Increasing the number of visitors to your eCommerce store is an excellent method to expose your products to potential new buyers, but doing so can be challenging.
You could use digital ads, but with the price of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) continuing to rise, it’s no longer practical to engage in competitive keyword bidding with more established e-commerce firms. Hence, an eCommerce SEO agency is essential in this regard.
By investing in SEO, you may reduce your reliance on paid channels, improve your website’s position in Google search results, and increase your organic traffic volumes.
This post contains valuable content for everyone, whether you’re entirely new to eCommerce SEO or just searching for new ways to get people to your business. Just follow these seven tips below to stay ahead of your competitors:
1. Conduct Keyword Research To Identify Your Ideal Keywords
The first step in any search engine optimisation strategy for online stores is to determine which keywords most apply to your products and services and include them in your online store.
What search phrases do you hope to dominate? Imagine you run a business selling aromatherapy supplies. Popular phrases like “essential oil” and “scented candle” should be included in your online store’s vocabulary. Although, you should know that there is significant competition in that industry. Several online marketplaces will vie for control of broad categories like these.
As a result, it’s essential to conduct in-depth research to identify suitable long-tail keywords. These terms are more specific but have fewer searches; therefore, there is less competition. As an illustration, “ceramic essential oil diffuser” and “white ceramic diffuser” are examples of long-tail keywords.
You can use search engine optimisation (SEO) tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to see how competitive the keywords you’ve chosen to target are.
2. Verify That Products Are Indexed
If a page isn’t connected to others on the site, Googlebot may not find it during its crawl. For example, some product pages on online stores can only be found using the site’s internal search function.
Using a combination of an XML sitemap and Google Merchant Center, you can guarantee that Google will crawl all of your product pages.
Using Google’s Merchant Center product feed creation tool will increase the likelihood that Google will find and rank all of your products. Googlebot is given the URLs for the individual product pages, so it may utilise them as jumping-off points to explore even more pages.
3. Enhance The User Experience Of Your Product Page
Now that keyword research is a regular part of your strategy, it’s time to evaluate your product pages to determine where you can enhance the buying process for your customers.
Maybe you’re wondering if this is a real search engine optimisation (SEO) consideration for online stores. It is. In recent years, Google has made numerous changes to its search algorithm, prioritising the presentation of the highest quality material.
Google introduced the E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) principles in February 2019 to encourage businesses to provide further thought to the material they publish online. If you’re going to publish, publish well. To give the reader/viewer as much useful information and honesty as possible. Because of this, the bar was increased for all brands, especially those operating in the e-commerce space.
4. Improve Your Website Navigation And Structure
A consumer may spend between ten and twenty seconds on an e-commerce site before departing. Within that window of time, consumers will decide whether or not they want to stick with your site based on how easy it is to find what they’re looking for, how well the categories are structured, and whether or not they feel drawn to your brand. This is why it’s crucial to enhance your site’s navigation and structure, not just for search engine optimisation but for the benefit of your users.
This piece of advice has two primary parts. Adding breadcrumbs is the first step toward better site navigation. Users may see where they are about the site’s overall structure (without looking at the URL) via breadcrumb navigation.
5. Mobile-Optimise Your Website
The 2019 introduction of Google’s mobile-first indexing policy bolstered the reliability of mobile versions of webpages. More than half of all website traffic in the world was from mobile devices in the last quarter of 2021.
You might as well waste money away if your e-commerce site isn’t mobile-friendly. The gold standard is to construct a website that responds to the user’s device screen size.
Explore your entire website on a mobile device and ensure that all images and videos are presented properly, the website opens quickly, and all text is readable. There are no advertisements that may not function on mobile. Another consideration is that the user experience must be consistent across all devices. Mobile and desktop users should have access to the same types of material.
6. Avoid All Broken Links
Both users and search engines benefit from properly optimised URLs, whereas broken links annoy both. Imagine a buyer eager to purchase your product clicks on the link only to find that it does not work. That’s a terrible way to treat your customers, and it will affect your sales.
A 301 redirect should be implemented whenever a URL is changed to ensure that users and search engines are redirected to the correct location.
7. Prioritise Link Building
To rank highly in Google’s search results, one of the most effective eCommerce SEO strategies is to get links from other eCommerce sites.
Referral traffic and additional sales can be attained through the use of backlinks. However, not all sites allow you to link directly to their categories or products. If you have a blog that people can link to in their postings, you may find more success.
Creating high-quality backlinks requires reaching out to other websites in your field and offering to write a guest post for them. Focusing on creating original, high-quality material that answers people’s problems or helps them in some way is another great way to attract organic links; this is the type of content that people are looking for; therefore, it’s also the type of stuff that other websites will link to.
Final Thoughts
With any luck, you’ll be able to use these pointers for eCommerce SEO to develop a winning approach for optimising your online business for search engines. Leave a comment below and tell us about your success stories if you have any more advice to provide.