eCommerce SEO can lead to more product sales but how can you implement it on a new or existing website?
You will find out as you read through this guide.
This guide is made easy so that a person learning about eCommerce SEO for the first time can grasp it and start driving quality sales in the next few months.
In case you are already familiar with text-based content SEO, you will observe some similarities and differences in their SEO approach as you read through.
So, get your notepad ready, and let's dive in;
What Is eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO are practices to rank products of an eCommerce website high on the search engine result page (SERPs) so that people searching for the products can buy from the website.
It involves optimizing the eCommerce website for keywords (search terms) that prospects can use to locate and buy from the website.
The optimization process will be applied to product descriptions, headlines, meta-data, navigational structure, interlink structure, user experience, and more.
eCommerce SEO is done by website owners or SEO experts to drive quality traffic, leads, and sales to the website.
eCommerce SEO practice gives a longer-term result compared to running paid ads.
Why An eCommerce Site Need SEO?
Search Engine Optimization for an eCommerce website will do a lot of good to your website.
It brings your website to the faces of people with a genuine interest in buying from you. It boosts your income and also increases your website credibility.
A lot of your prospects are online searching for product reviews, comparisons, recommendations, tips, and information that would help them with their buying decision. So, doing SEO for your eCommerce website will make the website show up in these search queries.
eCommerce SEO Practices For Beginners
There are some primary SEO practices for an eCommerce website that you must know as a beginner and each of them would be discussed in this article today.
eCommerce SEO starts with addressing basic aspects like navigation, internal linking, content creation, meta tags addition, and other technical aspects of SEO.
But below are the steps to take to start optimizing an eCommerce website.
1. Perform Keyword Research
Keyword research is the foundation of a successful eCommerce website.
Finding the right keywords will put you in a position to be easily located by your potential customers.
Meanwhile, it is more important to optimize the website for your target keywords to really achieve your desired result.
There are two major categories of keywords that are best for an eCommerce website;
- Commercial Keyword – Keywords that people search to buy your products almost immediately. For instance, when customers search for keywords like 'buy Bluetooth speakers', 'laptop coupon codes', 'new iPhone deals', ‘best waist beads for a fat person' etc, you can tell that they want to buy.
- Informational Keyword – Keywords that people search to learn about a particular subject or try to make buying decisions. These keywords do have words like 'what', 'how to', 'facts', and more.
You can use SEO tools like Ubersuggest and SEMrush to carry out this research. But this article will show you how to use SEMrush for keyword research.
Keyword Research Practice With SEMrush
Keyword research is made easy with SEMrush as all you need to do is to follow the steps below;
- Register an account with them
- Login to the SEMrush dashboard.
- Navigate to 'Keyword Magic Tool' under ‘Keyword Research’
- Type a primary keyword in your eCommerce industry and click on ‘Search’. A lot of keywords would pop up. So, look through the taskbar on the screen and use the filter options.
- Ensure that you filter metrics like
- Keyword Difficulty – choose Easy/Very easy.
- Search Volume
- Word count (advance filter) and other metrics that matter to you.
An interesting thing about using SEMrush for Keyword Research is that it indicates the search intent of each keyword displayed so that guesswork is eliminated.
Meanwhile, SEMrush is basically a paid SEO tool but you can use the free trial to see the effectiveness.
You can also try other Free Keyword Research tools like Ubersuggest, Answer the Public, Google Adword, SERP-related searches, and more.
2. Optimize Your Product Pages
This is the stage where you show your On-Page SEO skill.
At this stage, you must have already had your target keywords ready because you will need them for the optimization process.
So let's dive into some optimization tips.
Optimize Your Product Descriptions
Product Description is one part of the eCommerce web page that must stand out for maximum conversion.
Aside from making the product description attractive to humans (which is very important), it is advisable to consider optimizing for search engines.
So below are some tips to optimize your product descriptions;
- Add a lot of unique images to the page.
- Write a keyword-rich product description text.
- Ensure both target keywords and their related keywords are present.
- Add an attractive Call-to-Action button.
- Include testimonials
Optimize The Images
The images on the product description page can be optimized so that they appear on the search engine image search result which can be another traffic source.
You should check out some image optimization tips below;
- Compress images - Doing this can improve the site speed. Meanwhile, you should avoid excessive compression of the image to avoid tampering with its quality.
- Ensure that you use keywords or related keywords for the image alt tags.
- Add captions to the images.
- Use the right keywords for the image file names.
Feature Customer Review
Customer Reviews will help your customers easily make buying decisions. It builds trust with your customers as well as improves the overall conversion rate of the website.
You can encourage reviews by sending an automated message to your customers each time they buy a product from you.
Having reviews on your eCommerce website will improve the site engagement rate and time on site which is an indirect Google ranking factor.
Below is some other product page optimization you can implement.
- Ensure that the product page is well written and contains all the necessary information about the product.
- Add at least one Call to Action (CTA)
- Ensure that shipping details and policies are available on the product page.
3. Consider User Experience (UX)
The steps above might end up being useless if your eCommerce website is not user-friendly.
You should ensure that the site UX is properly set because a website with a bad user experience on the site can lead to the below:
- Poor Website Engagement
- Increased bounce rate
- Reduced time of the site
- Poor conversion rate
- Reduced traffic
Meanwhile, all these listed above can also negatively affect the website ranking on search engines.
So, follow these tips below to improve your website UX.
- Avoid Ads or pop ups that might affect the way users interact with your pages.
- Ensure that your website loads very fast.
- Always add a Call to Action when necessary.
4. Use Simple URL Structure
When it comes to website URLs, the shorter, the better. When the URL is simple enough, users tend to trust and click your website. Also, search engines understand your webpage better that way.
A good URL must be readable and understandable so that sharing it on social media is easier too.
Meanwhile, below are some tips to have a better URL structure.
- Use keywords in the URL – Doing this will tell the search engine what your page is about.
- Don't use stop words in URLs; they make it difficult for a search engine to read. Stop words include; 'and', 'of' and 'a'.
5. Increase Your Website Page Speed
Even though this might be a subsection of User Experience, it needs to be addressed separately because it affects website SEO directly and indirectly.
So, if you observe that your competitors have a better website speed than yours, then follow the steps below;
- Compress image sizes
- Compress the files.
- Reduce the social widgets on the webpage.
- Reduce the number of redirects on the page and HTTPS requests.
- Increase your search response time.
- Use a good web host.
Meanwhile, if you use WordPress, then you can try using plug-ins like WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, Cache Enabler, and more.
6. Post-Text-Based Contents
You shouldn’t neglect text-based content like blog posts because it is an eCommerce website.
Posting SEO Optimized content on your eCommerce website will attract more potential customers to your website.
It will build trust and improve the engagement rate with the website which will eventually lead to more sales on the website.
You can start by posting information-based content on the website like How-to Posts, Frequently Asked Questions, Newsworthy Posts, Launches, Virtual Events & Webinars, Glossary Pages, among others.
Conclusion
eCommerce SEO may be tedious but the result is rewarding. All you need to do is to follow the guide and put it to practice.
Meanwhile, in addition to the eCommerce SEO tips discussed above, you should ensure that you avoid duplicate pages and also utilize other SEO strategies like using Schema Markups and building backlinks.
Ensure that you share this article online so that it gets to other people who might also be interested in learning about eCommerce SEO.
About Author
Vibhu Dhariwal is Co-Founder & Director of Marketing at Digital Gratified, a Digital Marketing & Web Development company. He likes sharing his experience in outreach marketing, link building, content marketing, and SEO with readers. To know more about him, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.