All online business owners are well aware of the importance of SEO for generating traffic online. But you are not able to do so because you are unaware of the SEO best practices. You may have got your website made by a professional but generating good amount of traffic can only be done with great SEO techniques.
eCommerce has one big SEO backup that is a lot of content. You surely have this backup for your long-term traffic generation. Apart from your company blog your product pages should also be a key driver of SEO. E-commerce stores surely have this working for them.
Optimize your home page, your product pages, and your eCommerce blog by using these SEO techniques.
What is SEO?
SEO is surely not a new word to you if you have a website. SEO means generating traffic from free and natural search results on your search engines.
SEO plays a significant role in optimising your website. SEO is the process to help increase your ranking in search engine results. Many online store owners are using these SEO techniques unknowingly.
Joining our own insights with those from a leading SEO agency in Sydney – we have come up with the following list of best practices that e-commerce owners need to be incorporating into their online strategy to see the highest ROI from search engines in 2023.
1. Keywords
For an efficient e-commerce SEO campaign, you need to have an optimised keyword search for your site and products. Your list of keywords influences your SEO search the most. E.g. Your site’s architecture and URL should take your keywords into account. So now you know keyword search is of major significance for e-commerce sites.
Keywords for e-commerce products – Most keywords are information keywords. These are focused on help content. e.g. How to cook a turkey? But keywords for eCommerce products should be focused on the product description with long-tail keywords. You need to keep product concentrated keywords in mind.
You should take the example of Amazon as it is the most extensive e-commerce website in the world. Have a look at the Amazon keyword research.
As you can see in the picture, they have such long tail targeted keywords and this has been the primary reason for the success of Amazon. I just searched for gardening tools for garden and I got specified keywords options in the search result. You should try your best to optimise your site with such long tail keyword search options. Amazon will sometimes suggest categories above keyword search. If your group is unique include this unique feature in your category page keyword.
Do a keyword research, by this; you will know how people are searching for your products. This will help you optimize critical on-page elements and increase your traffic. Use keyword tool dominator to have end number of keyword suggestions.
2. Site architecture
Your site structure should be simple with pages arranged in an organized way. The structure should be such that any laymen can understand it. An e-commerce site has to be user-friendly. You may have unique products but making your site complicated is definitely the wrong path for best SEO results. An average e-commerce site has more pages than blog sites or pizza shop website.
So you can see in the picture there 4,96000 pages, now for this e-commerce site, it can be challenging to make a site architecture that is user-friendly and good for search results too.
In this case, you need to follow these two golden rules for a perfect site architecture
Rule 1: Keep things simple and scalable
Rule 2: Keep every page maximum three clicks away from your homepage.
Take this for example:
Here, it takes six clicks to reach the first product page, so this structure is clearly breaking our golden rule of fewer than three clicks.
If your site already does not have an ideal setup don’t start moving pages by yourself always consult an SEO expert. They will redirect your old pages to new pages. If done right you can get considerable changes on your site without losing any traffic.
Here’s an example of a user-friendly well-optimized e-commerce site.
On the above-mentioned website, you can see that the authority is concentrated in optimizing the category pages and products. Concentrated authority helps these sites to rank in Google and boosts indexation. This is great for SEO best practices and a user-friendly one too. A simple architecture makes it is easy for browsers to find any products on your site.
3. On page SEO
Now you have a correctly architectured site, so its time you optimize all your category and products. These two pages are most important for an e-commerce business as they generate a gold mine of traffic and sales. A person searching for red Nike running shoes is most likely to buy it rather than a person searching ‘buy online shoes’.
Add modifiers to your title tag like “buy”, “cheap” or “deals” to attract more long tail traffic. You surely should add your keyword to the title tag but to attract more long tail traffic adding modifiers is highly essential.
Your title tag should have click magnet words like “X % off” and “lowest price” to increase CTR. It’s a straightforward formula higher CTR= more clicks = more sales. There are very few words or phrases that attract a searcher’s cursors to click on your site. I would call them “click magnet words”.
These click magnet words for your e-commerce best practices are :
- Y % off (25 % off)
- Guaranteed
- Lowest price
- Free shipping
- overnight shipping
- Sale
- Weekend sale
Include such words or phrases in your title tag you will get more clicks and which will get you more customers.
Your description tag is equally important to increase your CTR. In a description tag, you can include longer phrases. Phrases like:
- Get the best price on a juicer today
- Save X % off on microwave
- All our black collection is on sale right now
Now I shall tell you three most crucial on-page SEO tactics –
1. Write your content with 1000 plus words description.
For best SEO results writing a longer product description using your keywords, 3 to 5 times in the content is very essential. The thing is that Google wants to understand your page the more detail description you give its easier for Google to understand and rank you accordingly. Studies have found longer content ranks best in Google.
For example, this KitchenAid Stand mixer listed on Amazon products has a description of more than 1000 words and the reviews will generate more content.
2. Sprinkle your keywords in your in-depth content.
This is important as Google will understand about your page. Google gives slightly more significance for keywords placed at the top of your webpage.
3. Use LSI (Latent sentiment indexing)
Latent sentiment indexing is the tactic of using words and phrases that are closely associated with your primary keyword. Let’s take an example of a juicer grinder for optimizing your page. Words or phrases closely related to the keyword.
- Slow masticating juicer
- High juice yield
- Drier pulp
- Easy cleaning
- Operating cold press juicer
- High efficiency
- Multi-function
URLs:
Always use short and keyword rich URLs. Short URL gets first ranking on the Google page rather than a longer one. An analysis made by backlinko.com show that 1 million Google search results have a clear link with short URL rankings.
As you are an eCommerce site, you tend to have a longer URL than other websites. However, your URL should be less than 50 characters as more than that can confuse your search engine and affect your ranking.
An SEO friendly URL is a keyword-rich URL. For your category or product pages include just 1-2 words of your product category in your URL. e.g. future.com/kitchnappliances/juicer.
4. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is highly essential for e-commerce sites. As an e-commerce site, you have more pages than a regular site. Due to a lot of backlinks pointing at an e-commerce site technical is a tiebreaker to get the ranking on the first page.
If you are at neck-neck competition with your competitor a technical SEO can get you a ranking ahead of your competitor. Therefore regular technical SEO audits are considered as e-commerce best practices.
You can run a professional audit on your site through tools like Raven Tools, SEMRush, DEEPCRAWL etc. You have a thousand pages on your site and a technical SEO for so many pages can be an ordeal situation for you.
Writing a unique content for every such page can be a difficult task. To fix this, identify the pages that you can delete. Use e-commerce CMS like Shopify to see products that are not generating any revenue and put them on a maybe delete list.
Avoid duplicate content because this is one of the significant problems that we are dealing with e-commerce SEO best practices. Duplicate content can affect your online ranking the most. Use advance SEO techniques like canonical tags to resolve this issue.
Writing a thin content can give you severe technical SEO issues. You may have resolved the issue of duplicate content, but thin content needs to be looked into to generate revenues. Research by backlinko.com says that e-bay lost its 33% organic traffic because of the small content related problem and a panda penalty.
First, identify your content pages that have thin content and work on them accordingly.
Your product page description should be like this.
The more accurate and unique description you write for each product the more traffic you generate. Your product pictures should be clear and from all angles covering all sides of your product.
Your site speed is one of the factors that increase your traffic online. If your site doesn’t load fast, you may lose your buyers. Viewers will leave your page and look for other options. Include a good site speed in SEO e-commerce best practices. To do so, compress and optimize your image size and use CDN as it is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to speed up your loading.
5. Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the critical aspects to attract an ocean of traffic. Like any other site e-commerce sites can boost their traffic with lots of content. This is one of the best digital marketing methods which helps to generate traffic in long-term and helps increase your page authority when you blog regularly.
Find your target audience and where they are hanging out online. This will give you insights into their thoughts and expectations and you can hit the right chord with your content.
Stalk your audience keep an eye on them and learn what words and phrases they use the most and use those keywords and phrases in your content. Now create exceptional content around the keyword and phrase you choose.
You won’t be able to crack the code and start generating traffic right away. It takes a bit of research and patience to figure out what kind of content is performing well and what is your audience engaging to. Maintain publishing consistency as this will generate traffic, backlinks, leads and customers.
For example, this famous apparel site FabAlley that features fashion and other latest trends on their blog section, this helps them generate enormous traffic
6. Link Building
When you build exceptional content and generate enormous traffic there will be many eternal pages linking your page or product to their website. It is one of the many SEO tactics used to create traffic. Link building is a time-consuming and challenging process. A link from a famous website will generate more traffic than from a regular site. Link building plays a significant role in Google ranking. The more high-quality sites link to your pages the more you go ahead in the ranking.
Here are some link building strategies-
- Content creation and promotion – Create captivating content that people would automatically refer and link to other people and sites.
- Submissions – Submit your site to directories.
- Reviews – Ask influential bloggers to write about your products, service or sites.
- Links from friends and partners – Get your known people to link your site.
Ways to build free links
- Anchor Text – This is one of the most significant text search engines consider for ranking your site. So someone uses your actual text for linking your site to its content, it will generate a lot of traffic. For example, If you are linked as Fashionista little black dress, then the key-phrase little black dress will help you get the ranking up. But if it were linked only as Fashionista it would not have had the same effect.
- Quality Of the Linking Page – Suppose the site sending you a link is not a high-quality page, this will affect your ranking. Search engines allow high quality trusted pages to boost rankings.
Conclusion
Starting an eCommerce business and keeping the lights on for your store requires a lot of hard work and creative marketing. Applying these 6 eCommerce SEO tips will help you generate traffic and increase your sales.
What SEO strategies are you using to build incoming traffic and generating more orders for your online store? Share them in comments below.