If you want to improve your search engine rankings, then on-page SEO is one of the first stages to attain success. When you are surfing Google, you will see a huge chunk of how-to articles as well as YouTube tutorials regarding eCommerce SEO tips. However, you won’t find many pieces in which the content creator discusses the main instincts of eCommerce entrepreneurship.
If you want your content or your website to be in the spotlight of Google, then you must understand search engine optimization (SEO). This isn’t a walk in the park for anyone, as you may have to contact numerous agencies or companies that provide SEO services. The reason behind it is that optimizing websites is quite a difficult task.
In this article, we will be sharing guidelines about on-page SEO. You need to send all the right signals to Google, which will enable you to attain an SEO ranking.
What is SEO in Ecommerce?
Ecommerce SEO is a procedure in which you can create a position/ranking for your online store in the search engine result pages (SERPs). When people are searching for the products in your online store, you have to make sure that your store is visible to them on the first instinct. For that to happen, you must develop strategies to boost traffic on your platform.
If you create a paid search, it will generate traffic. However, the SEO strategies for eCommerce websites are less costly. Moreover, ad blockers can reduce the impact of a paid search. Therefore, you have work to do regardless of the investment you did.
SEO strategies are beneficial in optimizing your headlines, meta-descriptions, metadata, internal linking, external linking, backlinks, and user experience. Every product you sell must have a respective selling page, so you can draw traffic for that product only.
Importance of SEO Ecommerce
When a customer wants a product, there are several steps that he/she goes through. Most of them perform Google searches. They consider different options that enable them to make informed decisions. If your website or the content page doesn’t appear in the high SERPs, that means that your strategies of SEO for eCommerce aren’t bearing fruit.
Moreover, your eCommerce customers aren’t interested in looking into your website either. Your products may have a certain place on the web, but can they be accessed easily? If you aren’t optimizing your product pages, then they surely won’t be. Even if some visitors appear on your website’s homepage, they won’t be satisfied with your customer service.
This is where eCommerce SEO comes into play. It enables you to target the audience without investing much in the advertisements. Once you are able to generate traffic on your platform, you can bring positive perspectives from them via a user-friendly environment, innovative products, and inspiring call-to-action (CTA).
Strikingly understands that the first thing to do when you bring traffic to your website is to create powerful designs for your website. You don’t need to have a coding degree to create exciting designs on our platform. We have pre-designed templates which you can customize as per the demands of your visitors. After that, you can add products to your website by adding photographs of them in the gallery section as well as information about it in the blog section. Moreover, you must target specific keywords that give more clarity about the aspects that you want to discuss.
How to Create an Ecommerce Strategy?
SEO can be time-consuming, especially if you are inexperienced or you have thousands of products to optimize. However, you can speed up your operations by creating a fundamental eCommerce SEO strategy.
Image taken from Strikingly
Firstly, you can assemble those pages that are likely to generate the most traffic. If you want people to prioritize a flagship, make sure to do the product optimization specifically.
When you are an SEO expert or working for an SEO company, there is a workflow that you have to get done with. You have to look at the keyword strategy, meta-descriptions, blog headlines, image optimization, user-friendliness, etc. Not a single aspect in those work tasks should be ignored to guarantee a good search engine ranking.
When you create an eCommerce strategy, you must also consider the strategies of your competitors. Make sure to look at your competitors’ websites and see the reasons why they are sitting at the top of the search rankings. This will allow you to improve upon your own SEO strategies. If you have an effective search engine ranking, conversion rate optimization (CRO) will follow the same wavelength.
Best Practices for an Ecommerce Strategy
It is all good to develop an eCommerce website for your product development or content creation. However, the most challenging step is maintenance. You cannot be building your website and feel that you have reached the peak point for your online business. In fact, you must develop strategies to ensure that you can maintain effective search engine rankings for your platform. To ensure that, we have displayed some of the most fundamental practices below for your eCommerce strategy.
1. Use Correct Keywords
For those who disregard keywords, you are missing a massive point in the world of eCommerce SEO. Keywords still have huge importance. However, you must make sure that you don’t fill your meta titles and meta-descriptions with these words only.
Before you add keywords for SEO, it is important to do some research regarding it. You must know how much that keyword has been searched on Google (Keyword Search Volume), or if it has any competitiveness in the paid search space (cost-per-click, or CPC). You can also search the topics for which that keyword has been searched.
Keyword search volume will ensure you the number of times when that keyword has surfaced on Google. If that keyword has a high CPC, it will have huge competition on the back of it. As a result of competitive keywords, you can consider long-tail keywords to efficiently rank your keyword. Therefore, keywords are one of the most important SEO strategies for eCommerce websites.
2. Competitor Research
If you don’t know SEO for eCommerce websites, you give your competitors an open field. The experienced competitors anticipate every single step that the inexperienced SEO experts would make, which makes them one step ahead all the time.
When you conduct the competitor analysis, keywords are one of the things that you must focus on for your eCommerce SEO. You can analyze your competitors’ keywords in the homepage menu and the top product pages. Besides keyword research, Strikingly also benefits by enabling you to build a stunning website that gives you an edge in the online market. The Google Analytics feature will help you in checking the traffic coming to your website. Knowing about the source of traffic will help to improve your number of website visitors.
3. Homepage SEO
The homepage is where most of your energy is consumed regarding eCommerce SEO. Even though the homepage is one of the most significant pages for optimization, it shouldn’t be the only page you should look out for.
Image taken from Strikingly
The title tag is one of the most essential features of on-page SEO. The heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) break down your content into parts and symbolize every section of your paragraph with a title. These tags should contain your business name along with the focused keyphrase. It shouldn’t be more than 70 characters so that your audience isn’t confused about what you are trying to say.
Secondly, meta-descriptions should also coincide with the meta title and headings that are part of your content. It shouldn’t be more than 160 characters and should describe your product or services effectively. They appear underneath your title tag.
4. Site Architecture
Apart from adding and optimizing your products, you must remember that site architecture also has a huge role in SEO for eCommerce websites. Usually, you would desire to have a navigation menu consisting of your homepage and product categories.
Search engine bots will enable you to discover numerous aspects of your websites via a clear internal linking structure. In the blogs you write, you must know that internal linking is vital to improve the site architecture. However, you must not jumble up your content by adding internal links everywhere. This would make the blog unpleasant and will cause a decline in your eCommerce SEO rankings.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly always likes to answer your questions regarding site architecture. Recently, we have developed a feature in which you can display or hide sections in your navigation menu. However, it doesn’t mean that it stops you from displaying the navigation menu on the published page entirely. Regardless of the decision that you make, you must make the audience your most preferred priority.
5. Optimize Products
Product pages are the bread and butter of your eCommerce websites. Therefore, product development is an integral part of an eCommerce SEO strategy. The name of your product holds massive weightage in optimization. For example, if you are selling a piano, make sure to include “piano” in your product title.
Image taken from Strikingly
The most important aspect of product development is image optimization. Images aren’t just crucial for your customers but also for optimization. If your images are blurry or unpleasant, no customers will come to your online store to buy the product. Moreover, you should never add images with the name “IMG1234.JPG”. Instead, rename the product and name it as “a-tennis-racket.JPG”. Moreover, you can include keywords so that the image appears in your customer’s search when they are looking for a product.
Image taken from Strikingly
Conclusion
Most of the eCommerce SEO experts would look to improve their website conversions. To boost your website’s conversion rate, you must have an SEO strategy to help you out. The strategy must contain the following practices.
- Use Correct Keywords
- Competitor Research
- Homepage SEO
- Site Architecture
- Product Optimization
If you can conduct these practices, there won’t be any doubt that you will attain a high search engine ranking for your online store. So without further ado, get yourself registered on Strikingly and blossom in the world of SEO.