Understanding Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO is the process in digital marketing that ensures that your online store is more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It helps you to achieve a high rank for your store and get more traffic.
Although you can also get traffic with paid search, using SEO costs you much less. One issue with paid search is that the ad blockers and ad blindness tend to reduce the effectiveness of campaigns which means that you will eventually need to optimize the search results.
Ecommerce SEO involves optimizing the headlines, metadata, product descriptions, internal link and navigational structure to provide a better search experience for the users. The products that you sell should have a dedicated page that is meant to draw traffic from the search engines.
In addition, you need to focus on the following pages on your site, to ensure that they are well maintained:
- Homepage
- About Us page
- F.A.Q. page
- Blogs
- Help center answers
- Contact page
The first step that you need to carry out is to create a list of keywords for these pages and find out the related keywords as well. There are several tools available online that help in searching for a long-tail keyword and find out the semantic keywords that will go well with them.
Importance of SEO for Ecommerce
You must have noticed that many people perform Google searches for tips, comparisons, options, and find out other related information that would help them make informed decisions.
If your website is not appearing in the SERPs, you lose all the critical access over the interested ecommerce customers. You need to make sure that your products are findable. To ensure all these things, you need ecommerce SEO that helps you reach your target audience without having to pay for the ads. Once you get people on your site, it becomes easy for you to show them high-quality products, copy on products, motivating calls to action.
SEO helps in acquiring new customers and getting people to know more about your site.
Developing an Ecommerce SEO Strategy
Handling Ecommerce SEO can be a tough task if you have a lot of products. Although it might take time, it will help you speed up the process with a solid strategy.
- Prioritize pages: Figure out which pages are getting the most traffic and start optimizing them. In addition to that, optimize the product first if you want more and more people to know about that.
- Create a workflow: Make sure that you meet all the specific requirements related to SEO. Figure out keywords, add metadata, name your images correctly, add image alternate attributes, and incorporate related keywords that are related to this category.
- Check your competitors: Build an SEO strategy that should be able to outperform your competition. Keep a track of top competitors’ websites and learn their SEO techniques. Find out ways in which you can make your strategy better.
- Keep a close watch on CRO: Keep a check on Conversion rate optimization (CRO) when you are using SEO.
Moving further, let us consider the best tips that can be used on the ecommerce sites that tend to lack in SEO space. If you want the people to find out your products easily, build a solid ecommerce SEO strategy, and tick off each item on the list in order to make the strategy more effective.
Use the Right Keywords
Keywords are extremely important in ensuring the success of your website. You need to be smart enough to use the right keywords. Avoid overloading your product titles and descriptions using these keywords, and instead, use them inside the copy.
The primary keyword should be present in the product headline, subheadlines, description, meta description, image alternate attributes, and so on. Also, add Latent semantic index (LSI) keywords in the entire copy as they help Google to understand the context of your website.
Analyze the CPC, Keyword Search Volume, and User Intent
Before using a keyword, perform some research on it. Learn the frequency at which people search for it, is it competitive in the paid advertising space, and what all do people look for when they use that keyword.
Understand your competitors
If you are new to SEO, then you can start with on-site optimization for your ecommerce site, and ensure that you are able to beat your competitors. Learn from the larger competitors as they have already cracked the ways to optimize your website. Keywords are the first thing that you need to focus on, and for that, you need to analyze them and ensure that they help you become the top product pages.
Improve the Homepage SEO
The homepage is where most of businesses tend to focus their SEO budget. It is one of the top pages on your website that need to be optimized but there are other things as well that need to be optimized.
- Title Tag of Homepage
The SEO title tag is an essential element of on-site search optimization. It should include the name of your business along with the main keyword phrase that you are targeting. It is also important for you to write the title tag in less than 70 characters which should be appealing to the visitors.
- Meta Description of Homepage
Although not that important, this is a 160-character description of your business that shows up beneath the title tag. You need to write it in a way that it appears interesting to the viewers.
- Content on Homepage
The content on your homepage is meant to help the visitors learn more about the business and the products that need to be offered in a concise and clear manner. You should avoid overloading the visitors with too much information and also consider featuring the top few products on the homepage that are your unique selling proposition.
Focus on Your Website Architecture
Remember that the site architecture plays an important role in search optimization as you tend to add products and categories to your store. Develop a distinct hierarchy of navigation right from your homepage to the product page.
Search engines will automatically discover your page and products that are listed on your website based on the internal linking.
Optimize Product Pages
Another thing that you need to focus on is to optimize your product pages that happen to be the core of your business. Several ecommerce store owners just write a few lines and provide images or video for the same. However, this does not work much in the ranking. You need to incorporate useful information on the product pages for Google to find them.
- Create a Responsive Design
Most people tend to browse products online and prefer online shopping. In such a scenario, you need to make sure that you are using a responsive design for your ecommerce website as that would ensure a better user experience and will give you improved search results.
On a final note, using these simple techniques for your ecommerce store will take you a long way and help with boosting the rank of your website. With improved ranks, you will be able to acquire customers that would eventually reflect on your sales and revenue.
