Effective search engine optimization can be the key to the success of an online store. However, many companies don’t quite understand how to make sure that their SEO efforts are having the impact they desire. Improving the performance of ecommerce isn’t all too difficult when you understand how to properly utilize SEO.
Use the Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is the first step any business should take when wading into the waters of SEO. Keywords are fundamental to how search engines work. Search engines will display content based on what their algorithms deem the best fit for the keywords in the queries used. Obviously, dominating a search term relevant to your online business is going to generate more traffic to your website, increasing sales.
Keyword research can show you how and why your competitors attract customers and how your audience searches online.
To determine which keywords you should target, you should engage in keyword research. Keyword research can show you how and why your competitors attract customers and how your audience searches online. The best traffic is organic traffic, and ranking for relevant keywords can improve organic traffic drastically.
Understanding important attributes like keyword type, searcher intent, and search volume are essential to your ability to properly and effectively implement SEO. Knowing which keywords will be most effective for your business is important when developing a solid SEO strategy. Keyword research can also yield other SERP-related information, such as what sort of devices people are using when they visit a page, which can help you decide whether and how to best optimize your site for mobile.
Create Valuable Content
Product pages are especially hard to get to the first page on a Google search, as they generally contain very little—but very specific—information. You can get around this by optimizing your product pages so that they are more likely to rank higher. This can be done in many ways, but overall it involves creating valuable content associated with your product.
One way to utilize SEO in promoting your ecommerce website is to start writing blog posts. Blog posts are highly effective in SEO because they not only create linkable content, but they expand the ability for customers to find your website through long-tail search terms. Additionally, blog posts give you the opportunity to build a loyal fan base and allow you to display the various benefits of your products or services that may not come across in product descriptions.
Adding high-quality photos and videos, as well as in-depth descriptions of the products, can do wonders.
On your product pages themselves, you can do a lot to improve ranking and clickability of your links. Adding high-quality photos and videos, as well as in-depth descriptions of the products, can do wonders, as customers will have answers to many questions at their fingertips. Even a good page title with relevant keywords can improve ranking and click-through rates.
Optimize Your Website
The user experience is also an incredibly important factor if you’re looking to improve the productivity of your ecommerce site. The better your website operates for your customers, the more time they will spend on it—and they will be less likely to click away if the pages are loading quickly. A simplified, streamlined website that is visually appealing and ergonomic can result in a memorable experience for customers and a profitable experience for your company.
The better your website operates for your customers, the more time they will spend on it.
Optimizing your website for different platforms is also important, as many customers will be accessing your website from a multitude of different devices. Mobile optimization through accelerated mobile pages improves loading times, quickly displays pertinent information, and excludes unnecessary images and advertisements. Employing responsive web design can automatically adjust screen resolution and provides image flexibility, providing a more pleasurable user experience regardless of what device an individual uses to access your site.
Don’t complicate your website structure, as a simple website structure is the easiest for Google’s web-crawling bots to identify and index. This will ultimately help your ranking, potentially making your webpage a top search result. Adding meta descriptions to your product pages is also a good idea, because even though these short descriptions of the page’s contents don’t directly help with rankings, they do increase click-through rates. Meta descriptions with relevant keywords are sure to catch a customers attention, increasing the likelihood that they will access your website.
Finally, use an error-finding tool to crawl your ecommerce website for bad links, code, and images. Errors such as page redirects, duplicated content, and unoptimized images could harm your website’s ranking with search engines. Finding these errors and rectifying them is a great start, but it’s important to remain vigilant at all times. If you notice a sudden and unexpected slide down the search engine results pages, site errors could be to blame.
Cultivate Links to Your Pages
The days of simply dropping links to your websites and product pages across the Internet are over. Indiscriminate third-party linking can actually result in your ecommerce store being penalized by Google and Bing. But contextual links on authoritative websites can give your website a better reputation among the main search engines.
Contextual links on authoritative websites can give your website a better reputation among the main search engines.
For example, imagine you’re selling vinyl records. If rock music journalists and bloggers are including a link to your “rock music” category page when reviewing albums and artists, your site’s profile should grow in the eyes of Google. Reach out to relevant bloggers and journalists for reciprocal linking opportunities, or offer to write authoritative content for non-competitor sites in your industry.
Ecommerce is bigger than ever, and the ceiling on its potential is seemingly far off. This means that there is plenty of room to occupy and evolve within this new retail space. While we don’t know Google’s exact criteria for indexing, SEO firms are becoming increasingly skilled at predicting what Google seems to prefer when indexing and ranking websites. Because of this, it is a smart move to employ SEO tactics to improve the functionality and efficacy of your ecommerce platform. Even though Google’s criteria is prone to sudden change, adapting to new SEO tactics is still preferable to disregarding them completely.
Have any questions about SEO? Let us know in the comments!