In this blog post, we’re going to talk about ecommerce marketing strategy, SEO, and its usefulness in growing your sales.
As an online store, you want to perform digital marketing where you appear in search results when people search for products or services related to what you sell. Enter ecommerce SEO! Ecommerce SEO is the process of optimizing your online store to rank higher in search engine results pages, and ultimately drive more organic traffic to your store. In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about ecommerce SEO, from how to create an ecommerce SEO strategy to tools that will help you along the way.
What is ecommerce SEO?
Ecommerce seo is the process of making your online store visible in search results so that people doing searches related to what you offer are likely to come across your website.
An optimized ecommerce site is more likely to rank highly in SERPs and drive organic traffic.
Ecommerce SEO is important because 60% of people research a brand online before making a purchase. When your site is optimized, they’ll be able to find your product pages in search results and learn about what you offer. This type of SEO is not that different from general SEO.
Still, you will focus your efforts on optimizing your site to benefit your products, like writing high-quality and keyword-rich product descriptions. By doing this, you’ll help your ecommerce site rank in SERPs and drive organic traffic.
Ecommerce SEO Strategy
1. Keyword Research
You will want to begin your ecommerce SEO process with keyword research, this is especially true for your product pages.
This type of research will help you to learn what words are most commonly used when people search for products that are related to your business. Once you have this information, you will be able to use these keywords in the content on your site. Doing this will let Google know when it should surface your website in SERPs and also let searchers know what they can expect to find on your page when they click on it.
You can also use competitor research to find keywords that you could be ranking for. Ahrefs Content Gap Tool is a great option for this, and you can simply enter the URLs for your competitors to get started.
2. On-page SEO
On-page SEO elements, such as content and HTML elements, help search engines understand what is on your site pages. Keyword research is always the first step since these elements often include your keywords.
- Meta titles are the headings you use to describe what’s on your page content. When you write them, you can summarize the main topic of your page with a related keyword. The image below is an example from Shopify, an ecommerce platform for businesses. In this example, the meta title describes exactly what the business is for: selling online.
- Meta descriptions are snippets of text in SERPs that describe what’s on specific pages. They help searchers assess if the page is relevant to what they are looking for. This summary is only visible in search results, and when writing them, you should include your target keywords. The image below is an example of a meta description from Dollar Shave Club that reads, “Everything you need in the bathroom – from razor blades to grooming products – automatically delivered to your door. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.” Adding reviews and star ratings to your meta descriptions can help build trust with potential customers. You can do this by using review snippet schema markup.
- Your website’s URL structure refers to the organization of your site’s pages via subdirectories and slugs. Best practices for simplifying and optimizing your URLs include using relevant keywords and hyphenating your slugs. Creating a clear hierarchy for your URLs lets browsers and search engines know when a page is getting more specific.
- Regarding product description, when writing product and category descriptions, be sure to include relevant keywords from your research. This will ensure that people can find your products more easily.
- Structured data is code on your website that helps explain your page’s content to search engines, making it easier for them to index your site. You’ll want to add structured data markups to your product pages to ensure optimization. Google has an entire database of product-related structured data (for shipping information, offers, pricing, product availability, etc.) that you can copy and paste into your site’s schema markup. Just be sure to add your unique elements and check if it’s valid using the Rich Results Test.
- Your ecommerce website will look much more inviting to potential customers if you use high-quality images of your products. In addition, including images with the right keywords and descriptive alt text can help improve your website’s ranking in search results and image packs. For example, the WordPress website uses an image with the alt text “Devices showing the WordPress mobile app.” The alt text describes what is pictured, which allows the image to show up in image search results for WordPress Mobile.
- Images are important for ecommerce websites. Not only do they help drive a sale, but images with the right keywords and descriptive alt text can help you show up in search results and image packs. For example, here’s an image from the WordPress website with the alt text “Devices showing the WordPress mobile app.” The alt text describes what’s in the picture, allowing it to show up in image search results for WordPress Mobile.
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is a set of practices that makes your site run more smoothly and load faster. For ecommerce sites in particular, focus on optimizing website speed. With all the text descriptions of products, accompanying images, and videos for product demonstrations, ecommerce site pages can take a while to load.
To keep browsers from getting frustrated and bouncing off your site, aim to compress all files so they load quickly. Studies show that conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of page-load time, so this is critical. Furthermore, clean code also impacts load times. Therefore, using the correct structured data can help you ensure your code is clean and easy for bots to read– which in turn improves SEO ranking. All these practices work together to create a better user experience.
4. Backlinks
Backlinks, also known as off-page SEO, are important for driving traffic to ecommerce sites. Seek out backlinks from sources with positive reputations that are authoritative and relate to what you offer. Some popular strategies for getting backlinks include reclaiming unlinked mentions of your business, getting mentioned in listicles, and using high-quality images that sites can use to link back to your content.
A creative way to get backlinks for an ecommerce site is through collaborations with influencers or affiliates. They can promote your products and share links to your site with their audience.
5. Optimize for Mobile
Optimizing your ecommerce site for mobile is essential to your SEO strategy. Mobile devices generate roughly half of all website traffic, so you need to make sure your site can adapt to whatever device a visitor uses. This means making sure your buttons resize on mobile, your images and graphics scale, your typography is effective, and your text size is legible. Really anything that can change based on the size of someone’s screen needs to be taken into consideration.
We implement these methods for clients that are looking to perform digital marketing for their products or e-commerce sites. Are you having difficulties working on this?
If so, we can help guide you to perform well in your work. Email us your preferred time, and we’ll send you a Google Meet link to help you out!
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