Strategy
8 minute read
How To Improve Your eCommerce SEO + An eCommerce SEO Checklist.
LAST UPDATED:
July 11, 2023
Ask yourself the following questions. How are your eCommerce customers finding your website? Are your customers finding you from social media or by searching for you?
Taking the time to optimize your eCommerce website is an essential prerequisite to selling things through an online shop — especially one that reaches a wide audience.
In this blog post, we share how you can improve your eCommerce website’s on-site search engine optimization (SEO) to set you up for success.
Not Just a Known Acronym!
If you didn’t already know, SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization.”
This refers to a method of organizing and indexing your eCommerce website to get on top of Google’s search rankings.
Users will typically search for terms or keywords that may be associated with your website and its related web pages. This provides a great way for potential customers to find you and your website.
How Does SEO Work to Your Website’s Advantage?
SEO is an amazing tool that works perfectly in sync with Google’s platform.
The use of keywords can be effective for creating copy for your website, which can be picked up easily by search engines.
This is how customers are able to locate your website through a simple Google search.
It’s important to remember that the amount of keywords on your website will correspond to the number of potential customers who can find you.
What Is the Purpose of SEO?
SEO exists to help you, the business owner, and your website to stand out from a sea of competitors who may be selling the same products or have the same brand voice as you.
However, the ultimate goals behind SEO are to help your website attract more customers and build interest in your products.
There’s no better way than to use SEO keywords throughout your website to help potential customers to locate and buy your products.
You can use SEO to forward your sales goal and make it easier for customers to find you, but there are a few things you’ll need to do first before you can improve a website’s SEO.
eCommerce SEO vs “Regular” SEO
There are a few note-worthy differences between eCommerce SEO and “regular” SEO, which are highlighted below:
- eCommerce SEO: This strategy is used to help web retailers reach a high rank in search engines, which focuses on SEO for both product and category pages. An optimized and well-designed website using high-quality content that has carefully crafted product descriptions can increase your store’s visibility and drive more traffic.
- “Regular” SEO: This focuses on SEO in general and will target the different pages on your website — such as your blog posts, homepage, main offerings pages, and more. To improve your website’s SEO, you can start by writing blog posts, adding keywords, and getting links.
Is SEO Important for eCommerce?
SEO is important for all kinds of websites, and an eCommerce website is no different. It has been a proven way to reach potential customers.
SEO that’s specifically formulated for eCommerce businesses will help to optimize your website which will allow it to rank higher in search engines.
There are a few factors that can affect how well your website can rank on the search engine results page (SERP), which include the following:
- The relevance and quality of your content
- Your site’s upload speed
- Optimizing the site through your use of keywords
Customers will usually make a search query when they’re looking for a specific item, so there’s a big possibility that they may land on your website to buy your products.
When you’re working on SEO for your eCommerce website, there are a few areas to target, such as:
- Diversifying your information and product content
- Optimizing your product descriptions and pages
- Getting the right images for your website
- Perfecting your homepage
I see so many eCommerce sites neglect their category pages, which is a huge missed opportunity. Category pages are one of the most crucial elements of eCommerce SEO and should be prioritized for optimization.
Jacob Andra, Customer Faucet
What Does eCommerce SEO Pricing Look Like?
The answer to this question will actually depend on the size of your business, as well as who you’re contacting to help with boosting your website’s SEO.
However, there are also other factors, such as:
- The number of keywords you’re targeting
- How competitive the landscape is
- How much effort will go into optimizing every page you want to rank
It’s never easy to put a price on SEO since this will depend on how much of your budget you’re willing to allocate and what you wish to achieve.
1. Product Descriptions
Every product on your website will need to have a description that’s unique to that specific product. This is vital if you’re looking to maximize your website’s SEO potential.
After Google released the Panda algorithm update, having unique content became more of a huge deal, forcing businesses to focus on producing relevant, high-quality content for their customers.
To make sure that your product descriptions are on point, try to vary your keywords while still making sense in every sentence.
Protip
Make sure that your product images have alt text descriptions to both help with your SEO and to follow ADA site compliance!
2. Deactivate Any Products That Are No Longer Sold
Many products will come and go, and your product page design should reflect that. To avoid confusing your consumers, older product pages that are no longer sold should be deactivated.
You will also need to create 404 pages (which means the page or product no longer exists) without the use of too many redirects since this will confuse Google.
When done properly, browsers won’t be able to find information if users attempt to navigate through these pages, even if they use an existing link.
If you do have 404 pages, don’t forget to link them to related categories to make the most out of your visitors’ time.
3. Voice Search Options
One of the biggest eCommerce trends in eCommerce is voice searching, where users use voice search commands through Siri, Alexa, or similar technologies to find what they want.
Voice searches eliminate the need for users to make an effort through typing, allowing consumers to take advantage of technology to find what they’re looking for.
Using automatic speech recognition (ASR), voice searches can translate voices into text, allowing smart device users to complete searches using their voice.
The search engine then uses these texts to conduct a standard search to deliver relevant results.
However, to make full use of this technology, you have to make sure that your products have been optimized for SEO.
4. Broken Links
If you have any broken links on your website, be sure to fix them! Broken links can seriously hurt your SEO and your overall rankings.
Broken links are bad for your SEO due to the following reasons:
- They may lower your website’s ranking in SERPs because Google will determine that they are poorly done.
- Broken links may chase potential customers away, especially during first encounters — this can then cause a huge negative impact on your site and hurt your SEO.
Make sure that your website’s maintenance process will assess and clean up links that no longer have a purpose on your website.
5. Navigation With Breadcrumbs
Nobody likes getting lost in a website they simply wanted to explore. This can be frustrating and may lead your potential customers to quickly leave your website.
Navigation is the foundation that will help your customers keep track of where they are on your eCommerce website, hopefully leading to a purchase.
Breadcrumbs are a great way to ensure that your potential customers never get lost.
Here’s an example:
Home → Product Category Page → Product Page → Checkout
Apart from being a navigational tool, they also play an essential role in SEO. Breadcrumbs help Google understand your website’s structure and hierarchy.
By placing breadcrumbs throughout your eCommerce site, you can improve its ranking on SERPs.
SEO is essential to any website; it can be what makes or breaks your site and provides the final push for your eCommerce website to drive traffic and increase its sales.
What company doesn’t want to increase its sales?
To get the results you’re looking for, be sure to put the various tips above into practice and leverage all the advantages that SEO optimization can offer.
Whether you place breadcrumbs around your website, take away broken links, or spruce up your product descriptions, these tips will weave magic into your eCommerce website.
How Much Traffic Can You Get With SEO?
Around 50% of your website’s traffic will be generated by SEO.
This organic traffic will come to your website after they have searched for keywords related to your website that you have used as your go-to SEO terms.
Should an eCommerce Site Have a Blog?
Blogs are a great way to add more SEO keywords to your website and increase your organic traffic from SEO.
Due to the high volume of words used to create blog content, there is a high opportunity to rank for certain keywords you use.
However, a blog is not a requirement for any website; it’s a suggestion.
Which Is Better for eCommerce: On-page SEO or Link-building?
There has been some research done that suggests that link-building helps slightly more than on-page SEO. However, both are a great way of making sure traffic gets to your website.
What are the 4 Types of SEO?
Did you know that there are four types of SEO? They are as follows:
- On-page SEO: Also known as on-site SEO, on-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing the content on your website. This includes your keywords, copy, headers, meta titles and descriptions, images, and others.
- Off-page SEO: This refers to everything else that happens outside of your website. Off-page SEO involves creating trust and visibility for your brand and company, which will accumulate more traffic and sales.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO talks about the steps you need to do to become more visible to search engines while enhancing user experience (UX).
- Local SEO: This is a variation of SEO that is focused on a specific location or area instead of focusing on a national scale. It places importance on building an online presence in the community while promoting your brand to local consumers.
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Author
Jeff Gapinski is the President of Huemor where he helps plan the long-term strategic growth of the agency. Jeff is passionate about UI/UX, demand generation, and digital strategy.
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