Considering that 44% of people start their online shopping journey with a Google search, and the #1 result on Google gets 31.7% of all clicks, if you own an e-commerce website, you probably know that ranking high in search engines is a priority.
Of course, this is not just a suggestion we give.
According to a survey of digital marketing experts, 42% of experts say SEO is the channel that produces the best results for e-commerce websites.
You ask why?
Although SEO requires a zero investment and long-term commitment, if you do it right, it provides a sustainable traffic flow. In other words, you don’t have to constantly invest money to see results like PPC or paid social media ads.
What is SEO in E-commerce?
SEO is the act of ensuring that high-quality and relevant content that people are searching for is successfully found, crawled, and indexed by search engines (most commonly Google).
SEO helps ensure that your products and website are found even if people do not yet know about your brand.
While in the past the goal in SEO was to write content that search engines could easily understand, now the goal is to focus on content that people find useful. Overuse of a keyword may have helped you to top the rankings a decade ago, but search engines now prioritize content that people interact with and learn from.
Why Should You Optimize Your Ecommerce Site For SEO?
Ninety-three percent of shoppers begin their product searches on digital channels.
Yes, this is a huge number as you can see, and the conclusion you need to deduce from this number is: “If your customers can’t find you on digital channels, your brand doesn’t exist for them.”
Businesses may only be successful for a while through word of mouth, but if your customers’ referrals can’t find your business, you can lose business to your competitors.
At this point, what can you say about the contribution of SEO?
SEO helps make it as easy as possible for your current and potential customers to find you.
If you are selling online, do an analysis of where your sales are coming from. Go to the Google Analytics acquisition reports and sort by channel. You’ll likely find that organic traffic is one of your highest-trafficed and also one of the highest-converting channels.
Some (or most) of this traffic may come from branded searches (from people who searched for your brand and found you through Google), but some of it comes from unbranded searches, from people searching for a product you offer.
Even if you don’t currently have many unbranded searches, you can increase your SEO efforts to help your customers find you in the keywords they’re searching for, without having to include your brand name.
As we explained above, SEO is one of the marketing channels with the highest return on investment, as well as providing long-term benefits. When you do paid advertising, the moment you stop paying for ads, your traffic from that channel stops and you stop making revenue from it. With SEO, a little time and effort is a long-term investment.
How To Do SEO For E-Commerce Sites? 3 Essential SEO Optimizations You Should Know
Ecommerce SEO increases your sales organically by putting your store in front of people who are actively searching for your products. Whether you’re selling electronics, clothing, or services; SEO is an investment that will yield profits for a long time to come.
So where should you start?
What are the best SEO practices ?
How will you compete with e-commerce giants?
Now we will explain all these questions and more step by step.
So let’s start!
1. Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is perhaps the most important part of e-commerce for SEO. People search for specific products they want using certain keywords. That’s why you need to use the keywords that your potential customers use.
There are a few important things you should know before choosing keywords for your product pages:
- Use a keyword research tool
The first thing you need when optimizing your e-commerce website for search engines is a keyword research tool. This shows how people are searching for the products you offer on your website. This saves you from guessing what keywords people are typing.
You can also search for any product or related keywords in your inventory using a keyword tool. This allows you to see exactly how many people are searching for certain keywords per month.
Keyword research tools will also help you discover other popular keywords that you can add to your keyword list and potentially use on your web pages.
- Use search engine auto-suggestion tools
The second tip to help you research keywords for your e-commerce site is to use the auto-suggestion tool in search engines. When you type something into a search engine, it will guess what you’re looking for by suggesting keywords to finish your phrase or sentence.
Search engines do not choose random words when doing this. Suggested keywords have been used by searchers like you in the past. This is a function of Robotic Process Automation and machine learning, and another way to see what people are actively searching for.
- Focus on long-tail keywords
The main advantage of the above method is that these automatically suggested keywords are usually long-tailed. Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific than short-tail keywords.
Short-tail keywords contain only one or two words. It makes it harder for you to rank high in search engines as you compete against a large number of high authority websites.
If you use long-tail keywords , it is much easier to rank high in the SERPs due to reduced competition.
Another important advantage is that a user using long-tail keywords is likely to be a strong potential buyer. Because these users know exactly what they are looking for.
If you use the same long-tail keywords on your web pages, your website will be served to people ready to buy your product.
- LSI keywords
Latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords are words related to your main keyword. Let’s say you’re using a keyword research tool and you’ve also found a nice long-tail keyword that you want a particular product page to rank for. On top of that, you need to find relevant keywords on your product page that you can use.
When a search engine sees your keyword next to related keywords on your page, it recognizes your page as related to your main keyword. This greatly increases your chances of ranking high in the SERPs.
The way to find LSI keywords is to type your main keyword into a search engine. Related keywords and search suggestions will appear next to or below the SERP. Identify the ones that are relevant to you and use them on your product page.
2. SEO for Product Page
Your web pages, especially your product pages, are where you research and place your chosen keywords. Several different areas need to be addressed when optimizing your product pages.
- Title
The product title is arguably the most important part of your product page. The title is the part of your web page that appears on the search engine results page in large, blue letters. This is important because when it ranks in the SERPs, it is what will drive people to click on your website. This is where your keyword research comes into play.
When choosing titles for your product pages, it’s important to make them as unique as possible. Having duplicate content or multiple pages with the same title does not contribute to your site’s SEO.
One of the common mistakes people make with product titles is to put their store’s name at the beginning of their title. It’s not the first thing users want to see, unless they’re specifically looking for it. Therefore, they are likely to skim through the list and click on the one that appeals to them more. When optimizing your pages, always consider the user’s intent first.
- URL
The second part of your product page that needs to be optimized is your URL. A page’s URL appears in your web browser’s address bar. That’s why you should try to match the URL of your product page with the product title as closely as possible. Again, the URLs for each of your pages should be different and specific to each product.
Having URLs that match your product title will help your SEO efforts. Because it helps search engines understand exactly what your product is. If your URL and title are completely different, there will be uncertainty and it will negatively affect your ranking in the SERPs.
- Meta Description
The meta description is the short snippet that appears below your page title in search engine results.
It can be edited by changing a little HTML code in the header of your web page. Content management systems and some free website builders allow you to write meta descriptions without having to edit your website code.
Meta descriptions used to be a very important part of SEO, but their importance has lessened in the last few years. But regardless, it’s worth the time to create a good meta description. A well-written meta description can entice searchers to click on your page.
If the words in the meta description match the keywords someone used in their search, they will appear in bold. That’s why it’s a good idea to include keywords related to your product in the meta description. If a searcher sees a lot of similar words in your meta description, it grabs the searcher’s attention.
- Product Content
The main content body on your product page is your product description. You can put secondary keywords here that you haven’t used before in your title, URL or meta description.
But the point you need to pay attention to here is that your product description is easy to understand for the reader. No one wants to be faced with a huge wall of text. If it’s not easy to read, people will click the back arrow in their web browser to return to the search engine results page.
This will increase your bounce rate. Your bounce rate is the number of people who click on your site and “return” immediately. A high bounce rate negatively impacts your search engine ranking.
You ask why?
Because you appear as an unauthorized site that people are not interested in.
So, what should I do, keep your communication short and quick to write interesting product descriptions. Limit paragraphs to one or two sentences. Also, use bullet points when listing specific product details such as size, material, and color. People shouldn’t have to read a paragraph to select this information.
3. Creating Backlinks
The more high-quality backlinks that lead to your store, the better your ecommerce SEO performance will be.
When deciding which sites to prioritize, Google prioritizes quality and reliable sites that want to show users reliable information. Backlinks to your site from high-quality, authoritative domains show that you have reliable content and allow you to rank higher in the SERPs.
Backlinks can be an important SEO powerhouse for e-commerce stores. By increasing site authority (and hence their ranking in SERPs), it also directs link traffic, allowing you to gain user traffic. Building this strategy correctly will allow you to win the best positions. By comparing your website to competitors in your niche, it makes it easier for your user or customer to find the information they are interested in and create the best backlink profile.
If you apply the basics we explained above correctly, step by step, on your e-commerce website, you will undoubtedly see an improvement in your SERP ranking.
