As an ecommerce site, you rely on your online presence to drive customers to your product and category pages. By brushing-up on your SEO efforts, you can soar up the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), boost sales and see an increase in revenue.
Why is SEO important for ecommerce sites?
It increases your online visibility
How will customers purchase your products or services if they can’t find you? Unless you optimise your content to increase your online visibility, fewer customers will discover your offerings, leading to less sales and having a detrimental effect on your revenue. By improving your SEO strategy, you can climb the SERPs and ensure that consumers both new and existing reach your site.
It can be more cost effective
Compared to PPC campaigns, SEO can be a more cost effective way to increase your brand awareness and drive traffic to your site. Whilst it often takes time to see results with SEO, if you find yourself needing to cut back on your marketing spend, you won’t suddenly see your organic traffic drop - which is the case with PPC where you must pay to advertise. That said, PPC gives you the opportunity to dominate the SERPs quickly and you can get creative with paid ads in order to lure new customers to your site.
Why not read our blog on how SEO and PPC can work together for search success to learn more about how running both SEO and PPC campaigns can work together to help your business grow?
It can have a long-lasting impact
SEO is a great investment for many ecommerce businesses as results are cost-effective, targeted, measurable and sustainable. As mentioned earlier, you don’t lose your organic positions when you ‘stop paying’ and you can build on your SEO efforts over time, strengthening your ranking positions and continuing to dominate your market.
It’s essential for keeping up with (and getting ahead of) competitors
The growth of ecommerce has also led to the growth of competition. If you want users to click on your site, you’ll have to try and outrank your competitors; remember, the higher the position, the higher the Click-Through-Rate (CTR) which leads to more conversions.
It helps to build trust and credibility
If a site is one of the top results listed, it indicates to users that Google identifies the website as credible and trustworthy, giving them trust in the site also. In turn, Google will notice when more users visit the site, convert and leave positive reviews which will help to give the site another leg up.
Furthermore, you can increase your authority by link building with relevant sites that also have good trust scores. In a search engine’s (and a user’s) eyes, another brand is recommending your products which assures them that they can trust you too.
It helps to improve user experience
Providing a positive user experience will go a long, long way in maximising visibility and successfully converting customers. By performing technical SEO checks and ensuring that the content on your site is of good quality and fulfills users’ needs, you can ensure that your site runs smoothly to avoid losing any customers. For example, if a user clicks on one of your links and they’re met with a 404 error page, they won’t be thrilled and will more than likely go crawling to one of your competitors to get what they need.
Our top SEO tips for ecommerce sites
1. Conduct thorough keyword research
By carrying out in-depth keyword research, you can ensure that you’re targeting the most valuable and relevant terms that users are actively searching for. Determining the best long-tail keywords (more specific search terms) to target is particularly beneficial as this helps you to rank for specific niches and in a less competitive landscape.
Guesswork doesn’t fly so well with SEO and you could miss opportunities to reach your target audience. By performing a keyword audit to understand where you currently rank and using keyword search and tracking tools such as Semrush to find out how users are searching, you can tailor your keywords in terms of user search intent.
2. Include target keywords throughout your content
Once you’ve identified and developed your keyword strategy, you should ensure that you’re including these keywords in the following places:
- Throughout your content/product descriptions
- Meta titles and descriptions
- Subheadings
- Images
- URLs
- Link anchor text - this is where you link to another page. For example instead of saying ‘click here’, use the keyword you’re targeting for that page so that both the user and search engine know what to expect by clicking on that link.
3. Run technical SEO checks to identify any issues
By conducting a technical SEO site audit, you can analyse how well your site is performing and discover any issues impeding your ranking success. Common issues that may be flagged in a site audit include slow page speed, duplicate content, broken links, non-indexed pages and more. Once you’ve identified any issues, you can look to fix them which will lead to better UX and site performance which will be rewarded by Google.
Why not check out our blog on how to conduct a technical site audit to learn more about what’s involved?
4. Avoid duplicating content
Copy so nice you had to say it twice? Duplicate content is a common issue amongst large ecommerce stores who have lots of products to offer and writing unique copy can be challenging. Whilst copying and pasting content will save you a great deal of time, you can be penalised for duplicating your own or other’s content. Think of it this way, if you were Google and found a bunch of identical pages, how would you know how to rank them?
5. Optimise product images
Having compelling, high-quality images is important for selling a product, but they also have a lot of SEO potential for you to take advantage of. By adding alt text (text describing the image) within a HTML code, you’re making it clear to search engines what the image is so it can be indexed correctly. Alt attributes are also helpful for users; for instance, if an image fails to load the alt text will appear, giving the user context to the image.
6. Monitor your organic performance
By monitoring your organic performance, you can keep track of your efforts to see what’s working, and what isn’t which helps to inform your SEO strategy. If you regularly analyse your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can avoid spending time and money on tactics which aren't boosting your profits.
7. Include internal links
By linking to other product or category pages, you can drive link equity and add topical relevance to newer pages which will also help to improve their rankings.
Moreover, internal links help to make navigation easier for users as you can point them in the direction of other useful pages or carry them further down the sales funnel. One way you can do this is to list related products at the bottom of the page that the user may find useful.
8. Build links
By building backlinks to sites that have good metrics and SEO scores (such as domain authority, domain rating and page ranking), you’ll be able to increase your metrics and improve the health of your own website. Having links on external sites can have many more benefits, including:
- They give you credibility as they are essentially third-party indicators that your domain has authority.
- Google takes links into consideration when ranking your site, so you want to make sure you have more quality backlinks than your competitors.
- Backlinks give you more brand exposure and can increase your traffic, leading to more sales and higher revenue.
There is however a right and wrong way on how to build links for SEO, for instance, you should avoid paying for links (especially on spammy sites) as this may negatively impact your website’s ranking.
9. Ensure that your site has good UX and prioritise mobile usability
Your site should be simple to navigate and have good UX if you want to successfully convert users. With so many users likely to access your site via mobile, you should ensure that your site has a responsive, mobile friendly design. Not only does Google use mobile-first indexing, 62% of users are less likely to purchase from you if they have a negative mobile experience (Google).
10. Add product schema
Having detailed product schema will help your webpages to rank higher and search engines can publish more information about your products on the SERPs - this information could encourage more users to click on your result. You should aim to include as much information as possible in your schema markup, such as the product’s name, price, availability and aggregate rating (which is the average rating of the product based on reviews) as search engines love being fed as much product information as possible.
11. Create high-quality content
Quality content should help you to achieve your marketing objectives, whether that is to generate leads or increase your brand awareness. It’s important to ensure that your content is relevant, unique and designed around search intent whilst also being optimised for search engines. A great way to drive more traffic to your site is to create compelling blogs which link to relevant product pages.
Final takeaways
SEO takes time to see results, but your efforts certainly won’t be wasted with the right SEO strategy in place. The above tips will help you to make improvements to your marketing funnel and get ahead of your competitors.
Looking to boost your SEO efforts for your ecommerce site?
If you’re an ecommerce website looking to improve your online visibility and conversion rates, you’ve come to the right place. We are Adido, an ecommerce SEO agency determined to help your online business to evolve and grow. Why not get in touch with us today to see how we can help?
Further reading
How to build a successful seasonal SEO strategy for your business
Why content is important for SEO
Optimising your site to achieve better SEO results: Digital marketing for the travel industry
