping the content on a product or description page extremely light might not help an online store make it to search engine’s index not to talk of SERPs, providing longer content will nicely fix this issue and give the brand a better opportunity to repeat the keyword as many times as possible (without overstuffing though), this then gives the store a better opportunity to rank high.
8. Avoid duplicate content
Due to the nature of E-commerce stores, there is often a need to repeat the same content across different pages, these duplicate content might work against the store during the search engine crawling process.
If search engines pick up the contents, they may decide to pick whichever version of the content they so please, to avoid this, it is advised that Ecommerce stores use canonical tags on the duplicate versions of the content, this helps to show search engines the main version, alternatively, Ecommerce stores could try creating new content for the many different times a product features on its site.
9. Work on Site Speed
The patience span of an average internet user is 3 seconds after clicking on a page, in this wise it won’t be advisable to make your site So heavy that it takes too much time to load as an unnecessarily heavy site might not earn the desired ranking, to avoid this it is advised to
i. use very lightweight images,
ii. Avoid overcrowding your store with old products or irrelevant pieces of information
iii. Use a very good web hosting service
10. Make sure your store is Optimized for phones and computers
Making your site responsive on both phones and computers will enable it to pop up and rank on any medium a search is carried out from.
11. Create Internal Links.
Linking to other pages or products on your online store will not only help in the SEO efforts of the business but will further aid in achieving sales by not just keeping visitors longer on the site, but also showing them similar or related products that they might be interested in.
12. Use simple URLs
Try to keep your URL short, simple, and readable by both search engines and humans, this is especially because accessibility is important to search engines, it is good SEO practice to include your keywords or the name of your store in your URL, avoid the use of stop words like “a” “the” “and,” “of,” in your URL unless they’re part of the keyword.
13. Each product should have its page
Lumping up more than one product on a product page might make it a bit confusing to search engines, a better way to do this is by providing each product with its product page.
14. Add customer reviews
Customer testimonials on how the product met their needs or how swift or spot-on your brand is will greatly aid the SEO efforts of your store.
15. Use live chat
The speed at which a customer’s query is answered has been shown to have a significant effect on how potential customers rate brands, which eventually plays a huge role in influencing the decision of whether they intend to continue with a brand or not, most importantly these are some of the issues customers or potential customers consider when giving reviews about a business, providing live chats is a useful way to improve a brand’s reviews and eventually SEO ranking.
Conclusion
Much as these steps can help e-commerce stores rank effectively on search engines, it is advised to keep up with the ever-evolving world of Search Engine Optimisation, a good way to do this will be to constantly Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console to help fix site errors and to keep testing and updating your website constantly.
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