Online marketing is about making effective content that gains your customers’ attention, who are your target audience. To make that happen, you have to achieve the top spots in SERP.
It would be a waste of effort if you offer exceptional products and services but cannot reach the right audience for them.
In this case, search engine optimization can help your e-commerce platform succeed with well-optimized content.
But search engine optimization is not dependent on a single factor. It would be best if you worked on several areas of your website to make it prominent among leading competitors.
In this article, we will share SEO tips to make your e-commerce site a roaring success. We will also share the methods for implementing these tips in your marketing content to help you reach the targeted audience.
10 SEO Tips for Successful Site Optimization
E-commerce websites are different from blog posts or social media posts. But the dependencies and regulations for search engine optimization are the same for every online platform. Therefore, we have shared some valuable tips for successfully running your e-commerce website with a better reach.
1. Find the Right Keywords
For an e-commerce website, choosing long-tail keywords that include three or more words is wise. Most of the time, writers and web admins are focused on long-tail keywords as they rank better, have less competition, and can be featured easily within the marketing content.
Long-tail keywords also improve relevancy, making it easier for the audience to reach the specific product. For example, if someone searches for “fast cars” instead of “fast four-door cars,” the search results may differ.
Therefore, targeting specific keywords that match the description of particular products or services is wise. Long-tail keywords have relatively less competition, so you can easily rank an e-commerce website even if it’s on the beginner level.
The keywords should be adjusted naturally, and it has to be grammatically correct because the readability of the marketing content depends on the extent of clarity and fluency it offers.
Moreover, ensure not to do keyword stuffing as it will generate negative results for your rankings. You must maintain the keyword density in various content sections to make it well-optimized for search engines.
Related: Excellent eCommerce Plugins For WordPress
2. Make Unique Descriptions
If you’re a third-party seller or affiliate e-commerce website, it doesn’t mean you should start scraping product descriptions from the original manufacturer’s website. That’s because search engines will scan your content and mark it plagiarized.
Moreover, you might face copyright infringement under the allegation of selling products or services by claiming ownership.
Therefore, you should take time to craft and read product descriptions, making them more accessible for the audience to understand. Before publishing it online, you can run it through a plagiarism checker to avoid penalization.
A product description on your platform has to be more unique and readable than the original manufacturer’s descriptions. It’s recommended to be written in the copywriting style that compels the audience to become your customer.
You can make descriptions readable and catchy by presenting answers to users’ queries in them. The answer to these questions should be your product, and the audience would come to your e-commerce website by reading the solutions.
3. Optimize Categories Pages
Usually, marketers focus on product descriptions but forget about the category pages and their critical role in search engine optimization.
Category pages reach buyers earlier to provide them with what they are looking for. Since the customers are looking for a solution, the category pages should address an answer to that problem.
Moreover, it’s easier to rank keywords that represent category pages, and they help to present a solution without going into specifics. The audience usually enters an e-commerce site through a category page.
For example, if something has gone out of stock, the customers or visitors will see various alternative products due to the optimization of category pages.
In this way, you can avoid higher bounce rates, and the visitors will stick around to buy something. They can also sign-up via a newsletter to get updates on restocking or something new.
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4. Add Optimized Images on Your Webpages
Since an e-commerce website is supposed to have a range of products, it’s incomplete without images. But only pasting the photos or images is not enough. You also have to optimize the images to get the desirable results from your search engine optimization strategy.
Ensure the following aspects before adding images with products on your eCommerce website.
- Ensure that the formatting of the image is in a web-friendly file type such as JPEG. This format is preferable as most operating systems and devices support it for standard display.
- Ensure the images are compressed and keep the size as small as possible. Preferably, it shouldn’t be more than 200 kilobytes so it can quickly load with the webpage.
- The images must include alt-text. Alt-text helps search engine crawlers to understand what the image means. The alt-text should consist of the primary keyword so it can relate to the topic or niche of the site.
5. Develop the Internal Linking Strategy
Internal linking is beneficial for gaining organic traffic on your eCommerce site’s web pages. The primary role of linking is to improve the user experience by providing them with additional material.
Every time someone clicks on an internal link, the Google webpage recognizes that your source actively provides credible information to someone as they have interacted with it.
Internal linking is healthy for your old web pages to keep them active. To draw organic traffic, you can internally link some previously uploaded material to the new webpage. In this scenario, the old web pages remain dynamic due to constant activity and interaction.
Make sure to clean up the broken links as they can affect the optimization of your webpage. They impose a terrible customer experience as broken links do not redirect to any information.
Even if there are broken pages on your website, you can add an Error 404-page template to guide your audience to the updated section of your website.
6. Provide an Enjoyable Experience
Establishing an e-commerce website is to make sales by approaching buyers online. Launching a website and featuring keywords is not enough. It would be best to focus on improving the customer’s experience.
According to Google’s EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, & Trustworthiness) guidelines, brands should be more intentional about posting content on their websites.
Therefore, the content’s quality should be concerned with the user’s persona, uniqueness, and extent of errors. Therefore, try to be more informative rather than persuasive.
The audience is looking for a reason to buy your products and services. Therefore, the content on your website should be written exclusively to satisfy the audience’s requirements. The descriptions of products or services should be presented with a graphical representation and title.
If the audience finds irrelevant information on your blog or e-commerce page, they won’t find the website worth exploring. The description of each product should elaborate on its unique features and how it differs from others.
You can also provide a better shopping experience for your customers by defining your brand’s success story. The success story pretty much explains the purpose of establishing the eCommerce platform. You can also discuss how your brand grew from nothing to something by gaining customer trust.
7. Improve Website Navigation
Different eCommerce sites in the same niche offer the same products and services. But the average time every user spends on a website to analyze it before leaving is around 10-20 seconds.
The time is also known as the bounce rate, which mainly focuses on the number of users who bounced back. Therefore, a well-designed website is also suitable for SEO.
All this depends on the navigation and impression of your site. If the site’s interface is disorganized, the user won’t be interested in scrolling through it.
The button’s placement, theme selection, and navigation bars state the usability experience of users. If the users have a terrible experience, they’ll look elsewhere.
The first thing you need to do is to add breadcrumbs which help to improve site navigation. Breadcrumbs navigation guides users to show a complete hierarchy of where they are on the webpage.
The best example can be taken from the Shopify store, which provides a complete guide on adding breadcrumbs for an improved user experience.
The other thing in site navigation should be a clean URL. Let’s take a look at this example.
This messy URL is unsuitable for site navigation and can confuse users.
- https://www.balibilal.com/index.php?page=blog
Compared to the above example, here is a URL that seems clean for readability.
- https://www.balibilal.com/blog
From the above example, you can see that the same link is created in two ways, providing a better navigation experience for users. Moreover, a clean link may rank high in search engine page results as the indexing becomes easier.
8. Feature Rich Snippets
Featured snippets are categorized among the technical elements of your eCommerce website. One should look to add structured data markup among the essential features.
Structured data markup briefly describes your website’s products and services before anyone even lands on the webpage.
Moreover, structured data markup helps you rank via rich snippets featured on the top of the first page in Google Page Results. This feature is common in eCommerce, which is a quick answer to the user’s query.
9. Improve Site Speed
It’s no secret that Google prioritizes page speed and considers it a ranking factor. From the practical point of view, page speed provides a better user experience which helps to connect buyers with sellers. A slow page experience may hurt SEO and your site’s organic traffic.
However, creating a well-responsive and quick-loading website is not as easy as it seems. Therefore, we have featured a few tips you should follow to improve the webpage’s loading speed and performance.
Reduce Image File Size
Small image size means the graphical content like infographics or product images would load faster on your eCommerce website. Using a Content Management System to host pictures, audio, and videography content is preferable. CMS would reduce the load on your website, which will help to load its contents faster.
Reduce Coding
Improve your page speed by cutting out the unnecessary code from CSS and JavaScript. By reducing the code, the variables and functions will become shorter. This way, only a few bytes of data will be needed to load your web pages that are suitable for SEO.
Include Lazy Loading
Lazy loading may seem negative, but it’s a technique that does not load images, videos, and audio until the user scrolls from those web pages. So, this technique differs from traditional loading as it does not load all the website contents simultaneously.
It’s a great way to improve loading speed as an eCommerce website has a lot of photos and videos of products that require a lot of time to load. Some eCommerce site builders may be able to include this setting by default.
10. Make it Smartphone Friendly
According to Google’s publishing guidelines in 2019, their search engine crawler would analyze websites with an exclusive search engine crawler.
So, it’s better to be prepared for Google’s benchmark to achieve a higher ranking. The crawlers are looking for the following things in an ideal mobile-friendly website.
- Make sure that your website’s mobile and desktop versions have the same content.
- Make sure the images and graphics are well-optimized for both mobile and desktop.
- Make sure the on-page ads are not affecting the experience for a mobile version.
Before publishing the mobile version of your website, it’s ideal for reviewing the interface on various smartphones. In this way, you can test the interface for any design flaws or user experience issues that may seem unpleasant to the audience.
Conclusion
Search engine optimization is vital for every webpage and website. Nowadays, an online business cannot even imagine surviving without optimization of their website since the competition in each category is on the rise.
Following the practical tips, we shared in this article can achieve higher rankings and better reach your audience. These tips are helpful for any marketing website looking to thrive in search engine rankings.
