Do you run an eCommerce website? Small or big, startup or Fortune 500, bootstrapped or flush with cash – every eCommerce needs customers to find it. With 89 per cent of users using search engines to inform their purchase decisions, SEO for eCommerce is critical, cost-effective and long-lasting.
Read on for our step-by-step guide and eCommerce SEO checklist:
1. Build a Strong Ecommerce SEO Foundation
2. Identify Your Competitors & Target Audience
3. Conduct Keyword Research
4. Perform On-site Optimization For Ecommerce Website
5. Optimize for Boosts in Revenue & Sales
6. Build Your Website Authority in Search Engines
7. Monitor Your Website For SEO Issues & Errors
Build a Strong Ecommerce SEO Foundation
Begin with the basics and get your foundation of strong eCommerce SEO right. Too many websites out there have a weak foundation and focus on quick-fix solutions to SEO, which are detrimental in the short term. When you launch your website, ensure the following eCommerce SEO best practices:
Use a mobile-friendly, Responsive website design
With more and more mobile internet usage, chances are high that a huge chunk of your traffic is coming from mobile devices. Ensure that your website is responsive, mobile-friendly, and easy-to-navigate. Search engines will rank you better and your users will enjoy a much better experience, improving your traffic and conversion rates.
Install an SSL certificate
An SSL certificate adds a layer of security to your website, ensuring that any sensitive information (such as contact and payment details) sent across the internet is encrypted. Customers only pay when they trust a website – install an SSL certificate for user security. Moreover, an SSL security certificate is also a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.
Check your site loading speed
40% of users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. This is even more pronounced in the case of eCommerce sites – 79% of shoppers who have trouble with site performance say they won’t return. Search engines are also more likely to give better rankings to faster websites, so ensure that your website is set up and optimized to load quickly.
Set up Google Analytics & Google Webmaster account
From the outset, set up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster. Google Analytics will help you understand how users engage with your website, helping you to learn more about them and lay the groundwork for improvements. Google Webmaster tools will help you track your site’s performance and optimize visibility.
Create a dynamic sitemap and submit it to Google and Bing
A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on your website and the relationship between them. It informs search engines about URLs available for crawling – create and submit your dynamic sitemap to Google and Bing for views and rankings.
Setup other Conversion Tracking Metrics such as Advance Ecommerce Tracking
Conversion tracking metrics such as Enhanced Ecommerce can give detailed insights into shopping activity, merchandising metrics, page views, abandoned carts, initiated, and completed transactions. These will help you set up an eCommerce strategy for improvements to the shopping funnel and conversion rates.
Identify Your Competitors & Target Audience
To create a successful eCommerce SEO checklist, it is imperative to have a strong understanding of your own industry, products, and target audience. This will allow you to conduct better research and create a more targeted and effective eCommerce SEO plan:
- Build buyer personas that detail demographic, behavioral and psychographic details of your ideal audience. This is extremely valuable for keyword research and determining the kind of content your audience will consume.
- Outline the journey that a user will undertake on your shopping website – anticipate their questions, concerns, and moments of delight. Great user experience at each decision-making milestone is crucial and will help you understand what the user needs to go further along that path.
- Assess your competitive landscape to create an SEO strategy that will help you beat the other players. Use SEO tools to map competitor strategy, traffic sources, and keywords gaps and opportunities.
Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is the next step. Armed with information about your website’s USP, your target audience and the competitive landscape – you can now conduct keyword research into what will grab qualified buyers’ attention and help you get ahead of the competition. Effective keyword research will guide your SEO, content creation, and paid marketing strategy.
- Create a well-rounded SEO plan that has both head keywords and long-tail keywords that target conversion. This will help distribute your SEO efforts across high-volume, high competition keywords and narrower, lower competition keywords.
- Look for related keywords and variations of the top searches in your industry to find your target audience and connect them to your eCommerce website.
- Conduct competitor keyword analysis to see where their traffic is coming from – both paid and organic. Identify the opportunities that you can use to drive traffic to your own website.
Perform On-site Optimization For Ecommerce Website
Use the following on-page site optimization techniques and best practices for eCommerce SEO to improve the pages on your website and make them more attractive to search engines. We recommend a holistic eCommerce SEO strategy that begins with the keywords selection.
Also Read: Best Ecommerce SEO Tips
Meta Description Implementation on Homepage, Category & Product Pages
A meta description is 155 characters of text within the HTML code that summarizes a page’s contents and allows the search engines to understand them. Optimizing this meta description is crucial for on-page SEO – ensure that it is done for the most important pages and contains the primary keyword in the meta title, description, and page.
Optimize URL Structures
Create SEO-friendly URLs that are short and contain primary keywords. URLs should follow a consistent, logical structure throughout the side and be free of any phrases or numbers that are nonsensical to users.
Add Content on Product Pages
Users spend time on rich product pages – they should contain product name, photos, and supporting descriptions. Pages with 300 words or more rank better, so include features, benefits, reviews and used case examples of your products.
Add Content on Category Pages
Category pages are the arteries of your website – they provide a great opportunity to drive traffic to meaningful outcomes. Well-written banner copy and SEO-optimized descriptions are useful to users and search engines alike.
Create a Blog Content Calendar
Blog posts with relevant content attract an audience, which can eventually convert to buyers or evangelists. They educate the audience and support SEO goals. Create a blog content calendar with consistent publishing timelines and evergreen content aligned to your audience’s interests.
Perform Internal Linking
As content starts to increase on your site, make sure you create relationships and interlinks between pages – it helps search engine crawlers understand your website. The goal is to increase the time spent on the website -links to important pages and allowing users a path to progress on improves navigation and user experience.
Add Schema Markup to each page
Schema Markup is code added to your website that can help search engines return more informative results. This results in rich snippets in the SERPs with additional information such as photos, reviews, and pricing.
Additional Read: Latest Semantic Markup Tips
Implement Breadcrumb
Breadcrumb navigation allows users to keep track of their location on a website. They help users to retrace their steps, find more interesting content and allow them to understand the logic of your website. For SEO purposes, they improve the website’s internal linking structure and reduce the overall bounce rate.
Image Alt tag Optimization
Adding images to your content vastly improves your user engagement. Adding alt tags {an HTML attribute} to your images helps search engines understand what an image is about in order to serve it in image search results.
Optimize for Boosts in Revenue & Sales
Our goal is to improve the eCommerce conversion rate. This conversion rate may be unique to your industry, your products or your audience – but there is always room for improvement! How can you optimize your website to boost eCommerce revenue, get more customers, and recover lost revenue from abandoning customers? If you’re an eCommerce retailer looking for guidance, read on
Improve Product Pages
Product pages should be engaging with product images, videos, features, descriptions, reviews, and catchy SEO-friendly titles.
Optimize Your Pricing
As any marketer will tell you, pricing your product right is the key to success. In eCommerce, have a clear CTA and offer comparisons where possible. Optimize your pricing by highlighting product benefits, offering free trials and building trust through excellent customer service, live chat, and trust seals / secure payment logos.
Use eCommerce Personalization
Using browser behavior and social analytics – you can predict a user’s future behavior. Offer your customers relevant, personalized offers and content such as segmented campaigns, related products, and geo-locational targeting for offers.
Optimize for Mobile
As we’ve mentioned before – speed up your site and make way for a responsive site – mobile users are the future. Leverage video for marketing, optimize for mobile search and mobile marketing channels and campaigns to improve conversions.
Use an Upsell
Targeted recommendations to existing customers or upselling expensive variants to interested customers can increase your eCommerce revenue. Display your upsell on key pages {such as the cart} and leverage A/B testing to see what works for your brand.
Create Urgency With Flash Sales
Sales and limited stock create urgency – eCommerce websites can successfully trigger FOMO to drive users to purchase by using aggressive CTAs, slashing prices or displaying competition and limited stock levels.
Overcome Other Specific Objections
Through analytics tools and conversations with your customers, you can learn more about any specific barriers to purchase such as price, product fit, competition, or services. Listen in on any chatter around your brand and overcome these objections with a targeted plan.
Reduce Cart Abandonment
Reduce cart abandonment rates by maintaining transparency, offering an easy checkout with multiple payment methods, guest checkouts, and sending abandoned cart email reminders. You can also offer incentives such as discount codes to drive purchase.
Build an Email List
An email list is a huge asset and email marketing has excellent ROI – send relevant emails with catchy subject lines, personalize your emails, and stay on-trend. Segmenting your eCommerce email marketing will impact your open rates and click-through rates hugely.
Split Test Your Email Opt-ins and Campaigns
Conduct A/B tests to figure best practices for your website – email opt-ins, marketing campaigns, and landing pages.
Automate Your Email Marketing
Automating your eCommerce email marketing can have many rewards. Brands successfully leverage automated emails to create touchpoints with customers such as welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, rewarding frequent shoppers and valuable customers and waking up disengaged customers.
Get Feedback
Invite your customers to talk to you – encourage two-way communication through live chat, social media, and even focus groups. You’ll learn more than you ever imagined and will get a chance to connect with existing and potential customers.
Troubleshoot Common Errors
Common errors such as slow site speed, missing content, broken links, or poor content can negatively impact your website’s performance. Conduct performance audits often and fix any errors that may come up.
Also Read: How Can ecommerce Startups Increase their Sales Exponentially?
Build Your Website Authority in Search Engines
We now come to another crucial part of the eCommerce SEO Checklist i.e. off-page SEO plan. Off-Page SEO techniques can build authority for your website by building backlinks from trusted sites and grow your awareness and recognition.
Set up social media accounts for your store
A strong social media presence speaks volumes with customers and search engines alike. It can help build digital authority for your website and drive traffic
Set up directory listings
Create relevant profiles on business directories and listings such as Google My Business to grow your traffic and establish credibility with search engines.
Conduct Competitor Research
Find websites that link to your competitors to identify where your website can gain backlinking and exposure opportunities as well.
Perform Guest Posts
Put together a guest posting or blogging strategy that allows you to get in front of a new audience and drives traffic to your website
Gain Customer Reviews
Customers are your best marketers – encourage them to leave ratings and reviews and share their love for your brand with the world.
Leverage Digital PR
Leverage highly-trusted websites to publish news and PR about your business.
Also Read: Leverage Pinterest for eCommerce and SEO
Monitor Your Website For SEO Issues & Errors
Run an eCommerce SEO audit to rule out any potential errors such as:
- Keyword Cannibalization – one page assigned to each keyword
- Keyword Stuffing – keywords stuffed inappropriately across content
- Check for duplicate content issues – content used in multiple spaces
- Check the on-page SEO for each page
- Fix any crawler errors and broken links
- Run Test transactions to ensure payment and conversion process performs well across all browsers and devices
After much research and experimentation, we believe that a successful eCommerce SEO services entail the above eCommerce SEO best practices. Optimize your site to drive more traffic, attract more shoppers, and increase conversion with our recommended eCommerce SEO checklist.
At Techmagnate, we can help you get ahead in the eCommerce game with our renowned digital marketing services – with an extensive list of clients and years of experience – we know what will help you get ahead. Get in touch with us for a free audit.