Growing a successful online store relies heavily on attracting enough relevant potential customers to your site. People often refer to the internet as the “information super highway”, but increasingly search engines are becoming more like the shopping super highway, with product listings taking many of the top spots. To help your business thrive, you have to take eCommerce SEO into account, and give yourself the best chance of ranking well.
eCommerce SEO Techniques
There are several elements to effective eCommerce SEO, which should be used in parallel to have maximum impact:
- Keyword Research – Choosing the right keywords to optimise for is vital to the success of any SEO strategy. Mistakes at this point can make it very difficult to get your product pages to rank. Effective keyword research will identify search terms that relate to your specific products with sufficient search volume, but with less competition than more generic terms. Planning out your keywords and their structure is a great first step to take before jumping head first into their implementation. With a cohesive keyword plan you can maximise the amount organic traffic you manage to pull to your website
- Site structure – Properly setting up the site and product pages with categories and tags makes it easy for users to navigate, and simple for search engines to understand. Using the keywords for categories also helps search engines to process exactly what the pages are about, which gives them the best chance of ranking appropriately.
- Technical SEO – There are a number of technical tweaks you can make to improve your chances of ranking for your target keywords. This includes things such as changing the file names for product images to include your keywords, updating page meta descriptions, including keywords in the URL, site linking to other products on your website and adding image alt tags.
- Content – Ecommerce SEO has specific nuances compared to traditional content marketing as you typically have less content on the pages. You should make sure you optimise all your on page content including relevant keywords and alt text.
- Mobile Friendly – Going “mobile-first” makes good business sense as such a huge percentage of search volume today is through mobile channels. With Google also announcing a change to their indexing algorithm to put mobile first, it’s vital your website is optimised for mobile to rank higher.
- Site security – Security is of utmost importance today, with many sites falling victim to hacking and exposing sensitive customer data. Search engines want to promote reputable and secure sites, so they will give preference to sites with proper SSL certificates.
Setting up your site properly in the first instance goes a long way, but you also need to review constantly to check that all of the above pointers are implemented properly as you add new pages and products. Analytics and tools such as Google Search Console can give you a really good indicator of how effective your eCommerce strategy is working. By looking at which keywords you are ranking for, you can optimise for these specific keywords and further enhance your ranking.
Holistic Solutions
At AsOne we know the importance of looking at the full digital business strategy as opposed to looking at any one element in isolation. It makes little sense to have a great eCommerce store if you’re not leveraging the right opportunities to drive traffic to your site to convert into sales. This is why it is so important that you think about eCommerce SEO.
Through long running relationships with clients across multiple industries we have built up extensive experience of the most successful ways of optimising search rankings for eCommerce sites.
If you’d like more information on how eCommerce SEO can help to grow your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
