Whether you are a startup or fortune 500 eCommerce company, in any case, you need customers to drive sales. No matter if you have an exemplary eCommerce store with perfectly placed product images and layout, finding customers in the virtual world requires workable SEO techniques.
Apart from considering SEO, you can go for paid ads if you have big bucks to spend or want faster footfall of customers. Caution – 70-80% users don’t look at ads and placing your hard-earned money on PPC won’t give you longer staying rankings (hope you are not doing business for just a few months).
So back to SEO, running an eCommerce store requires perfecting the art of search engine optimization to rank better and longer, and drive sales. But how to do that? Worry not, in the following, we have produced a gigantic eCommerce SEO checklist that you can follow and put your sales funnel on autopilot mode.
Wait before that, let’s learn what’s SEO
So SEO aka search engine optimization is a process where we optimize site around the user’s searched keywords — to score a top page ranking on search engines like Google.
9 SEO methods you need to consider with eCommerce SEO services provider
SEO comprises of on-page and technical methods to optimize the page. On-page optimization is done directly to your eCommerce website’s pages, its blogs, product pages, URLs, and titles. While technical SEO is done at the backend of a website ensuring the site’s smooth interaction with the search engines and the ultimate users.
Here we will brief you about both on-page and technical SEO tips. So pull out a chair, hold your coffee and start reading…
- Put up a smart keyword research
Effective keyword research is important to fall into the results of the user’s search. Put various factors at play like your target audience, competitors and your core specialization to begin with the search.
Have a competitor keyword analysis to understand the sources from where their audience is coming. Target on standalone and long-tail keywords that are likely to convert.
Look for the keywords that are in the top searches within your industry.
Understand your audience type and think from their perspective how they are likely to search.
After research, be mindful of the keyword placement
- Try to put keywords into your web copy and the header H1, H2 or H3.
- Make your keyword sit naturally, don’t overstuff them like the below statement.
“We are an online fashion store. Our online fashion store sells a wide variety of daily wears for women. Shop branded fashion pieces from our online fashion store.”
2. Put up clean, short yet descriptive web URLs
It was earlier when putting up keyword-centric URLs was a trend.
Consider putting up concise yet descriptive URLs for your product pages and its category, and subcategory pages — as Google will find them easy to read and crawl for the users.
Key to produce effective URLs
- Focus on static URL (as they are logical, unique and easy to understand) over parameterized one (as they are hard to decode for the user & search engines).
Parameterized URL –
https://www.yourbrand.in/Women-Pants-Capris/b?ie=UTF8&node=1968547031 – Confusing
Static URL –
https://www.yourbrand.in/Women-Pants-Capris/daily-wear-pants – Easy
- Putting up detailed and long URLs would end up confusing the Google spiders, try to put the shortest yet explanatory URLs to crawl fast. Confined mainly to what your product is about.
3. Don’t forget to optimize your product images
Optimizing image to a certain quality and size is very important to contribute to search engine ranking factors.
Few optimization tips:
- Carefully name your image URLs, put their product name or category than those confusing symbols, numbers or special characters.
- Give a thoughtful, keyword infused and descriptive alt tag to the image as it may help your product image rank in google image search.
- Try to keep the image file size less, as high size takes time to load and clearly affects the website’s ranking.
- Don’t compromise with the image quality, put high-resolution images to hold your visitor’s attention.
You can ask your eCommerce SEO services providers to introduce you with effective image optimization tools that compress images like magic.
4. Don’t underestimate the scope of link building
Apart from keywords, linking within or outside the website also helps Google in crawling a website.
Internal linking is a process where we link our web pages to the website’s other related pages. Google appreciates and ranks websites that have the right internal linking.
In external linking, a website put links directing to high-end, third-party authority pages. To gain visitors from their websites.
A backlink is another trick where links of own website are placed on third-party sites. Again to invite the visitors from high-visited sources.
Pro tip – Always put links of websites producing highly authoritative, trustworthy and expert content or information.
5. Put information or product description of sheer quality
Make sure your eCommerce web pages have the answer to potential buyer’s every possible query. Right from policies to shipping details to returns to warranty to discounts to the membership at el.
Make sure you have dedicated pages corresponding to each query type. Build a separate Q/A section to answer to deeply answer on user’s concern.
Put explanatory page descriptions for each product. Mentioning all the particularities of products, infused with relevant keywords and phrases. It will help Google to easily identify them and rank them.
Putting up a catchy, informative and detailed description will help in gluing your audience even.
6. Focus on keyword-driven meta tags and descriptions
Meta tags and descriptions as well take a major part in the search engine ranking factor. Put up a creative, engaging and keyword infused tags & descriptions to improve CTR (click-through-rates).
Writing keyword-driven tags and descriptions will help Google to interpret them and present it in the user’s searches. And will indirectly contribute to your eCommerce site’s top SERP ranking.
Some technical SEO forefronts to focus
7. Page loading speed matters
- The average loading speed of top-ranking websites is 1.9 seconds. In that race, if your eCommerce store is taking longer than 5 seconds to load, chances are you will never rank.
- A slow-loading website resonates with poor UX and even annoys search engines.
- You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights platform to identify the factors costing poor loading time. It analyzes in detail the file sizes of each media or image.
- Make sure your eCommerce SEO services providers have solutions to rectify the loading speed.
8. Not putting the duplicate or relatable content
Google doesn’t promote eCommerce stores with duplicate content and even penalizes them.
As per Google, content that is exactly copied from other sources or even matches somewhat to what others have written is said “duplicate’. And having such can severely affect the ranking expectations.
However, there are times when website owners are unaware of the duplication, they can take help from Google Search Console. As it will clearly help in identifying duplicate meta tags and descriptions, viewing the indexed pages in the past to check the discrepancies, identifying the URLs that are failing at crawling & indexing.
9. Differentiating main product page from its category pages
Mainly eCommerce websites have the main product page (trekking bag) and its subset product pages (trekking bag colors or sizes pages). Google finds it hard to identify which one to rank – the main product page or its subset product pages? Google can’t rank all the pages for one single product. Thus, Canonical tags can be used to help Google identify the main product page which needs to be presented upon the user’s search.
Conclusion
Your eCommerce website won’t drive traffic and profits if you haven’t considered SEO for it. Where every online brand is thriving hard to be in top searches, staying dependent on just developing an eCommerce website won’t help you appear in your audience’s searches. You do need to market your businesses over search engines to attain visibility among the shoppers.
Above are the sure-shot SEO practices that you need to put in your eCommerce SEO checklist 2020. Plan them and soar high in the user’s searches.
At JanBask Digital Designs, we aim at improving the SEO funnel of any digital brand by applying the best tools & methods recognized by search engines.
Care to have our eCommerce SEO services?
