This article will show you our organic SEO tips to boost revenue and traffic to your website.
Ecommerce SEO is the process of optimizing your brand's website to rank higher, gain visibility and clicks through search engines like Google with out paying for the click. Whether you’re an established ecommerce brand looking for tips to take your brand to the next level or you’re just beginning your ecommerce journey, this concise, step-by-step organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guide will reveal the best SEO practices for your ecommerce site in order to rank higher on Google.
How do ecommerce sites do SEO?
The Best Top 10 In-House SEO Tips for Ecommerce Websites
- • Optimize keywords using the best SEO practices
- • Ensure that your ecommerce site is fast and reliable
- • Clean up your website
- • Create multiple pages on your ecommerce site
- • Create unique and useful product descriptions.
- • Make your ecommerce shop user-friendly
- • Create internal links between your pages
- • Optimize HTML Tags
- • Accumulate backlinks
- • Optimize Structured Data Markup
1. Optimize keywords using the best SEO practices
The first tip to attract more traffic to your ecommerce product store is to optimize keywords on your website to encourage Google to rank your site higher, in the correct niche.
Realize your ecommerce store’s niche: If, for instance, you sell camping gear on your website, it would be advantageous for SEO to focus primarily on the camping niche and related keywords.
Best Keyword Research Practices: Find keywords related to your niche and incorporate them into product descriptions, blog posts, and other pages. For instance, using the example of a camping gear ecommerce store, you would want to focus on keywords such as “hiking and camping gear”, “camping trailer”, “men’s camping tents”, or “camping hammocks” depending on your niche, what products you sell, and your target audience.
To find and explore these keywords, we recommend you use an established SEO tool such as Ahrefs. This tool has extremely helpful sorting features such as local monthly volume, keyword difficulty, and related keywords which can help you find the perfect keywords depending on the scope of your ecommerce business.
2. Ensure that your ecommerce site is fast and reliable
Speed is another important ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. A fast ecommerce website is often the difference between ranking on the first or second page of Google. These are a handful of small steps you can take to boost your site’s speed, and they’re all worthwhile.
Measure speed and performance insights: Use a free tool such as web.dev to measure your pages’ speed. This tool will also offer helpful suggestions on how to further boost your website’s speed.
Compress your images: Compressing images on your website will reduce the amount of data displayed on your site and enable it to load faster for customers. This is one of the easiest and most effective steps you can take to boost your ecommerce site’s speed. To compress images, can use plugins such as Crush.pics to compress images automatically or manually compress them with a conversion website like tinypng.
Create a file cache: Using a caching plugin such as Hyperspeed saves a copy of your webpage on customers’ browsers so that they load back into your site faster upon return visits.
Limit the number of plugins and images on your site: The more plugins and images that your site has the longer it takes to load. Only use what you need!
3. Clean up your website
Ensure that your website doesn’t have any URL mapping mistakes, duplicate content, and that your ecommerce pages are optimized for mobile devices. Having structural issues like these within your website (even hidden) will hurt your rankings on Google.
Analyze & improve your pages: To evaluate the state of your ecommerce store and its links you should go through every page and skim the content. First, ensure that you don’t have any duplicate or broken pages such as 404 errors on your website. Next, ensure that your site runs smoothly on mobile devices by using the mobile tool directly in Shopify or opening the site on your mobile device.
Perfect your URL map: Finally, confirm that your URL map uses keywords and niche that you previously identified and has high search volumes. For instance, Patagonia’s URL map is strong because they know that people searching for them will be looking for camping or hiking gear:
4. Create multiple pages on your ecommerce site
Creating numerous related pages on your ecommerce website can increase your rankings in Google’s search algorithm because it provides your site with more credibility and more opportunities to be ranked higher. Examples of easy to create pages aside from a landing page and a store page include contact, about, blog, portfolio, videos, testimonials, and categories. However, do be wary that duplicate or non-user-friendly content will hurt your search engine ranking.
5. Create unique and useful product descriptions.
Creating exceptional and valuable product descriptions is an essential step in boosting organic ecommerce traffic. Spending time crafting memorable product descriptions won’t only help sell your product to people who are already on the page, but it will help your ecommerce site in regard to SEO ranking.
6. Make your ecommerce shop user-friendly
Another useful tip for any ecommerce site is that your shop should be easy to navigate, user-friendly, and should include content that draws users in. This content could include pictures, videos, testimonials, and reviews. This content will support a user’s on-page experience and increase their odds of buying a product. When a site looks unprofessional, is hard to navigate through, or doesn’t have reviews it’s extremely unlikely that consumers are going to be interested in the product.
7. Create internal links between your pages
Similarly, you can increase your ecommerce website’s ranking on search engines and your site’s user-friendliness by incorporating internal links between your pages. These internal links can link visitors to your contact page, similar products, or back to your home page depending on how you want them to function. Creating frequent internal links throughout your site will not only promote your ecommerce store’s rankings on search engines, but it will make it easier for users to navigate your website.
8. Optimize HTML Tags
Generating keyword-heavy, enticing metadata is another incredibly important step in ecommerce SEO. Metadata primarily consists of meta tags, alt-text, and HTML tags.
Meta Titles and Descriptions: Meta tags are what appear in search engines when you Google a topic; it’s the title and description sections. For meta descriptions and titles, the goal is to focus on drawing potential customers to your web page while maximizing keywords. It’s also important to note that Google will cut off your title at 60 characters and your description at 150-160 characters.
Alt-Text: Alt-text primarily refers to crawlable text for images. When adding an image to your site you will want to ensure that you use the alt-text found in settings. When writing alt-text, be as descriptive as possible while using your keywords frequently.
H-1 Tags: Heading tags are useful for structuring content for both the reader and search engine crawler. H1-H6 tags distinguish sections of an article. Best SEO practices include only using the H1 tag once for the title or heading of a page and using H2 & H3 tags for subheadings. Generally, there’s not a need to use H4-H6 tags.
9. Accumulate backlinks
Accumulating backlinks is a crucial step in establishing your website’s credibility and ranking well on search engines. Simply put, the more backlinks you have from trustworthy sources, the more credible your site will be and the better ranked your site will become.
How to analyze backlinks: Visit Google Search Console and navigate to the links section. You can analyze your site’s backlinks and internal links in this area.
Tips to building backlinks: There are many things you can do to create backlinks but here are a few easy-to-implement ideas. Create useful information on your blog and other people may cite your blog, guest post on other blogs and link your site, generate reviews on Google Reviews or Yelp, or breed excitement by posting content and getting it shared on social media platforms such as Reddit. Guest posting is another tactic for websites that are just growing and have little leverage to offer
Harmful Backlinks: The Google search algorithm understands that anyone can hyperlink to your site so it usually doesn’t rank a website lower for poor-quality links. However, in Google Search Console, you may receive a manual action warning if backlinks are ranking your website lower. At that point, you can disavow the harmful backlinks using Google Search Console manually or importing lists from a popular SEO tool such as SEMRush.
10. Optimize Structured Data Markup
Finally, make sure that your ecommerce website is utilizing Google’s structured data markup tool. When you set up this service it will streamline your ecommerce products directly to Google’s shopping page encouraging more clicks and conversions while bolstering the ecommerce site’s organic ranking on Google.
Conclusion
The purpose of this guide is to provide a clear introduction to many surface-level elements of search engine optimization. However, there are countless other strategies, tricks, tips, and tools that Adspace uses to provide optimum search visibility. If you want your ecommerce store to have rapid growth with minimal effort, request a free quote today!
