Ecommerce SEO Strategy: 14 Essential Tips
Do you want to know how to rank your e-commerce site? Read this step-by-step guide, and you’ll be on your way to becoming an SEO savvy business owner or marketer.
With frequent algorithm modifications, fresh search engine updates and conflicting suggestions, many e-tailers are uncertain where to begin with eCommerce SEO. That's why we're pulling the curtain back on some of our tried and tested 2019 eCommerce SEO strategies that can drive severe outcomes:
1 -Keyword Research:
Keywords are the first step towards a successful SEO. And when you nailed your SEO, that's when your organic views start to come in. More views, the more potential customers, more conversions, more profits. It is a time-consuming and ongoing activity. Create your list of keywords at the moment of campaign planning and you should constantly refine and expand your keyword list for long-tail, low price and extremely appropriate keywords. Another significant step in keyword research is to evaluate elevated costs under keyword performance. There are different types of keywords example-
- Short-tail keyword
- Long-tail keyword
- Short-term fresh keyword
- Long-term evergreen keyword
- Product defining keyword
- Customer defining keyword
- Geo-targeting keyword
- LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) Keywords
- Intent targeting keywords
2 - Website Analysis:
Website analysis in Search Engine Optimization is a process that comes under On-Page Optimization. It is a tool through which the experts analyze the entire website and find out how well it works or performs on the search engine. It helps optimizers focus primarily on the weaker areas of the website that become a barrier to obtaining the website's optimum profit and success. The result of website analysis allows optimizers to work hard on the SEO campaign, keeping in mind the weak elements of the website.
3 - Competitor Analysis:
A competitive analysis is a critical part of your business marketing plan. With this evaluation, you can determine what makes your product or service unique — and therefore what attributes you are playing to attract your target market.
- Who are your competitors?
- What products or services do they sell?
- What is each competitor's market share?
- What are their past strategies?
4 - Reduce Load Time:
Fast load times aren’t just essential for great user experience - they also significantly impact search rankings. In our experience, 100-200s of milliseconds load time is a solid benchmark. Although there are many ways to improve site speed, image compression can typically make an immediate impact. We also suggest that you check Google Tag Manager or other eCommerce SEO Tools to store active scripts on your site. If the list begins to look more like a novel, you may want to remove surplus calls that may slow down your site.
5 - Optimize for Mobile:
If your site isn’t mobile optimized, you’re at a serious search disadvantage. Evolving user habits make responsive design essential from both an SEO and user experience perspective. If you’re looking to take things a step further, Google’s AMP format can further optimize mobile experiences by reducing load time and improving mobile search rank. HubSpot has a wonderful tool called Website Grader that can verify if your site is Mobile Responsive and configured viewports.
6 - Internal Linking:
Analyzing and improving the inner linking strategy on a regular basis is essential for the SEO of your site. By adding the correct internal links, you make sure that Google understands:
- The relevance of pages;
- The relationship between pages;
- The value of pages.
7 - Resolve Site Errors:
Keep your site clean by continuously tracking the Google Search Console (officially known as Google Webmaster Tools). Site mistakes can include broken connections, indexed 404 pages or mistakes in sitemap files to name a few. Although not all mistakes are made equal, resolving them increases the capacity of Google to index your site and can positively impact search rankings.
8 - Enable Canonical Tags:
Canonicalization, also known as canonical tagging, informs search engines that a page URL actually constitutes a master page by default. This is particularly helpful if you have webpages with more than one URL (e.g. your home page or blog listing pages). In this instance, canonical tags transfer SEO credit from duplicate URLs to the default page you want to rank. It's an easy but essential fix that can have a big effect on search rankings. HubSpot also lately revealed a way to add canonical tags directly to the COS and blog posts, making tag application even easier for SEO professionals and novices alike
9 - Add Customer Reviews:
Search engines treat client reviews as fresh website content and commitment, all factors that affect rankings. Customer reviews also considerably enhance the user experience by adding third party credibility to your company. For example if you're using BigCommerce development, shopify you'll have options to use many applications in their app store. Also be sure to use the language of Schema.org so that your product reviews, stars and amount of reviews appear on the results pages of the search engine.
10 - Use Markup to Enable Rich Snippets and Knowledge Graphs:
As an e-tailer, you can provide comprehensive product data for search engines to show right on the search page – such as cost, accessibility, and review ratings. Google and other search engines aggressively roll out fresh search results formats. Sites featured in the Rich Snippets and Knowledge Graphs are now the first location where users tend to click. Getting featured in this portion of SERP will assist you to attract clicks and eventually more visitors to your site. Use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to see if your websites are using Schema.org markup formatting correctly.
11 - Add Breadcrumbs
Website breadcrumb enables both Google and your user to comprehend particular parent-child interactions when it comes to products and product categories. Think of it as a roadmap that makes it simpler for search engines to crawl and index your site. This tried-and-tested strategy can assist you to enhance your user experience and rankings with minimal effort.
12 - Optimize Your Content
This is a huge category, but I want to specifically focus on two main areas:
Product Descriptions:Product descriptions are often a challenge for e-tailers who sell products from producers who also have an eCommerce presence. Focus on the psychology behind the product to distinguish yourself from rivals.Why would somebody buy this specific item? Give more than the generic information offered by the manufacturer.
From an SEO point of view, believe about the terms you're attempting to rank for. While we never promote keyword stuffing, spend some time researching keywords that make sense for your products and include them in locations that make sense.
Category Pages: From the point of view of content, treat category pages as individual homepages. By this, we mean optimizing your content (H1s, links, etc.) for the word you're attempting to rank for. This will allow for a wider sense of content and boost your ranking opportunities for slightly wider terms.
13 - Optimize for Site Search:
Although site search is not a particular SEO tactic, it is an important website function that impacts how users discover products. Place keywords with elevated inner search volume in H1 & H2s as well as body copy and meta descriptions when it comes to your product websites.This will assist with your keyword focus and product placement on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Bonus tip: Allow Google Analytics ' site search function to monitor what your visitors are looking for on your site.You can activate this function in "View Settings" under "Site Search Settings," then enter your query search parameter (depending on the eCommerce platform you are using). The search conditions can be viewed later in Google Analytics under the section Behavior-Site Search.
14 - Link Building Strategy:
Building links for an eCommerce website is about placing yourself in a position to get links. Unless you sell highly innovative or provocative products, you won't have a lot of connections to your category and product pages. You need to discover a work-around to ensure that the authority, relevancy and trust of your category and product to improve your website.