The success of every business largely depends on its sales, and in the modern environment, increasing sales means establishing a firm digital presence. Every year, the growth of e-commerce keeps increasing and is anticipated to hit approximately $ 4.88 trillion by the year 2021, in global sales. Therefore, if you wish to grow your online store, then having a strong SEO for an eCommerce website is not only crucial but mandatory.
Today, it is very efficient to operate an online store compared to physical ones. However, the competition is relatively stiff hence becoming the best you need to instill your brand’s name in the head of your customers. Accomplishing this requires you to operate smartly and build your eCommerce search engine optimization strategies. This will enable your products list to be ranked highly on the search engine page.
Improving your eCommerce website structure is also an effective way to reach your audience hence giving you an edge in competing against giants like Walmart, etc. In this article, we have compiled a list of areas which when you focus on, could tweak your e-commerce search engine optimization and see your sales grow.
Proper Keywords Research
Ranking top on the search engine result page but for the wrong reasons does not do any good for your website. The key lies in using the right keywords that will, in turn, drive your targeted audience to your site or using keywords that are appropriate to your website.
Additionally, using the latent semantic indexing keywords is very important in the search engine optimization strategy. The keywords are usually closely related to your keyword. This will assist you in accomplishing high search engine ranking, increase content credibility, boosting on-site browsing time, and will reduce bounce rates. Fortunately, you can also use Google Keyword Planner to know how to locate appropriate keywords for your eCommerce website. The steps include:
- First step. Put your relevant target keyword so that you can find more relevant keywords from Google Keyword Planner.
- Second step. Analyze thoroughly the performance of your keyword with assistance from a factor, for example, search volume.
- Third step. Pick relevant keywords to form the ones offered by Google Keyword Planner based on how much your target customers search it in a month.
The content of your eCommerce website
Once you know how to identify and use relevant keywords on your website, and in digital marketing, another effective way of improving the ranking of the keywords is by making your content original, informative, and interesting. It pays to have SEO keywords in your content and title, and always frame a topic that answers your customers’ questions.
Creative, fun, and informative content attracts your targeted clients and compels them to give time to your eCommerce website design, therefore getting to know your products or brand. Another trick is posting quality content regularly so that your customers are furnished with the knowledge that helps them address various challenges in regards to the products they frequently purchase.
It is without a doubt that websites that use quality content have a high conversion rate than those with poor content. Customer engagement is important in attracting and maintaining your audience.
Your Website Structure
While content is crucial for any successful website or blog, unstructured and poorly arranged content would definitely work against you in pulling traffic for your site. This is mainly because search engines use structure when searching and going through your site. In order to maintain a good structure for your site, try to use internal linking in refining your website’s structure. Also make sure your web structure does not surpass three levels, which are the categories, subcategories, and finally the products.
Having a three-layered structure allows for easy navigation and your customers are guaranteed to easily find what they are looking for in real-time, and without confusion. Putting numerous levels is a turn off for many clients and are more likely to leave your page for a better one.
Other benefits of internal linking are:
- It helps organize your website
- It enables Google to easily crawl your pages
- Customers’ time is greatly saved by easily identifying what they are searching for
Build your brand authority
Search engine optimization and backlinks or inbound links go hand in hand. The popularity of a website is indicated by the number of backlinks. These links are very important for search engine optimization as most engine searches prioritize and give credit to sites with a good number of backlinks.
Additionally, the quality and quantity of inbound links are instrumental in determining the relevance of the website. This is what gives your website authority. Another way in building your brand authority is by the use of influencer marketing strategy. The use of popular personalities to give reviews about your brand gives credibility and builds trust in your targeted audience.
When your clients visit your site and see their favorite influences giving positive reviews about your products, they are more likely to respond instantly, and even go ahead and refer their friends to your eCommerce website. This is how to influence marketing works.
Maximize product reviews
Among the key elements that must be included in your website are the customers’ reviews on your goods or services. Positive feedback from other customers is enough to act as image enhance and add to building your brand considerably. The feedbacks are important because they provide your eCommerce website with SEO value, which in turn provides you with higher value in Google ranking. Most importantly, customers’ reviews give your website rich content keywords which will help in boosting your site’s search engine ranking.
Use Schema Markups to improve your rankings
Schema markup is some sort of HTML code that one uses on their websites to help search engines provide additional results to the clients. Therefore, when they are added to a webpage, an explanatory description is generated and appears in the search results.
In simple words, schema enables search engines to describe what searchers would understand about the site even before browsing through it. They also make it easy and fast for search engines to locate and display your content to clients. The results which are brought about by schema are very appealing and usually get more clicks hence bringing in more sales!
Page loading speed
The time it takes for your website to load pages is vital in determining whether customers would stay or leave your site. If your website takes a lot of time in loading pages, then it would definitely face high customer abandonment. A study which was conducted by search engine land reveled that Google announced page speed will be a key factor in the ranking consideration for mobile searches. What companies ought to know is that, regardless of how customer engaging and user friendly their sites are, its speed would be the sole factor when it comes to ranking.
It is therefore important when designing your eCommerce website to involve other technical SEO agencies to make sure that it runs not only smoothly but also fast. When the site is slow, there is no reason to invest in rich and quality content because all users would close your page when loading is slow.
Optimize your images
Image optimization is among the most overlooked methods in boosting results in Google ranking. If you wish to make sure of images on your website, you can simply add “alt” tags in each photo of your product. This will show that keywords have been presented in the images of the products on your page. Doing adequate SEO on your images is crucial because they are very relevant to Google searches especially when people are considering shopping online. Also, make sure to keep your image sizes below 100kb, and make sure to use a good keyword for your image.
Focus on the buyer
For any successful website, the product descriptions, landing pages, and internal link structure must be adequately utilized. The web content must strongly focus and reflect the purchasers’ intent by providing solutions to their problems. It is therefore meaningless to have a pretty homepage, excellent writing skills, or active social media presence if your final product page does not offer a solution to the customer.
This would usually range from your title tags to headers and in some cases copy block. There must be relevant information for readers to understand what you are selling, and what distinguishes your services from your competitors. When visitors to your page are not sure what your eCommerce website is all about, be sure to get poor ranking in the search engines.
Final thoughts
The above eCommerce SEO tips are intended to help you improve your organic traffic thereby increasing your conversion rate. However, regardless of the tips you implement, make sure that your SEO efforts match your brand. When these two factors do not match, a lot of confusion arises and this could create an ugly experience for your targeted audience. Important points to focus on boosting your sales include:
- proper keyword search
- creating engaging and relevant content that is informative
- developing an organized and well-structured website
- building your brand using various marketing strategies such as influencer marketing
- taking advantage of customers feedback and reviews
- the use of schema markups
- ensuring your website loads faster than your competitors
- using the right image sizes
- focusing on the buyers’ needs.
Finally, all the tips have to work hand in hand in your site in order to create synergy and smooth flow. Making more sales from your e-commerce store means increasing your site’s visibility in Google and this can be achieved by the use of SEO best practices as outlined above. With due diligence, extensive research, and careful consideration, you will be sure to skyrocket your engine traffic hence selling more.
