Optimizing an ecommerce website isn’t easy. Sites that sell products may have hundreds of pages that must be optimized well. This is indeed tedious and complicated. ECommerce websites are very much different from regular service websites and business blogs. How the product pages appear in search engine result pages depends upon how well they are optimized. The article explains five power-packed ways to make your ecommerce website SEO-ready.
SEO has an essential impact on ecommerce websites. It helps to boost rankings and drive traffic. The strategy eventually helps brands to engage more users and spike up sales. When a normal user lands on an ecommerce site for buying purposes, he generally compares products, reads reviews, or explores buying recommendations. This means, your website should be visible to them when buyers are searching for products you are selling.
SEO for Ecommerce Sites: Strategies
If you miss out on optimizing your ecommerce website, you will lose potential customers. It can adversely affect your revenue prospects. This is where Ecommerce SEO helps brands. It’s a white hat tactic to boost ranking, improve visibility, and surge visitor traffic. But it isn’t as simple as it appears. You have to have a foolproof and power-packed SEO strategy in place to gain the desired momentum. Following are a few very important SEO elements you should look at while optimizing your ecommerce website.
1: Keyword Research
Keywords are those ‘phrases’ that let both Googlebot and users find you online. It helps Google to recognize what a given page/product (in the case of ecommerce sites) is all about. So, to improve your product’s visibility in search, make sure it’s optimized using the right set of keywords. Well-researched and relevant keywords improve the findability of your brand for both search engines and end users.
Several free and paid keyword research tools offer in-depth keyword suggestions for your business niche or products you’re selling. Some top-rated keyword research tools that you can use include Moz, Ubersuggest, AHREF Google Trends, etc. The tools may offer you valuable insights into how efficiently your keywords match user queries.
2: Content Optimization
Ecommerce is all about selling products to people. Therefore, the content should be aimed at the end users. It should be written to serve their buying intent. An ecommerce website contains different sections where content is required. These are product pages, categories, and blog pages.
While writing for the product page, sneak into your competitors’ websites. It will shed light on how their product pages are arranged in terms of content. Keep checking if the product page has products that are out of stock and obsolete. If there are few, remove them. If such products are left in indexing for longer, it may hurt ranking.
The blog is an important element of your ecommerce website. It enables you to share your product information and valuable resources to your buyers. If those blogs are well-optimized, they can pull visitors to your ecommerce portal from search engines.
Make sure the blog post includes targeted keywords that bring your pages higher in search engine ranking pages. It would be great if the blog answered some of the most asked FAQs like how to use the product, what are their pros and cons and how to process the payment, etc. Besides captivating text, use stunning and informative visuals to spur user engagement. The blogs should also contain links to important categories and products from your website.
3. Easy Website Structure
The site architecture of an eCommerce website is a critical aspect. The site architecture helps websites manage their navigation process and arrange products and category pages for easy discoverability. website structure should be easily accessible to both the users and search engines.
When considering the navigation, make sure that each product page should take only three clicks from the homepage. That means you have to ensure that a user reaches the desired page within a maximum of three clicks from the website's home page. When you create a new category on your website, don’t mess with the site structure. Instead, analyze and organize things accordingly.
If the site structure allows users to reach the desired page in less than three clicks, pages receive the relevant authority from the homepage. It also helps search engines to crawl and index the pages.
4. On-Page SEO
In ranking and visibility of a website, the role of on-page SEO is significant. In the case of an Ecommerce website, On-Page SEO deals with optimizing the product and category pages to rank higher for the related keywords.
The top ranking for those keywords is eventually translated into higher traffic and conversion rates. The strategy is similar to any other website with a few noticeable additions and improvements. For an Ecommerce website, the following are some important on-page SEO factors:
- Write and use to-the-point and optimized meta titles and descriptions
- Make URLs that are short and keyword-rich.
- Use LSI Keywords in the product description.
- Build a relevant internal linking structure.
When thinking about the on-page elements, think beyond ranking only. Instead, consider user experience also. Along with the great content you built for the website, you can use relevant, and high-quality images to boost your rankings further.
5. Unique Product Descriptions
In the case of ecommerce websites where products matter the most, product descriptions are very crucial. But when there are hundreds of products that a website is selling, duplicity of the product information is always a concern. It’s always difficult to write a unique description for each product when similar products are being sold in different or identical categories.
Similar descriptions lead to duplicity that drastically hits the traffic, ranking, and conversion. To rank your products in search, it’s more important than ever to write unique descriptions for each product. Here are some working tips that you can apply when writing the product description tips Some tips of tips regarding writing a product description are given below:
- Create a product description that exceeds 1000+ words.
- Spread your primary keywords in the description organically
- Spill the LSI keywords appropriately
- Add modifiers like “Buy” or “Sale”
6. Site Loading Speed
Slow loading speed may make or break an ecommerce website. Buyers can't wait over three seconds to see the website fully opened with all the products in front of them. If the site takes more than three seconds to load, potential buyers switch to the competitor's websites. It turns out to be a real disaster for your retail website.
Despite a great collection of products, impeccable customer support, and other lucrative offerings, your slow-loading site can lead to a huge loss of customer base. Besides, search engines also consider site loading speed a significant ranking factor. That means, the faster your site will load, the better ranking it will achieve in search engine ranking pages.
7. Create High-Quality Backlinks
Regardless of the niche of a website, backlinks are unarguably the most important ranking factor. The requirement of high authority backlinks goes further in the case of e-commerce websites. A backlink from an authority website means a recommendation to industry-leading resources.
Quality backlinks not only increase the website visibility but also generate huge traffic on your website. When building backlinks, choose only authentic and relevant sources as per your niche. Irrelevant and spammy link-building practices may cause link penalties and ranking drops.
8. Meta Title Optimization
Search engines refer to Meta titles to understand the page. Well-optimized Meta title and description. While writing a Meta title and description for your product pages include a summary of the subject of the page. It will help buyers find and understand your page quickly.
Competition is getting fiercer every moment. Being unique and distinct is the only way to outperform competitors. It’s a challenge to write product descriptions for products that are almost similar. Since a website consists of hundreds and thousands of product pages, providing identical product descriptions may pose a threat to SEO quality and user experience.
It’s almost impossible to write cent percent unique descriptions for thousands of product pages on your online store. But the only way out here is to be unique. Google hates plagiarized descriptions. The absence of unique descriptions will prevent you from gaining any SEO advantage.
Provide the product description for as many products as you can, especially for the products that you want to rank on Google SERPs. Ensure that descriptions are fresh and unique. That means, writing unique and easy-to-read product descriptions for each product you offer. No duplicates at all.
9. Product Reviews
Buyers don’t necessarily sway away by your exaggerated claims. They tend to believe reviews by existing customers before making major buying decisions. Online users visit unbiased testimonials on independent review platforms to know more about products. Most customers trust online reviews and personal recommendations from friends or family before buying.
More positive reviews on a brand page embrace authority and brand trust. Negative reviews won’t have repercussions as long as they are few. User reviews are critical to SEO. If you run an ecommerce website, let users review products and provide their honest feedback. Website owners ignorant to the reviews may damage their website’s SEO. Studies say that reviews on ecommerce website lead to almost 30% growth in just one month.
Enable users to write down their reviews whether negative or positive. From the SEO perspective, it is always a good idea to have user reviews enabled on your site. Additionally, put an effective mechanism to manage reviews to keep genuine reviews on the website and weed fake reviews out.
Having only positive product reviews may seem suspicious and spam. It indicates the lack of ingenuity in posting reviews. By inviting people to post reviews and provide original, you will get a consistent stream of fresh content that is helpful for both search engines and potential customers.
10. Website Speed Optimization
Website loading speed is the #1 user experience indicator in the new Google regime. Google doesn’t want to see users waiting for a website to load. Slow website loading speed is one of the many reasons why visitors leave your website/cart without buying anything. If you are running an ecommerce site, keep a check on the website’s loading time. It could cost you badly. It’s evident that the longer your website takes to load, the higher the chances of a lower conversion rate, high bounce rate, and so on.
Experts say that 2-3 seconds of website loading time is ideal. Anything above 3 seconds could lead to traffic loss, which will mean lost revenue. So what do you need to do to ensure a fast-loading website? Choose the right and authentic web host after a bit of consultation. Additionally, install a good cache plugin to optimize the website further.
Since ecommerce websites contain thousands of associated products, they put a massive load on web servers. That eventually affects the website speed. Install an image optimization plugin to compress images in size and speed up website loading.
11. Website Redesign
Your website’s design is another important aspect. Many websites focus on merely launching their online store and jotting down strategies to generate revenue. A bigger challenge is, though, to have a proper website site design and redesign scheme. Make sure that the website is responsive and designed for multiple screen sizes. An ecommerce website should be optimized for SEO and user experience. In most cases, if the design/ redesign of a website is done correctly, you can see up to a 75% increase in organic traffic.
12. Image Optimization
The next element to be considered is images used on product images. Optimized images help your website with page speed as lightweight images let your website page load faster. When it comes to images, certain points you need to consider. Make sure images are uploaded in the right format such as PNG, JPG or JPEG. Before uploading, compress the images to make it lightweight using various fermium image compression tools. Finally, define alt text and image description for the images with keywords embedded into it.
13. User Experience Optimization
It’s of utmost importance to ensure user experience on your e-commerce website. Regular audit of website usability is essential from an SEO perspective. The audit is conducted to find several crucial insights including the time the average user spends on the page, the bounce rate on the website, and the pages that the users most visit. As per as website navigation is concerned, it must allow customers to find your product quickly. Your navigation menu should be convenient, and intuitive, and must enable customers to find the shortest path to important sections of the website.
The issues that affect usability may be both technical and non-technical. Find and fix them as soon as they happen. As user experience is now an important ranking signal, keep checking if for any reason it’s compromised. A website’s UX may be affected for many reasons like a product page containing many ad pops, poor content copy, too big or too small fonts, or color scheme that strains the eyes.
14. Install SSL Certificate
SSL certificates are indeed very important to all websites and inevitable for ecommerce website optimization is inevitable. SSL is a crucial part of technical SEO and provides security cover as well as SEO advantage for websites. Visitors are more likely to visit and execute transactions on an ecommerce website that has SSL. SSL guarantees the safeguard of private and confidential information being passed through the payment gateways. With SSL users can use their payment options without worrying about data theft.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.