The first thing for any e-commerce business is to rank higher than its competitors on the search engines. And for that, the only most effective tool as of now is SEO strategy. A well-planned Search Engine Optimization plan rank your website to the top, guarantee optimum lead generation and increase conversion rates.
Importantly, if your website is not getting clicks, then surely you are missing out on sales opportunities. You can optimize your ecommerce site at any time, whether you are just beginning the business or need to improve the current sales.
When it comes to an ecommerce site, it becomes more significant that your website gets the topmost ranking on the search engines since your business growth totally depends on online sales. Implement a solid SEO tactic that can surely increase your brand impressions, sales, and clicks.
Always Begin With Research
Every SEO strategy should first start with research. You can begin researching in two areas, primarily- first is to identify different keywords along with their variations that can prove valuable as well as appropriate for your SEO plan. Secondly, you need to find out what is working for your competitors.
Analyze their site structure, backlinks, keyword implementations, and major achievements to get an idea specifically what is clicking for them. After studying both these factors you will get all the relevant data needed to come out with a perfect SEO strategy for your e-commerce site.
More importantly, knowing in detail about the market niche and also about the competitors in your arena serves as a guide based on which you can improve a lot and flourish your e-commerce business.
Keyword Research
Keywords play a fundamental role while implementing on-page SEO. You need phrases that have been chosen strategically to ensure that your SEO game plan is working properly. So, you should first start with researching the keywords and make a list of such keywords that are relevant to your business and are currently trending.
The best way to generate relevant keywords is to think about the primary keywords that come to your mind while thinking about your business. Make a list of all such main keywords.
Once you have a list of such targeted keywords with you that describe your store or brand properly, try detecting phrases including these keywords. For this, it is better to check each of the keywords in the list one-by-one on the search engine.
Here you will get different variations or permutations of the targeted keywords in your list. Also, make use of tools such as Google Suggest to find new keywords. These are listed at the bottom of every search page. Collect all these keywords as well and add them to your list in a spreadsheet.
These additional keywords can be extremely helpful when you are creating content for your blogs that can improve the ranking of your e-commerce site.
Using Long-Tail Keywords
Research On Competitor’s Strategy
After the keyword research, you should research your competitors. For this, first, find out the list of keywords that they are using in their SEO strategy and also check which keywords are exactly clicking for them.
SEO services also check whether the web pages of the competitors have higher PA or Page Authorities. In case the PA’s or the DA’s of your competitors are much higher than yours, then you should focus on keywords they are not using.
It is because using the same keywords will directly set your e-commerce website against them in competition and since they are already ahead than you, your website may not gain much with such a strategy.
In the same way, check out the places where your competitors are obtaining inbound links. For this, you can use another free tool online, Open Site Explorer. You must also focus on the site architecture of the competitors and try to find the depth of their links and how is their navigation and so on.
For an ecommerce website to go ahead in the competition, it is also important to pay attention to other aspects of the architecture such as:
- Most viewed/popular products/category
- Top-rated products
- Related products
Once you have a complete idea of how your biggest competitors are organizing their site architecture you can as well decide a perfect strategy for the promotion of your website.
Identify And Fix Your Problems
For ranking your ecommerce site high, it is of utmost vital that you additionally track down the errors and issues in your tactic. The first step is to identify what specifically are your existing problems. For auditing your site:
Find Site Errors
Top SEO services advise the use of a free tool called Screaming Frog for finding errors on the website. This particular tool works with an SEO perspective and helps in tracking down CSS, images, websites’ links and script.
The top most things that you must immediately focus upon include:
- Making an update in meta descriptions, meta titles
- Replacing duplicate content with unique text
- 404 Errors-Redirecting such pages to the valid content
- 301 redirect
Tracking Speed Of Website
If your website speed is low, visitors will be automatically diverted to your competitor’s site. As per the research, more than 40% of visitors leave a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to upload. So if your site speed is low, it is time you increase it otherwise you might lose customers.
On-Page Optimization
For on-page optimization, you have to utilize the best keywords for your business that are trending higher on the search engine. This process includes every action that is taken within the webpages on your site to ensure that your website appears at the top. Here are the few steps to follow:
Title Tag
An important part of the optimization process is the placement of your keyword within the title tag. A highly attractive title with the rightly placed, trending keywords can ensure the strongest ranking for your site. It gives out the specific signals to the search engines and the traffic is automatically diverted to your website.
While writing title tags, SEO consulting services make sure that it is short and includes exactly what visitors can find on the attached page related to the keyword. Your title tag should compulsorily include your keyword so that the search results show a link of your e-commerce site on the index at the top.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions appear just below your title tag and URL under the short snippet. These are nothing but a concise preview of the content on your webpage and should be presented interestingly and relate what the visitor can expect when he will click the link to your site.
Heading Tag-H1
Make a rule to include H1- Heading Tag on your every page. Your H1 tag should be created in such a way that it relates the same thing as your Title tag. So what is the difference between an H1 tag and title tag?
A title tag appears in the search results whereas H1 is displayed as the title of your page. So, including a keyword in your H1 is equally important as in the title tag. Also, make sure that the keyword is placed closer to the beginning.
Site Architecture
Site architecture is of great significance for an ecommerce site as such sites have thousands of product pages. With the assistance of site architecture, you can choose how the shoppers move or flow through your online store. You would always want the visitor to identify the key pages quickly and reach a final decision.
A great architecture highly impacts the usability, conversions, and rankings of your site. If you plan out the site architecture properly, you can also add more product lines in the future. You can take the help of LucidChart, a free tool to prepare a chart displaying information about your site’s architecture.
Try to get a ‘flat architecture’ for your site as it will require fewer clicks for the visitor to reach from the home page to the product page. The best ecommerce website builder like Builderfly takes care of these together with other on-page SEO factors. Using such platforms reduce the hassle to mind all those yourself.
Internal Links
Internal links encourage the users to dig deeper into the website and also directs them to the relevant pages. Research shows that the utilization of internal linking helps in increasing engagement rates. Other advantages of using internal links include low bounce rate and improvement in conversion rates. Moreover, internal links additionally work as an asset to your site architecture and make crawling by the search engines for your website more productive.
Outbound Links
Always try to add an outbound link to your content, especially while writing a blog. It is highly important when you are including an important point of view to add links to the resources. It not only increases the credibility of your site, however, it additionally guarantee that search engines categorize your content properly.
Easy Site Navigation
Establishing simple site navigation can increase your rankings in the search engines as well as the user experience of your site. Attempt to organize your product pages properly, make them easily understandable and searchable by proper categorization.
You can make this possible by creating easy to follow and obvious site maps and design.
Mobile-Friendly
Always keep your website mobile-friendly. Nowadays, it is quite easy to buy and send gifts online utilizing a Smartphone. Looking at the existing scenario where more often people prefer online transactions utilizing their cell phones, it is of utmost significant that being an ecommerce website it ought to be mobile-friendly.
Give your visitor a smooth mobile experience by making a responsive design or with an interactive app or even by choosing an innovative mobile-friendly design.
Social Sharing
Firstly, social signals do not directly lead to higher rankings in search engines. However, adding sharing buttons on your website is one of the simplest ways of improving the reach of your content. So apart from the regular basic social integration, ensure that your product pages have social-share buttons so users can easily pass on the description of a particular product to their followers or friends.
More sharing indicates that users are showing more interest in your product which also leads to an increase in traffic and conversions. So having a social sharing button on each product page is a must.
Keep Discontinued Item Pages Up
Usually, whenever a specific product is out of stock or some products are not available the pages are terminated. However, the latest SEO strategy, says you need to keep these discontinued item pages running because it provides more permanent pages on your website. But you should definitely add a headline or a message indicating that the items are out of stock.
Pictures And Videos
A modern ecommerce platform ought to add pictures and videos of all the products it showcases since the visual content makes a major effect on the purchasing decision of the visitor. Include high-quality pictures, videos and tag them with appropriate meta tags so that your product images show up during the image-based search.
However, ensure that they are stored in such a way that they do not cause interference in the loading time of your website.
Conclusion
Ecommerce websites always need to face unique challenges that are quite different from other websites. Importantly, the competition is additionally too high and hence the implementation of the above-mentioned SEO strategies and making updates will definitely help you to reach your business objectives.
