Best eCommerce SEO Tips for eCommerce Websites
October 27, 2018
Sarvesh Bagla
Here’s a quick compilation of top SEO tips for ecommerce success. SEO professionals will benefit from looking ahead at what’s big, what’s trending, and which SEO strategies will work for eCommerce campaigns.
We’re always inundated with one big question – How do you successfully do SEO for an eCommerce site? Some quick research and trawling through the vast resources of the internet reveals best practices for “ecommerce seo tips”. SEO ranking factors have changed vastly over the years and adapting your ecommerce SEO strategy accordingly is the key to getting to the top of the SERPs!
Driving Ecommerce Success with the Best Ecommerce SEO Tips Out There
1. Create Exceptional Content – Content is King
In 2018, Google announced an update to its search algorithm – signifying a focus on content quality and depth. This trend will continue and the need of the hour is to create quality content – readable and connectable. Focus on well-researched, solution-based, evergreen content that makes one think.
A one size fits all approach will not suffice – understanding your audience is key and it is critical that user intent and journey is taken into account while creating this content. Authentic, useful, entertaining, and interesting content via the appropriate medium – be it text, video, podcasts, infographics – will prove to be shareable and relevant to consumers.
2. Optimize Ecommerce Sites for Mobile and other Experiences
Google considers the mobile version of your site as the primary version. As more and more people use smart phones and tablets for discovery, research, social and shopping activities, sales {as well as discovery and browsing} via mobile devices is increasing. You need a mobile friendly website to handle this growing segment, and effective mobile SEO could help you get ahead on mobile searches and beat ecommerce sites which dominate web searches. In this day and age, this also means optimizing for not only desktop-based or mobile experience but also app-based, audio-based or any other technology-based experience.
Additional Read: Best Practices for Mobile Search Engine Optimization
It is suggested that page load time should be < 2 secs – Google rewards speed and low page load times.
3. Add Relevant Content for Product Descriptions, Avoiding Duplicates
As a professional SEO company we always keep in mind that what is your audience searching for and carefully create / revise meta descriptions.
It’s easy to use product descriptions provided by the manufacturer or the seller, but you will simply end up resembling affiliate sites. It is advisable to create unique and original content for each product. However, if your site has 100s of products and descriptions and it is not immediately practical to create original content, do make sure to create unique and useful content on your category pages and consider using the NOINDEX tag on product pages you can’t write unique descriptions for.
Also Read: Free Duplicate Content Checker Tools
4. User Generated Content (UGC) and Product Reviews
Encourage your users to review products and leave feedback on your ecommerce site. It’s an easy way to get free and relatable content, make each product page unique, and also keep things fresh and interesting. UGC will take your product pages to the top of the search results. 59% of millennials claim they use UGC to inform their major purchase decisions. Additionally, 70% of online shoppers are looking for product reviews before they finally make their purchase.
User generated content and product reviews increase expertise, authority, and trustworthiness – also known as E-A-T in Google’s search quality rating guidelines.
Read also Instagram vs Facebook vs Twitter vs Snapchat: Which is Better for Business Marketing
5. Tap Video and Video SEO
Video marketing brings in huge amounts of traffic – keep your video titles and descriptions searchable and relevant, optimise audio and video quality, and integrate videos into the rest of your site content. Video is only getting bigger, folks – Cisco projects that online video will make up 80% of all online traffic by 2021.
Videos, infographics and even images – use them well and ensure they’re fully optimized with alt tags and title tags.
6. Integrate a Blog to Promote Your Ecommerce Products
A great way to create fresh, unique content is to regularly post offers, discounts, tips, buying guides, stories, and use cases for the products you wish to promote. An interesting blog, which is regularly updated, is a great way of establishing thought leadership, building relationship with customers and integrating internal back links with your product pages. Longer content {at least 2000 words} tends to outrank shorter content. Websites with a blog tend to have 434% more indexed pages – this helps search engines such as Google recognize that your website is a resource with useful information for people to consume.
Additional Read: Content Marketing for Ecommerce Industry
7. Logical Navigation with Clean URL Structure
In order to make it easy for visitors to find products, ecommerce sites offer the ability to sort and filter content on the basis of multiple parameters – price range, brand, color, size etc. leading to multiple versions of the same content. This means that you could end up with lots of duplicate pages and you need to tell search engines such as Google which ones to index in order to avoid passing “link juice” {term that indicates powerful a link is or could be} to unimportant pages. URL parameter-handling can get a little complicated but is very important for a clean URL structure and effective Ecommerce SEO.
8. Optimize Your Ecommerce Site for Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keywords are easier to rank for and also provide better conversion rate more easily on an ecommerce website. Ensure that you understand the search demand and behavior for your products and accordingly incorporate keywords in the Meta tags, H1 Heading Tag, Image Alt Attribute and content on your product pages. However, stuffing keywords in these tags will not provide any additional benefits and may backfire.
9. Focus on Voice Search
A huge talking point for 2019 is voice search – with the advent of Google home and Amazon echo, there is a huge rise in voice search. Voice search drastically improves user experience and it is estimated that by 2020, half of online searches will be made by voice. To ensure your content is optimized for voice search as well, include those long-tail keywords that sound more natural as opposed to shorter, snappier keywords that perform well in desktop SEO. Featured snippets will also help with the same.
10. SEO Audits
Perform regular SEO audits – we recommend monthly website audits to examine your rankings, backlinks, and content. Think strategically and in line with audience searchability in order to revise, rebuild, and create a successful SEO strategy
If you follow these top ecommerce SEO tips for your ecommerce, you can be rest assured that your on-page SEO analysis is taken care of. These tips will remain relevant even when you want to do SEO for ecommerce sites.
Additional Information: What is SEO
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