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Why should you care about eCommerce SEO?
It’s no secret that every year, the growth of internet shopping continues to be phenomenal. In the context of today’s society, online shopping is more popular than ever. The internet scoops up more and more of the overall sales throughout the world. This is exactly why you need eCommerce SEO
Many brick-and-mortar shop owners may feel they are fighting a losing battle when it comes to competing with e Commerce stores.
Yet if e-Commerce is used to its full potential, it can empower physical stores to gain more customers and thus more sales, than they would ever be able to reach without the help of the internet.
eCommerce SEO allows you to access segments of the market that may not have known about your business otherwise. Getting your products on your website is a start, but SEO for eCommerce helps you to gain success.
The most important element of e Commerce to understand is that potential customers are already searching for the product/service that you offer. So why not offer them the chance to purchase it from you instead of your competitors?
This is where an eCommerce SEO campaign comes into play. You can use SEO tools to help your content and shop appear more frequently and rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you want your site to drive significant traffic and improve your chances of conversions, you must learn the most important elements of eCommerce SEO.
By implementing a simple but well-thought-out, researched SEO campaign, you can drive hundreds of visitors to your site and work on encouraging them to become loyal customers.
By following the below steps in our guide to SEO for e Commerce, you can ensure you outrank your competition in search engines. You can build a loyal following of customers who trust and believe in your product.
By implementing effective eCommerce SEO, you may even start to rank on the first page within SERPs. You can achieve the SEO dream of ranking in the top 3 search results for your main keywords.
This is invaluable for any e Commerce store. Following our guide to SEO for e Commerce can help you achieve this and more.
Our guide to SEO can help you to create a blog post or article that sells your product without being off-putting to the customer.
We’ll discuss how to make the best use of SEO tools and strategies, how to use analytics like keyword search volume to improve your eCommerce SEO performance, the best ways to implement meta descriptions and title tags, help you to build effective category pages, and teach you how to structure your internal links.
Follow our guide to SEO and you’re bound to see an increase in organic traffic and conversions to your online store.
1 - Conduct effective keyword research
Setting up your website and implementing product and category pages are just the beginning steps of setting up your online shop.
A crucial element to making eCommerce sites successful is to perform keyword research. This should be a major element of your on-site SEO.
Conducting effective keyword research allows you to discover targeted keywords that help you to match your content with your potential customer’s search intent.
By focusing on creating a list of keywords that target your ideal customer, you can get your product in front of the people who are most likely to buy it.
This is one of the most important steps in setting up a successful eCommerce SEO strategy.
Where do you start with eCommerce keyword research? How do you come up with effective keyword ideas?
Ultimately, keyword research helps you to perform better in search engine rankings, so start with the search engines!
Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What terms would you type into Google to find the product or service you’re looking for? What keywords are auto-suggested by Google and other search engines?
This will give you great insight as to how your customers are searching for your products and the type of eCommerce sites you are likely to be up against. This helps you to gain more organic traffic from search rankings.
Keyword Research Tools
You can also use keyword research tools offered by platforms like Semrush and Moz to generate the perfect keyword, related to your product or brand.
These platforms can help you to generate keyword ideas you may not have previously thought of. Choose a primary keyword that is popular with users, but not too competitive within your market.
Keyword difficulty refers to how challenging it may be to rank for a certain keyword, compared to the competitors in your market.
A less popular keyword, while a less difficult keyword to rank for, also means there are fewer opportunities to be discovered by potential customers, as fewer individuals are searching for this phrase.
Another important part of eCommerce keyword research is to experiment with and implement a mixture of navigational, transactional, and informational keywords.
This will give you the best chance of ranking highly with those customers who have a specific intent to purchase, as your keywords will align with their intentions.
You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to analyze the effectiveness of your chosen keyword list. Google Keyword Planner can help you to generate the most suitable keywords for your e Commerce site.
This free tool will add to your keyword research efforts, by allowing you to see the average monthly search volume, impressions, and competition for certain keywords. Search volume is a key analytic that allows you to see how many people are searching for your keyword in a given period.
Short- and Long-Tail Keywords
You can also implement both short and long-tail keywords to maximize your opportunity of appearing in organic search results.
Using both forms of keyword will diversify your keyword portfolio, helping you to appear in Google searches.
Long-tail keywords may generate less traffic but can have a higher conversion rate, the people using these keywords are more sure of what they want and more likely to make a purchase.
Long-tail keywords are more specific and may appeal more to your niche or market.
Keyword research is one of the most important strategies to carry out when setting up eCommerce websites.
It can take time to research and implement effective keywords within your eCommerce pages, but it is worthwhile.
Keywords give search engines more context as to the purpose of your site and help put your products in front of your target customers.
2 - Include 5 bullet points of product benefits
e Commerce product pages are important as they introduce your product to the customer in detail for the first time.
When it comes to providing a great user experience, bullet points listing a product’s benefits can be much easier to read.
One of the most popular eCommerce websites, Amazon, implements this strategy within their product pages.
This makes it easy for potential customers to skim product pages and make a quick judgment as to whether the product is appropriate for them or not.
5 bullet points can provide the customer with an optimal amount of information.
By implementing bullet points accompanied by a short synopsis of the story behind the product, you can create a concrete image for your brand and increase the likelihood of gaining a loyal customer.
What to include within bullet points
Bullet points give the customer a quick overview of the product description, what the product does and what they can expect when they use it.
They should encourage the customer to want to purchase the product. These bullet points may also list unique features and benefits of a product, like interesting functions, available sizes, colors, or different product variations.
Focus on telling the customer the important details they want to know. Ensure the bullet points are concise and easy to understand, so customers remain engaged with the product description.
Bullet points can be indexed by bots for e Commerce search, which means you should take this opportunity to optimize your bullet points by including keywords.
This means that the keywords you include within your bullet points can affect the ranking of your eCommerce site within search engine rankings.
Avoid Keyword Stuffing!
However, ensure you avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ within bullet points. This can look unnatural and spam-like to a customer and can also raise red flags for search engines.
To maximize the effectiveness of your bullet points, the content should be relevant to the customer and relate to the additional product description you have written.
Another tip for writing bullet points for use within product pages is to write your content from your customer’s point of view.
You are very familiar with your product, the potential customer likely is not. Approach the story you tell your customer about your product and brand with this understanding to maximize their effectiveness.
3 - Optimize images for search and conversion
You can also use images within your website to improve your eCommerce SEO strategy. Images are another opportunity for keyword optimization.
Your images will have title tags and alt-tags where you can use your keywords. This also ensures your content is inclusive for people who use screen-reading technology.
Ensure you fill out the image HTML attributes, to let search engine bots know the context surrounding your image.
Stick to e Commerce SEO best practices, and again, be sure to avoid keyword stuffing! This only sends a red flag to Google that your website may not be legitimate.
Your images can also be engaging and exciting, giving website visitors more context to your brand and encouraging them to remain on your site for longer and explore your pages further.
Images can be used on your product and category pages to offer a closer look at your product or give a potential customer an alternative view.
Conversion driving images
Implementing high-quality images improves the user experience. However, be aware that they can also slow down your loading time.
If you choose the wrong image, you may give visitors the wrong idea about your brand or poorly affect your site structure.
To avoid this, be sure not to place images where they are not needed on your website.
eCommerce sites should focus on putting their product at the forefront, so include original, professional product images and avoid using stock photos on multiple pages, that may come across as spam.
You can improve product page SEO for e Commerce by including high-quality product images.
Ensure the use of images is further optimized on your website by including a primary picture on your home page.
This will grab the attention of your visitors and decrease the bounce rate on your site. This image should be unique and send the visitor a message about your brand.
To improve the user experience and potentially boost sales, carefully select the images you use and place them where it makes the most sense within your content.
4 - Ensure that your website loads fast
The loading times of eCommerce sites can make or break your sales. If your eCommerce site loads slowly, potential customers are far more likely to bounce, exiting from your site and throwing away any chance of a conversion.
Loading times for e Commerce are a crucial element of technical SEO.
It can be difficult to improve your page speed, but there are a few key steps you can carry out to ensure your eCommerce site is loading as fast as possible, giving you the best chance of making a sale.
Take a look at your site as a whole.
Are there features that could be reduced to improve page loading speed?
Are there videos and images that could be compressed, or lengthy text that could be removed?
Is there duplicate content within pages that you’ve missed?
When considering what could be causing slow loading speeds on your site, take a look at the following elements:
- An overload of content and lengthy test
- Heavy code that is not necessary
- Extremely large image files
- Issues with your website’s host
Your e Commerce site architecture should be a balance of engaging, optimized content that doesn’t weigh down the server.
The page speed of your website greatly impacts the experience of your users. This is linked with the performance of your SEO.
You can take advantage of SEO and technical tools to let you know which elements of your website may be causing issues with loading speed.
One of these free tools is Google PageSpeed Insight. The interface is simple and will grade your website speed from 1 to 100, with 100 being the fastest.
Once the test has been performed, you will receive a report pointing out the site elements that may be slowing down your site speed. This allows you to make improvements to your technical SEO.
Page loading speed is also considered a ranking factor by Google, as users will be influenced by the loading site speed of your eCommerce website as to whether they make a purchase.
How To Improve Website Loading Time
Consider the following key steps to improve the loading time of your eCommerce platforms:
- include fewer images on webpages
- compress images, videos, and large text files
- prioritize certain social media widgets
- limit the HTTP requests and redirects within your code
- optimize the server response time
- change to a different website host
5 - Test your website on mobile devices
An important element of online shopping today is that it takes place on mobile devices. Mobile eCommerce websites receive at least the same amount of traffic as desktop sites.
Mobile technology is continually improving and most people now use their phones to surf the internet. Mobile online shopping is only continuing to grow.
A major part of providing a great user experience is ensuring that your eCommerce site performs just as well on mobile as it does on a desktop.
If a potential customer discovers your brand while using their mobile device and your website fails to work, it’s unlikely they will reach out to you again.
Google also places great value on mobile sites, showing this by only indexing those sites that have ensured they are optimized for mobiles.
You can test your website’s performance on mobile devices regularly to ensure your site is responsive on mobile.
Take a look at the site elements like text and images. Can the user read the text easily? How does the scale compare to your desktop site? Are buttons clickable, or difficult to find? Are your product pages easy to navigate?
Ensure your site is working well on mobiles to increase your chances of conversions and improve your rankings in search engines.
6 - Write enticing titles and descriptions
Implementing a strong title and description will help you to attract potential customers to your eCommerce sites through increased organic traffic, and improve your on-page SEO.
It is important to use the keyword research you have carried out to optimize your titles and descriptions.
Titles and descriptions give you another opportunity to implement your relevant keywords on your eCommerce websites.
Your product pages and meta descriptions are some of the crucial elements of an e Commerce website. It gives you the chance to describe your product to a potential customer, listing the benefits and features in detail.
Schema markup can also be used to give Google context about your product descriptions. Schema markup is code that you can implement on your website to help search engines understand what your content is.
With product descriptions, you should be focusing on the customer first and Google second. It’s important to find a balance between writing for search engines and writing for people.
Your product descriptions are a part of your on-page SEO.
They should explain to a potential customer why they need your product specifically, over other brands available.
Consider the questions a customer may have about your product and try to answer these in your description.
Your goal regarding your product description should be to engage your customer and make them want your product.
Implementing your target keywords within your product and category pages can also be effective for your eCommerce SEO.
Optimize Product Pages
When it comes to optimization of your e Commerce product pages, consider the following elements:
- What are the most important elements of your product that you want to draw your customer’s eye to?
- How can you make these elements stand out to your customer?
- How can you improve the efficacy of your product descriptions?
- How can you implement your short and long-tail keywords on your product pages?
You may also consider the following steps to optimize your product descriptions:
- add original, high-quality images of your products
- include the most relevant keywords
- write interesting and detailed descriptions for your products
- include compelling call-to-action phrases to encourage a visitor to purchase
- include past customer testimonials
You are the expert on your product. Use product descriptions to describe the interesting details your customers may want to know. Stay excited about your product to entice your customers.
Your enthusiasm for your product can influence visitors to your site and make them want to be a part of your passion for your products.
7 - Optimize for out-of-stock products
It can be unappealing for customers to visit your e Commerce website and be faced with many out-of-stock product and category pages. You may be unable to provide your customers with what they want.
However, there are ways you can optimize your out-of-stock products to keep your organic traffic engaged.
If a customer discovers many out-of-stock products within your eCommerce sites, they may be tempted to search for similar products on a different website.
Failing to optimize your out-of-stock products is a wasted opportunity for conversions.
If you know that your products will come back in stock, it is important to maintain relationships with potential customers.
By communicating with your customers and alerting them to the out-of-stock situation early in the process, you avoid causing them undue frustration and stress.
If a customer in one of your eCommerce stores adds a product to their basket, or worse moves forward with a purchase and then finds out the product is out-of-stock, you are risking the breakdown of your relationship with clients.
It also contributes poorly to the user experience.
Ensure that any out-of-stock products either do not show up in search results or have a visible out-of-stock label and is possible, a return date when the product will be back in stock.
You can also give a reason as to why your product is unavailable. This will be useful for customers who are interested in purchasing your product in the future.
Call-To-Action
You can also further optimize your out-of-stock products within eCommerce sites by including effective call-to-action within your product description.
An effective call-to-action for out-of-stock products is to give potential customers the chance to be alerted when a product becomes available again.
It also positively contributes to the user experience when you give customers an idea of when a product will be back in stock.
You may also choose to allow a customer to reserve or pre-order a product so they can receive it when it comes back into stock. It is, however, important to be clear with your customer about when they will receive their order.
Manage Expectations
Managing customer expectations is a key element of providing a positive user experience and ensuring customers don’t purchase from a competitor.
Take a look at the Amazon listing below. They immediately inform you that they don’t have the product, but they don’t allow you to exit the page and purchase elsewhere.
They give you the option to buy the product now, whilst informing you of when they should have stock, and when you will receive the delivery.
When alerting a customer early on that a product is no longer in stock, you can improve this experience for your customer by sharing with them in search results similar products that they may choose to purchase instead.
For example, if you have a similar product in stock in a different style or color, your customer may choose to purchase this instead of waiting for the original product to come back in stock.
Ensure the similar product you are recommending is relevant to your customer’s needs.
8 - Don’t neglect your heading tags
Heading or title tags can influence your search rankings within Google. They are considered one of the most effective elements of on-page SEO.
It will affect your eCommerce SEO and technical SEO, and the experience of users visiting your sites. Optimization of your title tag, meta titles, and heading tags can be a great way to earn more organic traffic.
Headings and meta titles can help you to break down large sections of content, making it more digestible and easier to read for visitors to your eCommerce sites. This can have a positive impact on the experience of your users.
Heading tags will also give Google more context about your content and help to create comprehensive site architecture. You can also include keywords within your title tags, improving your eCommerce SEO and local SEO in the process.
Heading Tag Categories
Heading tags are broken down into six categories. These range from H1 to H6.
An H1 tag can be considered the most important tag in terms of context within your site architecture, while H6 is given the least importance.
These tags are used in HTML coding, giving a hierarchy to the content within your site.
This is why it is important to adhere to the structure of heading tags, placing them in order from H1 to H6, to leave the structure of your site architecture unbroken. This can have a poor impact on your on-page SEO.
Some webmasters or content writers of a blog post within your site make the crucial mistake of simply bolding or underlining text. A blog post should be structured correctly, adhering to heading tags. Avoid duplicate content and create original posts, to perform well in search engines.
Without including heading tags, you give no context to your content for search engines. It can also make it confusing for site visitors to navigate your content.
You should use proper heading tags. The main title of your page should be an H1 and each subheading organized between H2 and H6, depending on their importance. Your page structure will be categorized correctly and your content will be easier to read.
Implementing SEO heading tags
Here are some elements to keep in mind when deciding on which heading tags to use within your content:
- Topic relevancy: A search engine will consider how relevant your heading tag is to the content you are writing about. It will place a level of importance on your below-written content, depending on the tag you have associated your heading with.
- Keywords: Search bots will also determine if the keywords you have included in your heading tags are relevant to the content you are writing about. Avoid keyword stuffing, or placing keywords in headings where they don’t make sense.
- H1 tags: Your H1, or title tag, is considered the most important tag for search bots when determining the importance of your content and creating a hierarchy. Search bots will use the H1 tag to determine what your topic is about.
- User Experience: Heading tags give visitors to your site a clear expectation for the content you’re writing about. Google places a lot of value on the experience you provide to your users, so making the effort to ensure their experience is positive is an important element of eCommerce SEO.
9 - Use blogs for ‘Top-of-Funnel’ marketing
A potential customer who is at the top of your market funnel has come across your brand or product, either through paid ads, SEO tools, local SEO, social media, or when other sites link to you.
Once they have become aware of your brand or product, they are now at the first point of your marketing funnel.
Your SEO goals have likely been to attract as many visitors as possible to this first step in your marketing funnel. This first step is delicate and potential customers can be scared away if they feel they are being pressured into making a purchase.
Effective Top-of-Funnel Marketing Methods
Focus on subtle methods of promoting your products. One of the most effective ways you can do this is by creating blog or media content that mentions the benefits of your brand’s products.
You can offer potential customers a how-to guide, a free digital or printable product, or simply create valuable, helpful content that relates to your niche.
This is also a budget-friendly way of increasing organic traffic to your site and building on your consumer/brand relationship.
You can consider your blog a way of personally interacting with your potential customers, allowing them to become familiar with your product and building their awareness of your brand subtly.
They will learn more about your industry and your products and can choose to interact with you further.
By increasing visitors to your blog, you are also giving yourself more opportunities to convert customers.
They may sign up to your mailing list, be more susceptive to advertising or take advantage of your promotions and sales.
A blog is a fantastic jumping-off point to move potential customers through your marketing funnel.
10 - Regularly crawl your website for errors
As mentioned, the user experience of your website is very important to making conversions. Visitors to your site will be more likely to bounce away if they encounter broken links within your site.
To ensure a top-notch user experience, you can regularly crawl your website for errors and fix bugs as soon as possible.
By correcting any errors before they are detected by Google, you can avoid your technical SEO taking a hit.
Technical errors on your website may include broken links, 404 errors, or broken plug-ins.
Internal Links
The internal links on your website should be clean and organized. This can help you to keep track of your eCommerce site architecture and ensure you encounter as few errors as possible.
Consider which pages of your website are most popular, and where your site visitors navigate to most often.
Disorganized URLs can be difficult to navigate for your customers and result in a poorer user experience.
404 Errors
You can also ensure that your website does not have any dead-end pages or 404 errors.
Use Google Search Console to ensure your website is indexed and remains accessible to web crawlers.
By redirecting these dead pages to relevant content that improves your user experience, you also improve the technical SEO of your website.
You’re halfway through our guide to SEO for eCommerce stores helping you to boost your sales, congratulations!
Take a break from reading and relax, further your eCommerce knowledge with this comprehensive video that ahrefs have created.
We’ve already covered some of these points to boost your eCommerce SEO and we’ll go over more of them in our guide to SEO as we continue.
11 - Add FAQs that customers may have
By including FAQs on your website, you can deliver a large amount of helpful information to your site visitors, in an easily readable way.
Your customers may have questions about your brand or product, and FAQs are a great way to address these.
You can help search engines to recognize your content as FAQs by using Schema markup. These FAQs can then be used if a person performs a Google search for a query that you have answered.
Google may show your content as an optimized snippet of text, helping to engage your customers and drive further organic traffic. FAQs can help to optimize your conversion rate.
Often, your FAQ page may be the first interaction a potential customer may have with your brand.
By answering their questions efficiently, you can immediately start building a positive relationship with visitors to your site. This is a great jumping-off point for starting a purchasing journey.
An FAQ page can also be helpful for your budget and resources, as you will spend less time on customer service and answering questions through your social media or email.
An effective FAQ page for eCommerce should be well put together. You can do this by analyzing the most common questions you receive about your product or brands.
This can help you to build trust with your customers and improve your SEO.
FAQ Tips
Keep the following tips in mind when building your FAQ page:
- Ensure your FAQ page is easy to find within your website
- Organize your FAQs by category
- Write questions and answers that are relevant to your products, and consider implementing them within your product pages
- Add internal links to other relevant pages on your site
- Avoid duplicate content
- Implement call-to-action statements
12 - Follow an effective URL structure
By implementing an effective URL structure, you can improve the user experience of visitors to your site and enhance your eCommerce SEO.
A well-designed URL structure can make it easier for search bots to index your site in search results. An effective URL structure will also make it easier to share your products among other websites and social media.
To improve your URL structure, ensure your links are as simple and readable as possible.
The most effective URL structures are easy to implement elsewhere, easy for search engines to index, implement your keywords, concise and appropriate.
How a URL appears to visitors to your site can give them more information about the content included within your page. Structuring URLs properly also allows you to ensure crawl bots won’t encounter errors.
The following is an example of a URL that is not helpful for your SEO and takes away from your site’s user experience: https://awebsite.com/category123/subcategory123/productpage123/
Compare this to a URL that is concise and readable: https://awebsite.com/clothing/men/suits. This URL is much more beneficial for your site architecture and helps your page to be indexed within Google search.
You can then implement keywords, or metatags, within your URL to help a search bot determine what the content of your page is about.
Search crawlers will read your URL and use keywords to determine the ranking of web pages within SERPs.
- Nonsense to both humans and Google – https://yourwebsite.com/category271/subcategory706/productcode1183/
- Readable to both humans and Google – https://yourwebsite.com/clothing/women/dresses
13 - Remember to optimize category pages
To draw in the most organic traffic you can, you should make an effort to optimize each page on your website. This includes your eCommerce category pages.
Include keywords and relevant headings throughout the text you have included on your website and product pages. Any on-page text within your website should be well-thought-out, written for humans but optimized for SEO.
A category page will also utilize images and titles relevant to your product pages. This is why it’s so important to ensure these product page elements are well-optimized.
A category page will simply collate these products into a page where customers can easily navigate them. Category pages also implement anchor text that links to products and should be relevant.
Take a look at the image below, showing a category page for the Nintendo Switch from Smyths Toys.
There are so many well-optimized elements present. There are further sub-categories that are easily accessible, they’ve used brand attributes cleverly, they default sort by bestsellers, etc.
Take a note out of their book when it comes to optimizing your category pages.
14 - Display breadcrumbs on your pages
Breadcrumbs are a great navigational tool that you can implement on your website, to keep your visitors engaged and browsing your website.
They also greatly improve the experience of your users, who feel empowered by your internal linking, to make their own choices as it relates to your content and pages. Internal linking within your site is also pleasing to search bots.
It’s far easier for a visitor to navigate back and forth between pages on a website when there are breadcrumbs are present.
It’s an easy way to engage visitors further within your website, helping them to find what they’re looking for and increasing your chances of successful conversions.
For example, if a visitor is looking at a specific product but is not entirely sure they want to make a purchase, breadcrumbs can help them to switch between categories and other products to consider on your website.
An example of breadcrumbs that may be implemented on a tech website could be: Technology – Products – Computers – Desktops – Brand.
Breadcrumbs can also help your technical SEO performance.
Google can use breadcrumbs to gain more context about the layout of your site or an individual category page or the product page. Google can then further categorize your site and products within SERPs, providing potential customers with more accurate results.
15 - Discover and link to orphan pages
Orphan pages that end up overlooked within your website can be an SEO and conversion nightmare. An eCommerce website should aim to stamp out any orphan pages they come across.
An orphan page is a webpage that is not linked to, by any other page within your website. They can result in a lack of clarity for visitors to your webpage and are a red flag to search crawlers.
The importance of link building cannot be underestimated, so if a page is not even linked to its website it is considered worthless by Google.
Some orphan pages may have been created purposefully by web designers for a specific purpose. However, most eCommerce websites do not need pages within their site that the sole purpose of is to ignore.
A website may find they are punished by Google from an SEO standpoint, for implementing or missing existing orphan pages.
Discover Orphan Pages
You can discover orphan pages on your site quite easily. Run a site audit or website crawl and search for pages that receive no internal inbound links.
You can assess the results you receive from your site audit and use these to fix any orphan pages. You may choose to include these pages in the internal linking structure of your site.
By performing a site audit or crawl regularly, you can pick up on issues like orphan pages, before they do too much damage to your SEO performance and overall site structure.
16 - Steal your competitor’s marketing tactics
Researching the marketing tactics of your direct competitors can be very helpful when deciding what direction you would like to go in next in terms of digital marketing. You can gain quite a competitive advantage in the e Commerce industry by staying on top of what your competitors are doing.
Competitive analysis should be a strategy you use to improve the structure and content of your e Commerce site.
By assessing where your competitors fall, or where they perform well, you can tailor your content and site performance to what your customers want and what they respond well to.
Competitive analysis can also help you to identify your own site’s weaknesses, improving them to outrank the brands you are competing with.
Competitive Analysis
There are many elements of e Commerce sites that you can assess to help your performance. These include SEO, the layout of eCommerce product pages, mobile-friendliness, social media relations, site loading speed and performance, and many more.
By making comparisons between your site and a competitor when considering these elements, you may pick up on new ideas and strategies to improve your performance.
There are different competitive analysis tools you can implement to see how your competitors are performing in each category.
Use tools like SEMRush, or the Google Search function, to identify the top-performing competitors you may benefit from analyzing.
By paying attention to the strategies your competitors are implementing that are performing well, you can make a note of these and adapt them to your site.
Avoid duplicate content, but carry out thorough research on what your competition is doing that is working.
For example, if a competitor is ranking highly for an industry-specific topic, take an in-depth look at how they have formulated and laid out their content.
Why are site visitors discovering this content, and what is keeping them engaged.
What targeted keywords do they use? Do they use call-to-action phrases? How do they encourage users to engage? Are they implementing original images or videos?
You can create your unique content based on the layout that works for your competitors.
Take a look at the image below to see just a small amount of keywords that Amazon (UK) ranks for with the word ‘jeans’ in the URL or keyword.
Don’t let the range of metrics overwhelm you if you’re new to this. Important metrics include search volume and average traffic.
This is just to give you an idea of how to research your competitor’s keywords.
Ecommerce SEO competitor analysis can be used effectively, to help rank higher in SERPs.
A competitive analysis allows you to see how others in your industry are redirecting broken or missing links, improving page loading times, and engaging mobile compatibility on their site.
Consider researching the following in your e Commerce SERP competitive analysis:
- Ease of use: User-friendly Sites can rank higher because they provide a better customer experience.
- Layout: The layout of your site is important in SERP rankings. Ease of navigation for search engine bots has a big impact on rankings.
- Host platform: The technology you use to create and host your site is just as important as your unique SEO content to search engines when determining your ranking within SERPs.
- XML Sitemap: An XML Sitemap can provide efficient and quick indexing for search engines.
- Rich snippets: Rich snippets are concise, optimized pieces of content that answer search user queries. They appear at the top of SERP, usually with an image, link, and short description.
17 - Build relevant and authoritative backlinks
eCommerce website owners cannot underestimate the importance of link building, from other websites with strong link authority.
A backlink is a vote of confidence from another website that tells search engines your content is useful and deserving to be shared.
When link building, always consider link authority. This refers to how well regarded the website creating a link back to your site is.
If a well-regarded site links to your site within their content, a search engine will be alerted that they should direct other users to your website.
How to build quality links
An important factor in link building is content creation. By creating useful, compelling content that stands out in your industry, other websites with strong authority are more likely to share it.
You could also reach out to other site owners in your niche and network with them, which may create an opportunity to guest post on their site.
Another popular method to improve your link building opportunities could be to reach out to a blogger or influencer who may write a product to you.
They often have websites with high traffic and many backlinks. This can be invaluable for your SEO and organic traffic.
You can build a rapport with these influencers and inform them about your product. Ensure you describe how it can benefit them and what kind of link building arrangement you have in mind.
Another method of link building can be to link with your manufacturer if you sell another company’s products.
This is the type of backlink that makes a lot of sense. By reaching out and networking with a manufacturer, you can ask them to add you to an online directory of retailers they may have.
This can help with your SEO as you may receive a backlink from a high-ranking domain.
18 - Keep your SSL security certificate valid
An SSL security certificate is invaluable for carrying out eCommerce business.
It allows you to handle personal, sensitive customer information like credit card details and site login details. It helps with the safe handling of this information, by encrypting it securely.
It is an important responsibility to ensure your SSL certificate remains valid, to maintain the trust of your customers and search engines.
Your SSL certificate will provide you with a green padlock icon within your URL.
Consumers have come to trust this symbol. They can feel confident when inputting their sensitive information that it is safe.
Google will also not send its users to a website that it deems unsafe or untrustworthy.
SSL certificates are also not only limited to eCommerce websites that deal with financial transactions. Many websites which store user data are required to use SSL certificates to ensure data is encrypted and safe.
Even social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can use SSL certificates to ensure users with malicious intent cannot intercept transactions or user search queries from their websites.
19 - Use the holidays to your advantage
Another effective method of increasing sales for your eCommerce website is to use the holiday rush to your advantage.
Holidays can generate increased levels of income and traffic to your site. It’s important to be well prepared for a holiday rush, to perform to the best of your potential for customers.
You can also implement special holiday promotions that may help you to increase sales. This can be special offers, holiday discount codes, or further deals to help increase conversions and traffic.
Prepare for holidays
To be well prepared for the many holidays throughout the year, you can implement a holiday calendar that will help you to plan your content, product releases, and special offers.
Include major holidays on this calendar, such as New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, Hanukkah, and more.
eCommerce sites can also implement other commercial holiday discounts, such as Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals.
You can create content around these events to attract more traffic and alert customers of upcoming sales and promotions.
Holiday shopping can draw a large amount of traffic and sales to your website. These customers may be drawn into your website through holiday promotions and then engage further with your brand at other times of the year.
To help your website perform well during the holiday season, you can implement SEO strategies to maximize the number of visitors to your website.
It can be easy to get overwhelmed with preparing for the holiday rush in the eCommerce world, but ensure you don’t overlook your SEO requirements.
Planning your SEO techniques ahead of time can help you to ensure your SEO performs well. Effective SEO is an especially important component during the holidays when building your sales campaigns.
Without implementing a prepared SEO strategy, your site may not be found by consumers and this can result in fewer sales.
This includes ensuring that your site is performing at its maximum capacity. This can help you to accommodate a large influx of traffic to your website and maintain your site loading speed.
20 - Measure positive results in Google Analytics
Google Analytics can help you to attain and evaluate data about the performance of your eCommerce site.
It’s a free tool you can use as an eCommerce site owner to help you adjust elements of your website that may improve your traffic and sales.
The content of your website is an important element in driving traffic and increasing conversions. By optimizing your content, you should see a positive increase in the analytical performance of your website.
Analytics can help you to determine the journey of your customers, to meet their needs. Customers have unique needs and interests which can be reflected in their analytics.
Not every person will respond the same to different marketing techniques. However, by analyzing the performance of these techniques, you are increasing the chances of conversions.
What does Analytics tell you?
Analytics allows you to track the performance of elements within your website and gives you an insight as to how your site elements are working. You can also gain insight as to the channels that are attracting the most customers to your site.
This allows you to optimize those channels to improve their performance even further. You can also gain insight into the specific analytics that relate to your site visitors’ behavior.
You can get reports about the average time a visitor spends on each page, the type of content they click on, and the content that performs the best. This can help you to keep your visitors engaged.
Analytics also gives you in-depth information relating to eCommerce specifically. This allows you to optimize your store and go through your products to improve sales on your website.
Becoming familiar with Google Analytics can help you to find this key information.
You can use Analytics reports to help improve your sales and digital marketing processes. These reports and numbers can be invaluable for business owners.
Google Analytics can give you further information regarding the performance of your website.
Building a well-performing eCommerce website requires a great deal of time and effort. This is why it’s so important to analyze the importance of these strategies and determine their results.
If you can determine how well a strategy is working for you, you can put more effort into the strategies that are performing well. It can show you where to focus your future marketing and SEO strategies.
This allows you to build on your success as a business owner. Google Analytics can help you to generate more clicks, more traffic, and more sales.
It also allows you to set up specific eCommerce goals, helping you to achieve these sales and performance objectives.
Final Words
ECommerce search engine optimization can help to make your website more visible in your niche, drive more organic traffic and build trust between your brand and your customer.
It may seem overwhelming trying to come up with an effective SEO strategy, as there are so many elements to think of. Use this guide to SEO for eCommerce, to help you focus on the best practices for SEO.
Important elements of SEO for eCommerce can include internal linking, content creation, and user experience. Optimizing these aspects of your website can help significantly boost your SEO and conversions.
Improving your SEO for eCommerce is not a quick fix. It can take time to build up relationships with customers and drive significant traffic to your site, without the use of Google ads or other paid marketing.
Your strategy will be long-term and need adjusting overtime to meet the needs of your customers.
eCommerce is becoming more and more competitive as the industry grows. The number of online sales and online shopping customers continues to increase year on year.
We would strongly encourage any eCommerce store owners to take action now on the above steps mentioned.
This ensures you give yourself an incredibly effective head start when it comes to the success of your eCommerce site.
If you focus your efforts on implementing the points that have been mentioned in our guide to SEO, you’re almost guaranteed to see an increase in your eCommerce sales.
More customers will discover your website through Google and you’ll have more chances to sell your product. Building an effective SEO strategy can take time, but the results can be overwhelmingly worthwhile.
We’d like to finish off by thanking you for taking the time to read these tips and we hope they brought you value. We wish you the best of luck!
– The team at Launch Site Boost.
