SEO plays a very crucial role in any e-commerce business. It can help them to improve their online presence and increase sales. However, SEO is not easy to achieve as it takes time and effort. SEO is a hot topic and it’s easy to see why. With the increased use of e-commerce, the popularity of online retailing has been growing at a rapid pace. According to US Census Bureau, US retail sales increased by 4% in 2016 to $4 trillion. It makes it the largest source of revenue for many businesses.
For those who are new to the world of e-commerce SEO, this guide is a step-by-step walk-through of everything from choosing a niche to optimizing your website for conversions.
The following are steps will help you understand:
Step 1: Keyword Research – Keyword research is a practice of search engine optimization professionals use to find and research search terms that users enter into search engines when looking for products, services or general information.
1. Choosing the Right Keywords for Your Store
Keywords are the foundation to the success of your online store. They help in driving traffic, conversions, and sales. However, when it comes to choosing keywords, you may not know what to look for or how to go about finding them for your online store.
For example, I have a business running with men’s and women’s clothing. I want to target people who are searching for the same. So, if I want potential customers to reach my website, I will choose the keywords of buy men’s t-shirt online, buy women’s kurta online etc.
So, you need to choose the keywords that are relevant to your business and make sure you choose the right phrase to match the keywords of your products.
2. Search Volume – The keyword search volume is the number of times a specific keyword is searched on Google. The search volume of the keyword search is measured in total searches per month.
3. Competition – “Competition” is a metric indicating how difficult it would be to have your website rank high on search engine result pages (SERP) for a particular keyword. It’s also known as “Keyword Difficulty.”
4. Relevancy – Relevancy is a term used for how well Google can match your content or product to what you are typing in the search engine.
5. Intent – Keyword intent is the idea behind what makes a keyword different from another. A keyword might be related to specific search behaviour, such as “buy a t-shirt online”. By analyzing these keywords that people use online, we can get an idea of what people are looking for and how search engines rank them.
Step 2 – Website Structure
Website structure is a crucial aspect of website success. Website structure has an immense impact on the content that is published on it. It can also help boost conversions and increase engagement rates.
As a part of this, a website structure is important because it helps to quickly understand the content or your business of a website and determine what type of information you should be looking at first. It also helps the visitor to find what they need easily by providing them with links to relevant content.
Here is an example of a web structure.
Step 3 – On-Page SEO for Product Page
On-Page SEO is one of the most important factors that help websites maintain traffic. On-Page SEO is often overlooked by many business owners, but it is important to ensure the success of your product pages.
On-Page SEO is not just about optimizing titles and meta descriptions of the product of an e-commerce site. It also includes improving your site’s structure, navigation, content hierarchy, keyword usage, and so on.
When creating product pages for your e-commerce website, use these tips to make sure they rank high in the search engines:
• Create a unique title that incorporates a keyword phrase people are looking for in their search query. For example: Natural Vitamin C Serum vs Vitamin C Serum.
• SEO-friendly product descriptions need to be clear, concise and practical. Bringing valuable information like the core features or benefits along the practical use on your website is a great way to keep search engines focused on providing valuable content on the website rather than ranking for keywords.
• Images play a big role in user experience. They are also significant for both SEO & brand presence. Optimizing your images with keywords helps to ensure they rank higher in image searches!
Step 4 – Use Responsive Design
Responsive design is a style of design that adjusts the layout, navigation, and content to the size of the device it is being viewed.
What makes responsive web design different from traditional web design is that it doesn’t submit to single screen size.
The broad use of responsive web design can be attributed to its ability to adapt to many different screen sizes and devices, as well as ease of development. Most importantly, it helps improve user experience across all devices with one site.
Responsive websites are designed with fluid layouts that adjust according to the device they view without having any performance issues or scrolling difficulties. The website layout will automatically adjust so that all sections have an equal amount of content, and there won’t be any disruption in reading flow or navigation.
Step 5 – Reduce page load speed
With the rise of the internet, most e-commerce businesses are become increasingly competitive and need to offer their products and services faster. The SEO and page load speed help the site to gain a competitive edge over its competitors.
If your website page load time takes more than 3 – 5 seconds, you may lose your potential customers who may not wait for too long for the page to load.
There are two ways that you can go about improving your website page load speed:
1) Reduce the number of scripts on your site;
2) Optimize images as their load time makes delay.
Step 6 – Create Backlinks
Most of the people in the SEO world prefer to find backlinks for their websites through natural search. It is not only the fastest way but also the most reliable one.
If you are looking for ways to create backlinks for your website, then these are some of the techniques that could help:
-Link building through videos: You can create a Youtube channel and start uploading your product videos, and in the description, you can link them to your website.
– Facebook & Instagram: Post on relevant groups about your product. It will help build trust with the audience.
If you follow those steps, your ecommerce site will rank better in the search engines and generate more prospects.
Conclusion: The e-commerce SEO should never be taken easily as a one-time project. It should be a continuous process that aligned with the digital marketing plan and roadmap of the business. This blog provides a guide on how as a beginner one should optimize an e-commerce website through various techniques such as keyword research, off-page optimization, and on-page optimization. Also, learn search engine optimization with Google Partnered Agency Institute and get more e-commerce insights to practice and master.