Tips and Tricks for eCommerce SEO

Nicole Dean

Nicole Dean

Optimizing any website for search engines is obviously vital in order for your site to show up on SERPs (search engine results pages). However, with eCommerce websites, it’s even more important because if you don’t show up on SEPRs, then no one is going to buy your products. If you don’t show up within the first three search results on a SERP, the harsh reality is, you might as well close up shop. eCommerce sites immensely depend on attracting, delighting, converting and retaining their customers and if they can’t be found on search engines, absolutely none of those things can happen. SEO is certainly hard but it doesn’t have to be! If you take these tips and tricks to optimize your eCommerce website, you’re going to be just fine!
With SEO, you always want to start with the basics and then incorporate as many SEO best practices as you can to ensure you’re going to be ranked number one, or at least in the top three. The reason why optimizing eCommerce websites is so difficult – and time consuming – is because you have hundreds or even thousands of product listings that each individually need to be accounted for. Once it’s all done, though, it’s definitely going to pay off!

START WITH THE BASICS

To start off perfecting your SEO strategy, you need to analyze data, research keywords and competitors, and optimize all of your webpages. To really dig deep and see what is the root of your SEO problems, you need to start with an SEO audit. When doing this, pay close attention to your product pages. You can use a software tool called Screaming Frog to crawl all of your links, images, CSS, script, etc. that will point out the errors, duplicate content, redirects, missing tags, and other issues that could impact your site’s SEO. The next step is to do your keyword research.
Using the right keywords on your product pages can really be the key in attracting high-qualified consumers and getting big sales numbers. Long-tail keywords are going to be the best to optimize for. Consumers who are searching for their products on Google generally know exactly what you’re looking for, so a product page that is optimized for this has a higher chance of attracting and converting this customer who is ready to purchase. Once the keyword research is done, the next step is to do your competitor research.
You want to review their sites and make a list of keywords that they’re using in their own SEO strategies. Figure out which of those you can compete against. Another great thing to look for is, look at how they set up their websites. What’s the architecture of their pages, specifically their product pages? If it seems to be working well for them, think about trying a similar architecture for your own product pages.

ECOMMERCE SEO BEST PRACTICES

Intuitive Navigation

The architecture of your eCommerce website plays a curtail part for a smooth customer experience. Not only that, it actually has a large impact on getting higher rankings. Organizing your product pages into different categories and sub-categories that are easy to understand and navigate, search and follow, will land you high on SERPs.

Captivating Metadata

Each individual product page needs it’s own unique meta-description and meta-titles that include your keywords. You don’t want to overthink this. Metadata is one of the first things that a potential customer sees in a SERP before they decide to click to your store or not, so you want to make a great first impression.

Unique Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are where you get to shine and create one-of-a-kind, captivating sales copy that will entice visitors to buy your products.

Internal Search Engine

Most eCommerce stores have a lot of products that they offer on their sites. Adding an internal search engine will make it easier for your customers to look for what they want within your site. This will help them save time and prevent them from hunting through your entire site trying to find a single item that they can just type into a search bar on your site. This will particularly be helpful to your mobile shoppers that are out and about, or better yet, in your physical store and need to go to your website while shopping to view a particular product.

Product Images and Videos

Not only do product images and videos show your potential customers what a product looks like, they can help them visualize the product in-hand, or in their space. The quality of images and videos are extremely important. They influence how visitors feel about your products. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone to a site and they either had small product images or they were too blurry and I immediately closed the website. You don’t want that to happen to you!

Customer Reviews

It’s no secret that people make sales based on what others say about a product. Showing your product testimonials and reviews is definitely going to help your potential customers make the decision to purchase. As far as SEO goes, product pages that feature testimonials rank higher because Google rewards pages that are frequently updated with fresh, unique content.

Social Media Sharing

Making it easy for your visitor to share your product with their friends on their social media pages is huge. Google rankings are significantly influenced by the amount and quality of social media signals because they determine a page’s authority and relevance. You always want to give your potential customers or happy, existing customers a chance to rave about your products on their social pages.

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