Here is a number for you: 1.92 billion
This is the estimated number of global digital buyers in 2019. When you know that the world only has a population of over 7 billion, then you can understand how popular e-commerce has become.
You can now start your own e-commerce site and run an established business. E-commerce sites are great for a number of reasons:
• They generate a passive income
• They are in demand
• They are getting more popular with time
What about the competition? To overcome the competition, you will need to focus on e-commerce SEO. And don’t worry, we’re here to help. In this article, you’ll find out the best e-commerce SEO strategies. It’s a detailed article, so bookmark it. You would want to return to it later.
Perform Effective Keyword Research:
Using the right keywords is a necessity for any online business. Google alone receives more than 63,000 searches per second. (https://seotribunal.com/blog/google-stats-and-facts/ ) The terms people use for making these searches are keywords or key phrases. Therefore, it is essential that you incorporate keywords into your SEO strategy. Finding the correct keywords isn’t difficult. Why? Because the web is full of tools that can help.
Here are our top suggestions for keyword research:
Google Keyword Planner
Google’s own keyword research tool, GKP gives you keyword ideas and tells how many times people have searched for these terms. You can determine the popularity of the keywords and use the ones, which are relevant to your brand. Ensure that the ranking difficulty isn’t too much for the keyword.
Ubersuggest
Present on Neil Patel’s website, Ubersuggest gives you valuable keyword ideas. It also tells you about the ranking difficulty and the cost per click for the terms. You can also find out which pages are ranking on the SERPs for the keywords to get an idea what’s working in the market (and what isn’t).
Keywordtool.io
This free tool gives you over 700 long-tail keyword ideas on the basis of the term entered. For a particular term, you can get a plethora of keyword suggestions to use in your web pages.
Google Autosuggest and Related Searches
When you enter a term in Google Search, you’ll find some suggestions from Google, this is Google Autosuggest, and the terms are quite valuable. They are the most popular relevant terms for the phrase you’ve entered. Apart from these suggestions, Google also shows you related searches. You can use these terms as well.
Amazon Suggest
Just like Google Autosuggest, Amazon also provides you suggestions in its search bar. Use those terms because just like Google, Amazon is also a popular search engine. Moreover, these terms have higher buyer intent.
Work on your Site Architecture
Your website’s keywords are not the only thing that influences SEO. You’ll need to optimize the site architecture as well. Your user’s flow should be seamless. A complex site structure leads to poor user experience. And a poor user experience increases your bounce rate, which lowers your ranking in SERPs.
How to have a great site structure?
Just follow these steps:
• Use categories
Divide the products present on your site in categories. Have distinct categories as well. Be sure that you set clear criteria for categorizing your products.
• Divide categories into sub-categories
Use sub-categories for further simplification of the site structure. It will help keep the structure convenient for the user to navigate in. Site structure is a vital SEO factor. All search engines consider it for ranking a website so don’t hesitate in putting effort into the same.
Improve your site’s navigation
Suppose a new visitor arrives at your site. How will he/she navigate? It’s an important question and its answer shows how important your site’s navigation is. The site structure simplifies the user experience whereas navigation reduces the hassles of the same. Just keeps these points in mind to improve your e-commerce site’s navigation:
– Prioritize the Pages
Which pages do you need the most? In most cases, these pages are Home, About Us, Brand New, etc. Which keywords attract visitors on your site and what is the task you want them to perform first? Answering these questions will reveal the pages you need to give the most priority.
– Do you need drop-down menus?
Search engines can’t check the drop-down menus without the right codes. Make sure that the code is perfect for the drop-down menu.
– Use keywords and breadcrumbs
Add keywords to your most important pages and use a breadcrumb trail to help in simplifying navigation. The breadcrumb trail will help the user in going back to the previous page. For keywords, use the short-tail versions of your primary keywords. You can use ‘Red Chief Shoes’ for the page having Red Chief’s shoes instead of saying ‘Shoes from Red Chief’ or ‘Buy Shoes from Red Chief’.
Keep the category names short and use keywords for them.
Audit your website
It’s important to know where your website stands before you can make any decisions. If you don’t know the starting point, it’ll be impossible for you to measure your progress. For this purpose, you’ll need to audit your e-commerce site. How can you do that? You should use Screaming Frog for SEO audit of your e-commerce store. It will reveal the weaknesses of your website and give you suggestions to improve. It also redirects 404 pages and changes 302 redirects to 301.
SEMRush is another great tool you can use to audit your website’s SEO. It tells you the following:
– The keywords you’re ranking for
– The places you’re getting backlinks for
– The sources of your traffic
You can use this information to get an idea where your e-commerce site stands at the current moment. SEMRush has a free version too, so be sure to check it out.
Add reviews to your site
74% of customers say that reviews influence the trustworthiness of a business. Be sure to add some product reviews on your site. This doesn’t mean you should write them yourself. Never do that, it would be unethical. Instead, ask your customers to leave a review. The more reviews you have the more trustworthy you’ll be.
Use Product Review Schema Markup
The presence of customer reviews on your site isn’t enough. New users should be able to see them without even visiting your site. How is that possible? Use Schema markup. It shows the rating and the number of reviews. Schema markup increases the information you can provide the users.
Search engines consider it as a vital factor. Here’s a detailed article from Neil Patel, so you can understand the importance of Schema markup and what it means. (https://neilpatel.com/hi/blog/seo-mein-schema-markup/ )
Use Short URLs
Use short URLs for your pages. Long URLs deteriorate your ranking and damage your SEO. They are a minor ranking factor and they help you in climbing the rankings. Keep them short and use keywords in the URLs. It will help the search engines in recognizing the relevance of your page.If you want your URLs to render properly in all browsers, keep them shorter than 2,000 characters. The perfect URL would be like:
Use keywords in the category name, subcategory name and product name to enhance the SEO.
Here are a few things you can do:
• Use hyphens to connect words
• Avoid using product IDs or codes, instead, use names
• Use lowercase letters because the use of uppercase letters can arise confusion
Optimize Product Descriptions
Product descriptions can have a huge impact on your site’s SEO. Your product descriptions should:
– Be unique
– Have keywords
– Describe the product properly
You should use bullet points in the product description to keep them easy to read. And avoid using the manufacturer’s product description.
Have attractive Meta Description and Titles
The Meta description and the Meta title are displayed on the SERPs. Both search engines and people read them to keep them high-quality.
They influence the click-through rate of your website as well. Make sure both of them are attractive, compelling and contain keywords.
Use Headings
Use headings multiple times in your pages. Moreover, add keywords at least in the H1 headings of your page. Search engines analyze the headings on a page for readability and SEO. Where can you use headings? You can use them in product descriptions, blog posts as well as web copy.
Get HTTPS
Security is a major factor. How can you ensure your visitors’ safety? Get HTTPS certification. Google has stated that having HTTPS influences your site’s rankings. Therefore, you should get one for your site. Google has started displaying whether a page is secure or not. Clearly, it will leave a bad impression on your new visitors if they see your site as ‘not secure’.
Have a Sitemap
A sitemap tells the search engines about the pages present on your website. Through it, they can understand which pages they need to index and so, it’s important that create a sitemap and submit it to the search engines. You can use XML sitemap creator for this purpose. Once created, submit it through the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to let the search engines know about this development.
Enhance Loading Speed
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool for finding the speed your pages take for loading. The faster your page loads, the more people will stay on the page. You can face a loss of 1% for every delay of 100 milliseconds. You should optimize the images and improve the code of the site to reduce the loading time for your e-commerce site.
Keep your Site Mobile Friendly
Google has started mobile-first indexing. This means it prioritizes your mobile site for ranking you. It will check your desktop site in case you don’t have a mobile site. Obviously, having a good and responsive mobile site is imperative. You should use responsive web design and take the help of Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check the level of optimization. You can take the help of Accelerated Mobile Pages for this purpose. They contain fewer data and load much faster than the usual pages.
Use a Content Delivery Network
A Content Delivery Network or a CDN will help you reduce the loading time and enhance the usability of your site. They help you in offering a better user experience, which after all, leads to better SEO. Like AMPs, a CDN loads your pages faster and enhances your site’s conversion rate.
Publish Amazing Content
You can’t rely on your store alone to get your customers. In order to stay ahead of your competition, you will need to publish quality content regularly. Performing content marketing will not only enhance the number of keywords your site has but it will also get you more link-building opportunities. You can share this content on social media platforms to get more user engagement as well.
Conclusion
Your e-commerce store will now be able to topple its competition and get ahead with much ease. Remember that SEO takes its time. You can’t expect results overnight. But with the help of these tips, your e-commerce store will stay on the right track. What do you think of e-commerce SEO? Is it easy? Let us know.
