Businesses have a lot to lose if they don’t rank highly in search engines. Without high rankings, you’ll be unable to attract customers and you might not make as much money as you’d like to. The good news is that we’ve put together a list of ecommerce SEO tips that can help your online store rank higher on search engines. By following these tips, your store will have a chance of doing well in organic search. If you need help with this, give our ecommerce company a call at +1 202 915 6200.
What is ecommerce SEO?
Not sure if you’ve heard of it, but SEO is pretty cool. It basically involve optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results. Now I know that sounds difficult, but it’s not as bad as it seems. SEO these days is really easy if you know what you’re doing. Getting your site up to par will take some time, but it’s worth it. SEO typically involves a number of techniques to improve performance, from creating keyword-rich content to designing a user-friendly website. Even if you’re already doing some of this naturally, there might be some things on the list for you to check out.
About our list of ecommerce SEO best practices
To help small ecommerce sites rank higher in search engines and also avoid being penalized, we recommend following these best practices. If you do so, you’ll learn a lot of SEO tricks that will help your site rank higher (and convert better!) in search engines.
8 best practices for ecommerce SEO
1. Use important keywords
To make your product information understandable and accessible to shoppers, measure, price, and other details should be easy to find. If you have visitors from different regions, you should consider displaying measurements in their respective units and your images should be accurate representations of the size and color. Retailers sometimes hide prices on their product pages, which can impact your SEO. If a customer doesn’t see pricing information on a product page, they may leave right away and this could increase your bounce rate, which we will discuss in the next section. In addition, you should get it as up to date as possible. When a manufacturer updates their information to you, do your best to include it! Not only is it important for shoppers but it will also help to rank for more keywords on your page.
2. Design with shoppers in mind
Every part of your website and product page design should help the buyer, not harm them. In this day and age, shoppers are bombarded with all kinds of offers, deals, and discounts. But even if you’re the coolest, most in-demand brand for the best prices, shoppers will still get frustrated and leave your website if they find it difficult to navigate or if they can’t find the products they want. A well-designed website can help reduce a bounce rate – that is, visitors leaving your site quickly after arriving on a page. Even if people don’t find what they want right away, they might browse a few more pages. A website design should be easy to use and have clear navigation options telling visitors what to expect when they click a link. Design should also be in your best interest when it comes to SEO, because slow load times can lead to less engagement by more impatient shoppers.
3. Avoid cluttered, complicated URLs
The address someone accesses a webpage on your ecommerce store is called the URL. A URL can contain a lot of information in a small space. It might include categories, product names, file types, or actions (like “_blank” to open a new link in a new window). Use URLs with your website’s content so search engines can give it a higher rank. Avoid URLs like this: http://www.websiteurl.com/cat?=328/product?=237828/main.html A search engine won’t be able to pick up any information from that URL! Instead, create URLs that reflect the content on the page. For example, instead of this: http://www.websiteurl.com/lawnmowers/green-gas-powered-lawnmower.html Try this: http://www.websiteurl.com/lawn-care/lawnmowers/green-gas-powered-lawnmower.html The first example URL could lead to just about anything, couldn’t it?
4. Use alt text in images
Add alt text to your images! This text is used in a variety of ways, including: being shown when the image’s link is broken, or in some browsers, when the user hovers their cursor over the image. Alt text is another way to get your important keywords on your site; it’s another way for search engines to know what your images are about, or why they are on a page. For example, an image of a lawnmower might be accompanied by alt text that says “lawnmower”. This helps include your keywords in the page where you have the lawnmower image displayed. So make sure you write an appropriate alt text for the images on your site. Besides helping with SEO, it also makes sure that images appear in Google Image searches too.
5. Allow customer reviews
Reviews are a powerful tool for boosting sales. What’s more, they have been found to help SEO: customers are very likely to buy products when they see reviews. Whether or not the reviews are positive seems to matter less to them. And surprisingly, reviews may also help with SEO, which makes review management a common ecommerce SEO tip. Now that Google has released the new version of their search engine (focusing on mobile and social media), people are even more likely to be browsing business websites on their mobiles. This means that even if you don’t have a lot of social media following or a strong number of website visitors yet, your ranking may increase over time simply because of the increased number of reviews!
6. Avoid duplicate content
Online retailers probably have product descriptions from manufacturers. You should make an effort to avoid copying any of their work, but you can still have duplicate content if it is spread out over a few pages. For example, many websites have duplicate content around their product descriptions. There’s no reason to worry about this as long it’s spread out. However, search engines are getting stricter on duplicate content and now penalize websites for it. Your goal should be to create new and unique product descriptions for each item you carry. Creating good product descriptions can be difficult, but it helps set you apart from the competition. Customers appreciate clear, interesting and easy-to-understand descriptions, but humor helps too and anything that is a new “spin” helps too.
7. Create unique content
If your ecommerce website has little to offer in terms of original content, or lacks products to speak of, it will be very difficult to rank for your chosen keywords. One way to work around these problems is to create some unique, interesting blog posts. This can be done by having a company blog and talking about the latest news, trends, and developments in your industry. There are many ways that you can draw in readers to your website and optimize it with “meaty” content that search engines will love. From guides, whitepapers, and longform blog posts or articles, there are many strategies at your disposal that can help you rank better in the search engines.
8. Write for humans – not for search engines
Everyone knows optimizing for search engines is important, but everything you do must ultimately be for the benefit of your shoppers. Your customers are not robots, after all! Keyword-stuffing and confusing content might help your rankings a little, but it won’t improve your conversion rates. Your best bet is to hire an experienced copywriter. If you can’t afford one, straining out some education online is better than nothing.
Need help using these ecommerce SEO tips?
Proximate Solutions is committed to providing quality online stores for our customers. We want our customers to be successful and grow their business, so we offer ecommerce SEO services. We’re experts at what we do, and want to share our knowledge with you. This article will give you ecommerce SEO tips that can help you grow your business.
Ecommerce SEO Services from Proximate Solutions
Looking for ecommerce SEO services that won’t break the bank? Look no further than Proximate Solutions. We offer affordable SEO packages that are designed to help your ecommerce site rank higher in search engines and drive more traffic (and sales!) your way. What’s more, our team of experienced SEO professionals will work closely with you to ensure that your site is optimized for maximum results. So whether you’re looking to increase your visibility in organic search or improve your conversion rate, we can help.