What’s the key to a successful eCommerce SEO strategy? There is no one-size-fits-all answer, but you can use seven essential pillars as a guide. In this blog post, we’ll outline each of these pillars and explain why they’re vital for your business. So whether you’re just starting with SEO or you’re looking to revive your current campaign, read on for tips that will help you boost your rankings and drive more traffic to your site.
Why is SEO important for eCommerce Business Owners?
SEO is unquestionably vital for every eCommerce business owner. Search Engine Optimization is the process of capturing new visitors to your website by following a few simple steps that allow search engines to find your content readily. Implementing an SEO strategy involves organizing content on a website by topic, which helps search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing understand a user’s intent when they search for something.
Keyword planning is an essential component of the SEO process while writing blogs and web pages. Content is optimized using keywords relating to a given topic, which helps articles rank well on Google’s and other search engines’ Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Most crucially, this enhances the overall quality and quantity of organic (non-paid) search traffic to a website.
Search engines may appear as simple as entering a term and receiving a list of the best and most relevant web pages in response to their inquiry. The truth is, it isn’t because search engines are complex algorithms comprised of numerous rules and components.
1. Keyword Research for Ecommerce
Keyword research is the backbone of every SEO strategy, and the situation is no different in eCommerce. But unlike typical SEO keyword research, there are four additional aspects you need to consider.
- Search Volume
It would be useful if you determined that a sufficient number of individuals are searching for the keyword. Then, use comparable high-traffic keywords as a baseline to estimate the best volume.
- Intent
You must ensure that the traffic you are generating is qualified. This traffic has arrived at the appropriate point in the sales funnel.
- Relevance
Ensure the term is related to your store’s offering to attract the right audience. Look at the top 5 to 10 results for a keyword if you’re unsure if the term is relevant. If the results look similar to your niche and offering, the keywords are likely to be appropriate.
- Competition
Long-tail keywords have lesser competition and a high level of intent. It would be best to verify that the keyword is one for which you can rank. Starting with your eCommerce site, I recommend focusing on long-tail keywords.
2. On-Page SEO for Ecommerce
Once you’ve selected which keywords you need to rank for, make sure they appear on your website’s pages. When dealing with the usual online retail website, you’ll encounter a different, more complex site architecture, as well as other kinds of details and information. With e-commerce, SEOs undergo particular challenges while optimizing it, as it uses a lot more frameworks to cover various page types, which makes the process more complicated.
Most critical On-Page SEO elements you should check and optimize:
- Product Name
- Product Description
- Product Additional Features
- Product Images
- Proper Heading and Subheadings Structure
- Keywords
- Meta titles
- Meta descriptions
- Title tags
- Schema Data or Microdata
- Internal Links
- Media
- Call To Action
3. Blogging for Ecommerce
When Google displays results to users, it takes fresh content posted from your site into account. As a result, if you have a diverse selection of valuable and high-quality blog content, you’ll see an improvement in site traffic as well as higher rankings in Google search results.
Blogs are the most straightforward approach to show Google that you’re updating your site regularly and that you’re an expert in a variety of fields. A typical eCommerce blog serves a variety of purposes. This means that any content you create, whether it’s blog entries, tutorials, or anything else, must achieve at least one of those goals.
- Get more quality links
- Generate more traffic
- Can make you rank and increase sales
4. Optimize Site Taxonomy and Page Speed for Ecommerce
Another issue is deep site taxonomy. Many pages on eCommerce sites are hidden deep inside the architecture, making them virtually inaccessible within the crawl budget provided to the site.
Internal and external broken links can prohibit crawlers from reaching all of your site’s pages. Also, if you offer a terrible user experience, it may impact your rankings, organic traffic, and conversion rate.
Page speed directly affects conversions on a page. For instance, if a page takes more than 3 to 5 seconds to load, more than a quarter of your visitors will exit your page. Page speed is a complex factor, and it is measured in a variety of ways to address any concerns it may cause: load time, page size, time to first byte (TTFB), and round trip time (RTT).
Tips to increase page speed:
- Minify CSS and JS
- Compress and optimize your images and other media
- Enable caching
- Omit render-blocking scripts
- Use scripts asynchronously
- Leverage browser caching
- Use preloading and prefetching of resources
- Deactivate unnecessary plugins
- Check your Database
- Upgrade your CMS software and plugins
- Upgrade to the latest version of PHP
- Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Change to a faster host
5. Off-Page SEO and Link Building for Ecommerce
This pillar of SEO includes executing tasks off your page or website to increase the page ranking. This is how it can be explained. No one will trust your website unless you work hard to maintain your reputation by demonstrating to people that your website is worth visiting and that your company and services are worth using, but through other means.
As a result, your brand must be focused on more than just the online side. Off-site SEO can be successfully implemented when using citations, social media backlinks, and establishing relationships with consumers and potential leads through these various techniques, etc.
Backlinking is still the most important ranking element for search engines. However, your SEO approach will suffer a significant setback if you don’t have a solid link-building strategy in place. This is when one website links to another website, this is known as a backlink. Backlinks are distinct from outbound links (links from your website to another website) and internal links. Remember that a website with many backlinks generates the most organic traffic! Most crucially, backlinks improve a site’s ranking and visibility in the SERP. People can use several different backlinking techniques.
- Target Competitors’ Links
- Reclaiming Brand or Business Mentions
- Sending Products for Reviews
- Forums
- Citations or Search Listings
6. Indexing, Sitemaps and Schema Markup for Ecommerce
You want to make sure Google can locate the pages on your site once you’ve finished your site audit and repaired all SEO issues. This is known as indexing, and it entails notifying Google of your site’s existence and making it as simple as possible for Google to read your material. It’s simple to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. Upload the site map to the Search Console, and you’ll start to see a boost in site traffic.
The schema markup is a type of technical SEO markup. Search engines can better understand the content of your web pages thanks to Schema, which improves your search visibility on the SERP.
The FAQ schema markup and corporate contact information in the Knowledge Panel are two schema examples. Still, for eCommerce sites, Product, Star Rating, and Review schema can be quite helpful in enhancing visibility (and increasing pixel real estate on the SERP).
7. Social Media for Ecommerce
Social media like Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok have changed the way we think about SEO and how it works, and it’s having a direct impact on how effective businesses are as a result of how their content ranks on a SERP (SERPs). Social media is the final pillar of an effective SEO strategy. Your social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tiktok and Linkedin) give value to your website through the connection they provide.
Improved online visibility and more traffic to your website, increased authority and brand recognition, broader content and longer content lifespan, and improved local SEO are all effects of social media.
Conclusion: Search engines are an excellent way to find qualified leads and customers. That’s why, if you want to stay in business, improving your eCommerce site’s SEO is critical.
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