When it comes to the world of e-commerce, few things will have the impact on your survival and success as SEO.
E-commerce SEO is vital to ensure that your site - and by extension your products - are visible and easy to find for consumers.
When your site is properly optimized, it ranks higher on search engine results page (or SERPs), meaning more organic traffic to your site and - ultimately - more business.
E-commerce SEO can be a daunting and time consuming task; however, any costs or investment in good SEO is definitely overshadowed and outweighed by the benefits and rewards it can have for your business.
We’ll highlight a few techniques to good e-commerce SEO and the benefits they can draw.
Why Is SEO Important?
As mentioned above, good e-commerce SEO gets your site a higher rank on SERPs which draws more traffic to your site and results in increased conversion rates.
As an e-commerce business, one of the chief ways people will find your site - and therefore your products - is through Google searches.
While paid search can work to get you a beneficial spot, ad blockers and other variables can reduce the effectiveness of that method.
We have an entire blog post devoted to the importance of SEO for your e-commerce business. Check it out if you’d like more information!
The Key To Successful SEO
We’ve already highlighted why e-commerce SEO is important, now it’s time to discuss just how you can put it into practice.
One of the first things you want to do is develop a good strategy.
A good e-commerce SEO strategy will help you efficiently spend your resources and energy in order to yield maximum results for your business.
Here are some key things to keep in mind when developing your e-commerce SEO strategy:
1.) Prioritize!
To start, focus your energy on the products or pages that you want to feature or already generate the most traffic.
While the long-term goal is to optimize your entire website, approaching with that mindset will only exhaust you and spend unnecessary resources
2.) Plan!
In order for your efforts in your prioritized area (and beyond) to have maximum result, you need to plan out what needs to be done.
SEO has a lot to it on the way of criteria, including but not limited to:
- Content
- Keywords
- Images
- Descriptions
- Meta-data
These are just broader key points of SEO that we’ll touch on, each has its own facets and nuances that can and should be touched up as well.
For those bits, we recommend hiring someone with e-commerce SEO experience who knows what they’re doing.
3. ) Scout!
If you’re having trouble figuring out what direction to go in, a great place to start is to check out your competition, particularly the competitors a little ahead of your league.
Their site is more than likely already optimized, and taking a look at what they’ve got in that department can give you a number of good pointers and ways to improve your own!
Nitty-Gritty
Once you’ve got your SEO Strategy together, then it’s time to take action.
Here’s where we’ll break down some of the broad key aspects we highlighted earlier.
Content
Content is the backbone of good ecommerce SEO: without quality content, then any SEO you do really won’t have anything to work with.
Blogs, news articles, info pages, and more are great ideas for content pages that you can use for your site.
These pages give Google and the other search engines stuff to look through and rank you by.
More quality content, and these search engines will see you as valuable, knowledgeable, and relevant with the topic you’re addressing, resulting in a higher ranking on the SERPs.
Keywords
Where content is the meat of your site, keywords are the salt.
Researching what keywords will work best for your business is its own beast in and of itself. But using them appropriately throughout your site once you have them is an art.
If you use too many keywords, Google will call you out on it and slap you with a lower ranking. But if you use too few, then Google will hardly notice you.
Again, think of salting your food.
If you use too much, then the meal is ruined and you need to eat something else. If you use too little, then your food will still taste bland.
Use the right amount to really bring out the flavor and make the meal more appealing!
Images
Images are another huge factor in good e-commerce SEO, as they work to reduce your page speed.
Your website’s page speed is a huge factor when it comes to customer satisfaction and by extension, then, your SERP ranking.
If you use lots of big, hi-res uncompacted images, then your site will take longer to load them. Customers click away from sites that tend to take any longer than 5-7 seconds to load, with the gold standard being less than 5.
Optimizing your images is a fantastic way to decrease your page load speed and keep your website optimized!
Descriptions
Optimizing your descriptions is another important step.
You want to give as much information as you can in as few, carefully selected words as you can manage.
Carefully sprinkle your keywords throughout as well to catch Google’s eye.
If not optimized, consumers can lose patience and navigate to somewhere else, and Google could see your site as overcomplicated and rank you lower.
Metas
From image alt text to your webpage’s snippets, these little bits can be very important for Google to see and rank you higher.
Giving your images alt text lets Google know exactly how they’re relevant, and also lets them be sorted more efficiently. The same goes for the other little snippets and such.
Conclusion
E-commerce SEO can be an intimidating process, but with the right method and enough preparation and planning, it can be done efficiently and really boost your e-commerce business’s Google ranking!
