SEO essentials for online retailers

eCommerce is an incredibly competitive business and the brands that will stand out are the ones that carry a compelling value proposition. 

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is continuously evolving. Today, SEO for online businesses has become essential, especially for online retailers. When you plan to sell products or services online, you need to make sure that people can actually find you. What’s the point of having a well-designed website with the best products at the best prices when potential customers can’t find you when they search online? The higher you rank, the more clicks you get. And the more traffic you get, the more sales you make. 

Importance of SEO for eCommerce 

SEO is the process of generating traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. 

·      Less than 5% of searchers visit the second page of search results. So, if you aren’t within the top 10 listings on the search engine results SERPs, you’re going to be missing out on site traffic.

·      Besides boosting traffic and thereby sales, SEO also helps in reducing your overhead as well. In general, small- to medium-sized eCommerce businesses spend at least 12% of their total revenue on digital marketing. But instead of paid promotions, you can improve the SEO for eCommerce product pages with help of SEO agencies and end up securing greater results at a lower cost.

·      eCommerce SEO checklist improves organic search results and your product page SEO ranking. 

SEO common tips and practices to drive traffic to your online store

Time to take a look at the top 11 tips for improving SEO on eCommerce websites:

1.     Find strong and effective keywords 

Recognising high-value keywords and optimising your site for those keywords is most important for a strong SEO strategy. To identify high-value keywords, simply type in the words that describe your products into Google and see what you get. 

Keywords are the phrases that people search queries for online, so you will want to focus on potential customers looking for your products.

Simple tips to find the right keywords

·      Make a list of what you have to sell and related terms.

·      Look at any current analytics and data to find out what keywords people are already using to find you. 

·      Use tools like Google Analytics and Moz Keyword Explorer to explore what people are searching on search engines.

·      Get more specific and hone in on your unique products and differentiators. 

·      Balance search volume with the competition to target relevant terms with high search volume that are relatively easy to rank for. Target some lofty phrases, for which you can use tools like Google Keyword Planner.

·      Think user intent carefully. Focus on keywords that are more likely to lead to purchase. 

2. Organise your site carefully

Site owners must organise their site and optimise it with specific keywords to impact the user experience which has an influence on your site ranking factors. Make your site easy for your customers to find and purchase the products they want as well as be scalable. For this, search for competitors selling similar product catalogs and spend some time exploring their sites. 

3. Optimise the site for mobile users

Your retail business can only succeed online if you have optimised your site for mobile users or else you will lose a huge chunk of your target audience. Today 63% of millennials shop using their mobile devices on a daily basis, so optimising for mobile and making sure everything is mobile-responsive is very essential. Use HubSpot’s Website Grader tool to measure your mobile performance for both speed and SEO.

4. Provide great product descriptions 

For your eCommerce site, there won’t be a lot of content to optimise for SEO. So, create quality content for the products and services instead – namely, your product descriptions. Make it self-explanatory, entertaining, well-crafted, and relevant for the best SEO ranking highly but make sure, it includes those keywords you chose earlier. You should also make smart use of alt text for images wherever possible.

5. Encourage customers to write reviews

Encourage your customers to leave reviews of the products they purchased and count them as content on your site’s product category pages. This can help to boost your search results. You can offer a discount on future purchases in exchange for leaving a review or some brownie points for interacting with the brand on social media, posting a picture, sharing the review, etc. 

6. Use your catalogue wisely

You can create the product catalogue as a text-based PDF instead of designing it in an image-based program, as Google will get the text to read to determine top of the SERPs rankings.

To make the most of your PDF catalogue, optimise it by incorporating your keywords into the headlines, copy, and descriptions. 

7.  Be cautious of duplicate content

Duplicate content is text that appears multiple times, either on your own site or someone else’s. Search engines like Google hate duplicate content and aren’t sure which one should be ranked. So, avoid duplicate content for your online commerce site to rank higher in search by not using the same keywords multiple times on the site or just doing copy/paste of the manufacturer descriptions provided, but try to be unique and put your own things. Yoast and Plagiarism sites can be used for these sorts of technical side problems in more detail.

8. Make your URL structure easy for search engines 

Good URLs provide site visitors with a preview of what the page tiles are about and also do the exact for search engines. So, keep the page URLs short, concise, descriptive, and user-friendly. 

9. Try Google Ads to test your target keywords

Google Ads essentially helps to determine the value of ranking for a keyword on a temporary and less-expensive charge. The Google Listings & Ads extension can help set up a campaign and measure your results.  

10. Avoid broken links

Broken links are confusing for your site visitors as well as search engines. 

Use tools like Screaming Frog or the Broken Link Checker plugin to monitor your links as it can be difficult and time-consuming to monitor all of your quality links manually. 

11. Speed up your site

Search engines consider site speed when ranking your pages. Also, quick page loading times provide great user experience. If your site is too slow, you can –

·       Optimise your images, use large files only if necessary, and compress media files whenever possible.

·       Set up browser caching to save your website on visitors’ browsers so that it loads faster the next time they visit. Use plugin WP Super Cache.

·       Install a content delivery network (CDN) that stores heavy files off-site so that they load quickly. Try WordPress CDN. 

·       Select a great host as it lays the foundation for great site speed. 

·       Reduce the number of plugins to reduce the load of page on your site.

·       Use a tool like Jetpack Boost to optimise your CSS structure, JavaScript, and image formats.

For the success of any eCommerce online store, it is important to remember that the most important thing is to focus on user experience. All of the above tips all have one thing in common – they focus on real people. So, take time to focus on your audience and provide them with a great experience, and you will be on your way to excellent search engine optimisation.

There are many ways to get site traffic, like social media, paid ads, and email. But traffic generated by SEO efforts is the most reliable, free, self-sufficient, and relatively easy to acquire.

Alternative Search engines like Google want to provide the best possible results for their searchers. 

A simple well-planned SEO campaign can best result in exponentially greater sales. So connect with eCommerce masters like Adobe Commerce or BigCommerce and learn the insights of eCommerce SEO strategies to transform your online business. 

References

Ecommerce Seo: How online stores can drive organic traffic. Layer 1. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2022, from https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/articles/ecommerce/ecommerce-seo/ 

6 simple SEO tips for online retailers. (n.d.). Retrieved September 17, 2022, from https://seositecheckup.com/articles/6-simple-seo-tips-for-online-retailers 

 Top nine seo tips for eCommerce stores. WooCommerce. (2021, November 11). Retrieved September 17, 2022, from https://woocommerce.com/posts/top-nine-seo-tips-for-ecommerce-stores/ 

 

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