No doubt, ranking your e-commerce site higher than your competitors on Google is a must. But, to be there on the top, you must know the best SEO tips and tricks. If you’re missing out on rankings in the #1 ranking, you’re probably also missing your sales.
Statistics show that 37.5% of all traffic to e-commerce sites comes from search.
As, reaching the first page isn’t a significant achievement but, to generate sales, you must rank #1.
If you don’t have a strong e-commerce SEO strategy in layman’s terms, you lose out on brand clicks, impressions, and sales.
If you want to rank your e-commerce site, follow these strategies to become an SEO business marketer.
Keyword Research and competitor’s research
Research is an integral part of SEO. Before you start SEO work (on-site or off-site), you need competitor and keyword research.
Targeting the wrong keywords can ruin your business by generating less traffic and few conversions.
Keyword Research
You must focus on these 3 areas when conducting keyword research.
- keywords for your homepage & product pages
- keywords for blog topics
- Avoid keyword cannibalization
Competitor Research
Once you’re done with keyword research, it’s time to conduct competitor research.
To do it, you must keep these points in mind
- Main keywords of your competitors
- Where are they getting their inbound links?
- Look at the site architecture of competitors
- How can you make your website look different than competing sites?
Identifying Current Problems
Audit your site for current problems that need to be fixed. To identify problems, focus on these auditing steps:
- Find Site Errors: Redirecting 404 pages to the actual content and redirecting 302 to 301. Also, update meta titles, duplicate content pages, and meta descriptions.
- Determine Your Website Speed: Once you have fixed the site errors, it’s time to work on website speed. Visitors don’t like to spend time on a slow-loading website. Statistics show that 40% of visitors abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load.
Use a free tool, Pingdom, to check your site’s load speed.
On-Page Optimization
Off-page optimization and on-page optimization are also important for SEO.
On-page optimization consists of actions within your web pages to rank your site better.
For on-page optimization, focus on these 8 key areas;
- Keyword Optimization: Make sure your webpage has the keyword in the page title, Headers, Sub-headers, Paragraph copy, Product descriptions, Image file names, Image alt tags, Meta title and description, URLs
- Site Structure: If you’re building a website from scratch or re-designing an existing site, information architecture is a must. For instance, an online pet food store’s site structure could look like this:
- Linking building: The next step is internal linking, for example, linking your website to other pages within your site. It helps you to make your anchor text, which can help you with top keywords ranking.
- Usability: This feature helps to make your site visitors happy. If your brand or e-commerce site has great usability, your customers will start visiting your website again and again. A greater user experience means spending more time on your site. If you use a live chat widget, it will lift conversion rates and increase the average time on site.
- Website’s Mobile Version: These days’ people are browsing the web through mobile devices and shopping online. So, you must have a mobile-friendly version of your website. Statistics show that 31% of mobile users go online using their phones. At the same time, 58% of mobile users expect to load mobile sites as quickly as or faster than desktop sites.
- Customer Reviews: A Customer review on an e-commerce site is important. According to Internet Retailer, the conversion rate of an e-commerce site can be increased from 14 to 76% by adding a customer review. Jupiter Research also found that 77% of consumers read reviews before purchasing online.
- Snippets: Rich snippets are HTML coded that tells search engines about your website before clicking through to see it. When people see Google results with images, they’re more likely to click and purchase your product.
- Social Media Integration: An e-commerce site is incomplete without social media! Integration (sharing your content on social platforms and engaging with customers).
Testing strategy
Once you have worked on your SEO (and usability), it’s time to put a testing & optimization strategy in place.
How can you do this?
- Use analytics to see keywords that are ranked
- Use PPC campaigns to find high-ranked keywords. Now add them to your SEO strategy
- Work on Meta titles and descriptions to increase click-through rates.
- A/B testing
Blog Content
Now you have a list of important keywords, as each page of your site should be optimized for only one keyword; there will be plenty of keywords left.
To rank your site through those keywords, write a blog. In a blog, you can optimize each post for important keywords that you aren’t targeting with your website’s main pages.
Blog posts should be high quality and user-friendly. Do not stuff your content with keywords, and you will start losing your customers.
When you’re creating blog content, consider packaging together various posts on the same theme into a downloadable eBook or guide.
Kyle Lacy, Senior Manager of Content Marketing, says, “The contents of an eBook can be easily published in their entirety or as teaser content to drive more interaction, downloads, and overall interest in your eBook. When it comes to content marketing, your goal shouldn’t be to generate a ton of content, but rather use the content you create effectively.”
For example, suppose you are an e-commerce business that sells clothes. In that case, you might write a series of blogs on how to select the perfect dress for an engagement or wedding, how to negotiate the cost for the dress, and you might even include romantic tips for a date dinner. Then, you could include those posts together into a downloadable guide, pdf, or eBook.
Before they downloaded your eBook, buyers must enter their email addresses into a landing page. This would help you to send a series of sales & marketing emails to buyers.
Link Building
Focus on earning links from high authority sites by offering some value to them in exchange for a link.
You can offer them a high-quality guest post, a quote for a story, co-authoring, an infographic, and more.
Use a free service like HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to find link opportunities.
Here are the best-suited links for e-commerce websites:
- Product reviews
- Press mentions
- Awesome content
- Broken link building
While working through the above list, please include;
- Variety of anchor texts
- Link to the most relevant page but don’t link to the same page repeatedly
- Only get links from high authority websites
Business Tip
If you are a local business owner, then make sure you have (NAP) your name, address, and phone number showing throughout your website. Use the same name, address, and phone number across all websites.
Best SEO Tools
It doesn’t matter if you are part of a solo strategist or SEO team; there are many SEO tools to help you optimize your rankings.
Here are 8 best SEO tools,
- SEOmoz Keyword Tool
- Open Site Explorer
- Screaming Frog
- Google AdWords
- Authority Labs for Monitoring
- Ubersuggest Keyword Suggestion Tool
- Mergewords
- Buzzstream
You can streamline your SEO process by using a combination of these tools. Moreover, these tools can provide you with data to help you make smart decisions that lead to better rankings and sales.
Bottom Line:
Among many other reasons to optimize your site for search engines, the main thing is to increase sales.
When you plan SEO strategy in the right way, you will see an increase in organic traffic, which will lead to more conversions.
Before you get started, understand that SEO isn’t a one-time game. Major search engines, including Google, update their algorithms constantly to bring better results to the audience.
So, now, you need to stay on top of the town and update your strategy accordingly.
There is no doubt that SEO requires a lot of hard work, time, and patience, but the benefits are worth it.
What are your secret SEO strategies to boost your e-commerce sales?
