Planning your website with major SEO goals is the best strategy to improve the visibility of the site. More visibility means better chances of being chosen by your customers. SEO is your key tool to being ranked #1 on SERPs. 

 

To find out the important basic ways to perform e-commerce SEO, click here.

 

Most e-commerce websites use the following techniques to drive more traffic & to engage their existing audience:

• • Email marketing campaigns
  • Local listing & further expansion to other locations
  • Mobile-oriented user experience
  • Social media shoutouts  & shares
  • Product reviews by customers
  • Customizing the accounts for high-value customers

 

At the beginner’s level, you can preferably begin with these fundamental practices. Brainstorm and develop strong text-based & other ideas for your e-commerce site. Such creatives can build a more engaging audience and become the building blocks for the overall website structure. Below, you can find a list of detailed methods for e-commerce SEO. These form the different layers of a successful, high revenue grossing online business. 

 

1. 1. 1. 1. Keyword Research
         2. Site architecture
         3. On-site SEO
         4. Offpage SEO
         5. Local SEO
         6. Link building 
         7. Content marketing
         8. SEO auditing & troubleshooting

 

Now, that you have your basic checklist done for e-commerce SEO, dive deep. These basics will be taken care of by most website developers. There are certain additional master moves in SEO; capable of improving your conversion rates exponentially. 

 

SEO is the easiest way to drive your organic traffic. Therefore, knowing what your audience needs & serving them their needs at an ease-of-access is a matter of concern. Keyword research and site architecture, primarily focus on this impact on your traffic. They track the funnel with brand awareness, reachability and usability. (read in detail here)

 

So, moving onto Onsite & Off Page SEO, these optimise the webpage using small tips & tricks behind each website. Let’s analyse in detail, how they work.

 

 

Onsite SEO

 

If you feel SEO is simply optimising your texts or site architecture, then you are moving in the wrong direction. Onsite SEO is one such part of the overall website, which concentrates on the proper usage of keywords throughout the webpage.

 

The main goals of Onsite SEO is to improve CTR and reduce bounce rates. An e-commerce site contains mainly product pages, category pages and blogs. Most of these have images, videos or product descriptions and reviews. Onsite SEO targets to incorporate keywords into these using various methods. 

 

• How does it benefit in driving more traffic? 

 

Both search engines and users will be interested in your site. The search engines can crawl the site easily if it contains relevant topics and insights. For the users, they can get a summary of the content available from your e-commerce site. This usually comes handy when the webpage loads or even during a webpage error.

 

• Things to check for product pages

 

Proper URLs

Short & simple words are what human beings prefer. Search engines also have similar algorithms while crawling and indexing. 

URL address is the primary identity of every webpage. Making it as simple and sane as possible should be your top priority. Inserting machine language or gibberish characters into URLs can bring more harm to your webpage. Your page is chosen from your competitors, if it can shout out loud of the topic; right from its URLs.

 

Title tags

Title is the significant pointer for your product; users navigate around the SERPs, in search of relevant titles. Using your top keyword for your product is the deal.

Sometimes, title tags are referred to as H1 tags. The best method to optimise H1 tags is by listing and picking the best keywords out from the list of 30-50 keywords. Employ call-to-actions buttons also. Your main objective of product pages is to get the users to make a purchase. Hence, phrases like ‘add to cart’, ‘buy now’, ‘order now’ and ‘hurry, last <time> hours’ will be your CTA buttons.

 

Content copy for the products

As you all know, content is king for e-commerce sites. Proper keywords throughout product descriptions will improve your CTR. 

To begin with, create good & relevant product descriptions. Remember to showcase the key features and details of the product. The deal is in the details. Vague descriptions, often called ‘thin content’ will lead to site abandonments. A moderate good description ranges to 1000 words. Just a ‘copy-paste’ act for the description by the manufacturer will lead to duplicate content and result in lower ranking of your site on SERP. In general, always develop unique & trustworthy content for your website.

Another important aspect is the extent of usage of keywords. Simply stuffing them into the content copy would not bring any desired results for your e-commerce site. The optimum usage is adding 3-4 top keywords for every 500 words. Anything less than that will not be coded by crawler bots.

Product descriptions seek details. However, making it too long to read is not a good approach. Introducing customer reviews is a wonderful concept to invoke the trust on your brand. Therefore, all the additional information can be presented through by creating a separate FAQ page. FAQ pages are easy to read and are a great way to connect with the audience who want more insights about the product. It also ensures that you don’t make things boring for unintended visitors to the site.

 

Images and metadata

E-commerce thrives on the multitudes of images available for different product categories. The smartest and effective method to e-commerce SEO is using these available instances from your site design and structuring.

While adding the product images, or main images to your webpage, you can add keywords in them. The search engines read the codes of the site; not the text & images. So, use appropriate keywords as the ALT tags for the images. You can bring back the need of long-tail, unique or product-oriented keywords in the image tags. The same strategy holds well and good for header tags as well. 

Meta titles and meta descriptions are other efficient ways to use proper keywords. You can add CTA buttons without hesitation to these mata data. The main purpose of metadata is to improve CTR by giving short descriptions of your website content on SERP. A  standard persuasive meta description usually contains 150 characters. Most of them characterise a question & answer tone, interesting the user’s curiosity.

Mostly, CTA buttons involve social media shares. Since, social media has now turned into a platform for any online business, building such connectives can gain more visitors to your site. Develop unique creatives for a particular social media page; there might be different audiences on different platforms. 

With all these add-ons you can optimise the functioning of your e-commerce site. But, few technical sides rely on the  success of a webpage creation. All these are included as the Technical SEO for e-commerce sites, below.

 

Technical SEO

 

Technical SEO begins with an overall auditing through your website. It can be broadly summarised to the following methods. But, for more insights on technical SEO, it is important to do the basics of a website creation. Only such information can help you achieve the required changes in your website.

 

• Check for any broken links or duplicate content

 

Audit for the backlinks and connecting links for your website. Fix them if needed. Optimise your content to avoid being penalised for duplicate content. Canonicalisation is a good option to avoid the effect of duplicate content in your site.

 

• Clean URLs and secured connections

 

Avoid gibberish words or characters in the URLs. Unnecessary parameters must be removed for better crawling by search engines. Try using ‘https’ connection for secured connection. Users always prefer websites which don’t encroach on their personal data. ‘Https’ addresses assure much more safety of data encryption.

 

• Check your landing page of the website

 

The landing page for your website should be your prime concern. It is the first impression for your website to all visitors coming in. So, making it usable is the primary task, without any navigation troubles. Any kind of redirecting errors should be fixed for the landing page. 

 

• Improving page load speed

 

Waiting for long to get your page loading is annoying. Often, visitors abandon a website if the webpage takes more than 5 seconds to load. 

 

Focus on including images or videos in a precise manner. You could compress the images to improve the page load speed. Also, opt for quality-oriented and professional videos for the product pages. 

 

• Link building

 

Adding hyperlinks within your content is a significant metric for the quality score of your website. It can be either cross-linking to the other pages in your website, or linking to other great web pages in your niche. When your pages are linked with those pages having a higher quality score, you earn a better chance to rank on the first page of SERPs. 

 

For e-commerce sites, internal linking is a success factor. It helps the user to move around your website; higher scope of narrowing the funnel. But, never forget to use proper tags. Do NOT leave any anonymous descriptions within your website, during link building.

 

• Schema-markup & rich snippets

 

Presenting your website has a big step with schema markup. This technique is skipped by most e-commerce sites. But, in reality, schema markups are a great source to make your web-site user friendly. 

 

The fundamental concept is to present what your website means. For e-commerce sites, a specific data markup should be of 2 types – product based & review based. This helps the users to decide on visiting your website/no; with regard to their particular need. Enabling rich snippets is another method to increase the CTR.

 

• Website usability and navigation

 

The core metric for making a site usable for visitors is website navigation. Generally, site architecture helps to get a better user-experience. Developing a mobile-friendly user interface is utmost important; 63% of e-commerce audience are mobile-users. Incorporating mobile-based CTAs such as ‘scroll’ or ‘tap’ generate a more engaging audience. 

 

You can also choose the navigation of your website. Depending on your business goal, you can go for pagination or infinite scrolling. Pagination means giving suitable breaks for each webpage. While, some sites also prefer continuous scrolling, so that the user doesn’t find it difficult in searching for the desired product or service.

 

These are the elaborate specific ways to optimise the user experience on your website. We have already discussed local listing and link building.

 

With the interesting tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, SEO auditing can give you deeper insights on fixing your e-commerce site further. Employing complete site audit is very beneficial in making timely changes & updating the user-experience. This in turn, gets higher website ranking on SERPs.