In recent times, online market growth is picking up pace. The reason being everyone in the world has a need or is looking for something to purchase including products, software, tools, home appliances, and even small electronic equipment. If you have a similar need, then what would you do?
As you read further, you’ll get everything that you need to know about optimizing your eCommerce website, keyword research, link building, and technical SEO.
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Why is SEO important for eCommerce?
45% of people will start with their shopping needs online through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. This will help them to get an idea about the product’s details like pricing, size, color, and other specifications. Surely, I bet you that 75% of people look only at the first two pages of the search engine. Only very few people will go for the remaining pages.The first-ranked result that appears in Google’s organic search has an average click-through-rate of 31.7 %. Because most of us are very lazy people. Really accepting my point!!! Once we entered the search engine, what would we do? Randomly type some keywords and will check the very first results. If we are not getting any relevant information in the first two pages, we will go for other queries, and not for the third and fourth pages. Let’s come into the eCommerce business, suppose you are running an eCommerce store. You have invested quite big amounts of money in the products. But you don’t have the right visitors and there is no sale on the website. Then what will happen? As per our last stats, 75% of people only look at the first two pages of the search engine. So, we have to position our eCommerce website in the first two pages in the search engine for the targeted keyword. That’s exactly why SEO people are really important for any eCommerce site.Yes, I got your mind’s voice. Now your question is “How to do SEO for eCommerce websites”, right? Keep reading to know the process and gain insight into the detailed instructions for an effective eCommerce SEO strategy.
The role of SEO & the best eCommerce SEO strategy:
An important role of SEO is to strategize website optimization. This will help you gain more targeted traffic to the website. According to the research, it is observed that 37.5% of the entire online traffic to eCommerce sites is from search engines. Adding to this, it is surprising to know that 23.6% of eCommerce orders have originated from organic traffic. The following are the SEO strategies that need to be followed for an eCommerce website.
- Keyword research
- On-Page SEO
- Canonicalization
- Duplicate Content
- Link Building
Keyword research
This is the most important thing with respect to SEO. We use many queries in the search engine to get accurate details. Similarly, how many of them use the same search query (keyword) to get particular information. This is called the Search Volume. First, you have to find your perfect keywords for your website. Finding a proper keyword has never been that easy. It should be relevant to your product or service that you offer. If you want the right audience, then you have to select the right keywords. There are many tools available to get those keywords such as SEMRush, Ubersuggest, Keywords Everywhere, KeywordPlanner, and many more. So, you can easily find your highest volume search keyword for each page and avoid unnecessary keywords stuffing, which can appear suspicious to search engines.
On-Page SEO
This is nothing but the changes which you have to make to your website. We have many codes, tags, and scripts to build a website. Within that, you need to concentrate on a few sections.
- Meta title and description
- Heading tags
- Breadcrumb
- Image optimization, ALT, Anchor Text
- Open Graph and Twitter Card
- 404 – Error fixes
- Sitemap and Robots.txt
Meta title and description
The meta title and meta description are very short (limited characters), but meaningful elements. It should briefly summarize the whole page content to hint what we are trying to say. Header tags (H1, H2, H3, and so on) are also the most important elements as they make up the structure of your articles. That too has a limit while being used on the web page. The H1 should appear only once on the page and other heading tags can be used multiple times on the same page.
Heading tags
Mention your primary keyword in your page headline, description, meta description, image ALT attributes, and sub-headlines (H1, H2, H3,…), and use latent semantic index (LSI) keywords in the content as well. These are related keywords that help search engines understand your page in context. Then put all product details on the product page such as shipping costs, specifications, user reviews, delivery, and return policy.
Breadcrumb
If you want your category and product pages to be as easily accessible to visitors, then it should be easy for customers to find the information and products they need. Ensure your menu bar is convenient, intuitive, and provides the shortest pathways to different sections. This will help you to reduce the bounce rate.
Image optimization, ALT tag & Anchor Text
Likewise, we should concentrate on image optimization as well. We should use only the compressed images on the website with the relevant ALT tag. You can use your keywords in the ALT tag as the search engines read the images by using these ALT tags. Also, anchor text is an important aspect like the ALT tags. We never miss out to update these two tags.
Open Graph and Twitter Card
While you are posting your webpage link on social media, it will show a small description with an image. If you forget to add this, then no information will be shown. The open graph is for Facebook and the Twitter card is for Twitter posts. You can check this link before sharing it on social media using the tools below:
- Facebook Debugger
- Twitter card validator
- Post inspector
404 – Error fixes
The broken links are the most dangerous factors that affect the SEO value. We have to maintain our websites without any broken links. If you are making a change in URL, don’t forget to add the redirection. But try to remove those broken links from the website, because many redirections may slow down your website loading speed.
Sitemap and Robots.txt
Sitemap.xml file helps you to show all URLs on the website to search engines and the Robots.txt file will help you to hide the unwanted content/pages from the search engines.
Key Hints
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Canonicalization
Don’t panic!!! It’s just a part of technical SEO. If you are having two pages with the same content, but with minor differences such as with or without “/”, .php, .htm, and some expressions (/?xgf) trail by your URL, these URLs will show the same content to visitors. But the search engine considers this as a different URL. So, it will throw the Duplicate error message in the audit.For example, https://www.dckap.com/magento-services.htm http://dckap.com/magento-services.htm https://www.dckap.com/magento-services https://dckap.com/magento-services.htm These URLs are showing the same content. But this is not a unique URL. So, we have to intimate right URL to the search engine by using “Canonical tag” on the page (Place it in the
section)
Syntax: rel=”canonical” href=”Page URL” />Solution for previous example:
Duplicate Content
It also comes under technical SEO. Everyone knows how content plays a vital role in online business. If you are copying content from somewhere and using it on your site. Then it is not a good one and the search engine also finds you easily. The search engine finds more duplicate content on your website. Then it will affect the SEO value and even there is a chance to ban your website. So, avoid such things by adding more unique content to the website. Make use of “Plagiarism Checker” an accurate tool to identify duplicate content.
Link Building
This is the biggest part of SEO. There are three reasons to use internal linking.
- Simplify onsite navigation for users & offer them engaging content related to their interests.
- Help search engines to crawl your website and identify the themes of your content.
- Encourage users to stay longer on your website by visiting multiple pages.
Also, we have to do some external linking very carefully by checking many factors like spam score, dofollow, nofollow, and so on. There are two reasons to use external linking.
- To get more traffic from other sites.
- Increase the Domain Authority and Page Authority value (SEO Score).
SEO Responsibilities
Any guesses? SEO is very simple if we execute it with the keywords, linking, and other assets that I shared above, right? Not at all, we have to focus on the following aspects too:
- SEO Architecture
- Responsive Web design
- Schema Markup
- Loading Speed
- Competitor Analysis
- Blog Posting
- Traffic & User Behavior Check
- Prioritize Your Pages
SEO Architecture
There are two main rules to keep in your mind when it comes to planning the eCommerce site’s structure:
Rule 1: Keep things simple and scalable
Rule 2: Minimize the number of clicks for every page (three or lower) from your homepage Check out the image below that represents how NOT to set up your eCommerce site’s architecture.
Now, glance through the image below that represents a well-optimized eCommerce site architecture.
Responsive Web Design
Responsive web design is really good for SEO. Checking and improving the usability of each webpage are essential tasks for every SEO specialist.
- How much time does the average user spend on each page?
- What is the bounce rate?
- How well does the CTA’s perform?
- Which pages are most visited?
Schema Markup
Positioning the site on the first page of the search engine is not the only responsibility. The way we show our content really matters. We should highlight the important metrics in search engines. What are the metrics that we can highlight?
- Event
- FAQ
- Organization details
- Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
- Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
- Review, AggregateRating
- Images & Videos
Also, we have many things to show on the search results. This is possible with the schema markup.
Page Loading Speed (Mobile & Desktop)
Page speed is a measurement of time (in seconds/ms) on how fast the content on your web page gets loaded. As per the stats, a one-second delay in page load time yields:
- 11% fewer pageviews
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
Overall 25% to 30% of people leave the page due to poor loading speed and 40% of consumers expect the loading speed to be less than two seconds. So it’s necessary to concentrate on the loading speed and even more important with mobile loading as most people use their mobile to surf any information. You can evaluate your page speed with Lighthouse and Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Also, you can see your average loading speed in Google Analytics.
Competitor Analysis
Your eCommerce SEO strategy should outperform in the competition. Analyze your top competitors’ sites, find out their SEO efforts, and identify the way to make yours better. It will help you to gain competitive advantage. Check all their efforts such as keyword, content, blogs, link building, social media, and even promotion mailers.
Blog Posting
45% of marketers say blogging is their number 1 strategy to bring traffic to their website. 70% of people would rather learn about a company through an article than an advertisement. Use high searchable and long-tail keywords as titles that are related to your service. Posting four blogs per month and making it as the practice is definitely a good SEO advice.
Prioritize Your Pages:
Which pages on your website should get the most traffic? Start with that page. Additionally, if you want people to focus on a specific product or service page, do the SEO optimization for that page first. I’ve listed below some important pages to start your optimization process:
- Homepage
- Landing pages
- About page
- Contact page
- Category Pages
- F.A.Q. page
- Blog articles
Traffic & User Behavior Check
You did everything on the website as an SEO. How do you measure SEO success? You have to check your traffic daily to know whether it is increasing or not. Also, you have to check the user behavior. Then you can identify the issue and sort it out easily. In the report, there will be some key aspects that you need to focus on such as new users, returning users, bounce rate, number of pages reached, and conversion rate tracking. Google Analytics helps you to track these details perfectly and Google webmaster helps you to track your website behavior on the google search engine.
Use LuckyOrange or similar tools to know the heatmap of your website visitors and make changes on your web page accordingly. Frequently check your DA and PA value in the Moz. It will help you to know the SEO-optimized level of your website.
Conclusion:
I hope you got a few insights from this blog. SEO is the most important inbound marketing activity in digital marketing. The eCommerce business is growing day by day. So, our competition level is also crossing at high levels. If you have missed your chance, then someone will come up on the top. This is the truth in SEO. Finally, I would like to say that please spend more time with your website to get exact stats and plan SEO activity accordingly. By now you must have got to know how important it is for your eCommerce website to be SEO-friendly. DCKAP, being a key digital commerce agency, has a strong history of delivering impeccable SEO services for clients. Our team of experts curate SEO-friendly pages, while also mapping existing URLs to forward without fail. With the right expertise in the digital commerce arena, DCKAP augments your eCommerce website to rank higher in this dynamic and competitive space, thereby taking your brand reputation to great heights.If you want any help, please drop a mail here.
