When you are running an ecommerce site, you know the competition is real tough out there, no what product you sell, and what market and consumer segment you target. Chances are there are already hordes of competitors doing the same thing and targeting the same customers.
So, how do you stand out from them? How can your store become more visible than theirs and people put more trust in your store and buy from you? How can you make your store a favorable brand for Google to look at and place at the top in the search results when people are searching for the products or services that you sell?
The answer to all this lies in one – Ecommerce SEO.
However, you still can’t expect to outshine your competitors and fare well against established and some new names if your eCommerce SEO strategy isn’t unique, personalized, customer-centric and much more impactful and competitive.
Why You Need Creative and Result-Oriented Ecommerce SEO Service?
“When the going gets tough, the tough gets going” –This adage definitely applies to ecommerce industry in the present age. If you have to stand out, you have to compete, and you have to do better than others.
Your SEO strategy needs to be right on toe – You need to understand your potential customers, their purchase journey, your competitors, and you need to adapt to all those aspects to ensure you stay ahead on all curves.
Over 80% of users search for products or services online. Even if you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can’t overlook the influence and expanse potential of your business reach and growth the digital space will provide you. Having a strong SEO strategy will definitely help e-commerce website appear at the top in the search results and drive traffic.
Users are likely to trust and click on websites that appear at the top of the search results, which increases the likelihood of conversions. And this underlines the significance of quality and result-specific SEO services for your business.
Here are a set of e-commerce SEO techniques to drive traffic and boost sales
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Keyword Research forE-commerce
Keyword research is the most crucial step to optimize your e-commerce website for search engines. Identifying the right keywords helps you target relevant search queries and drive organic traffic.
Keyword research starts by identifying the target audience and their interests, as well as the user-intent. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ubersuggest and Ahrefs can be of great help in identifying the target keywords.
For keyword selection, it is important that you pick both short-tail and long-tail ones. Long tail keywords are easy to target and also indicate higher purchase intent. However, keywords that promise high search volume should be in your list. But it can also mean more competition, but to counter the competition you will have to ride those tides.
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How to Prioritize Relevant Keywords
Suppose your store is engaged in selling shoes for men and women.
‘Casual shows online’, ‘high-heel boots’, ‘shoes store near me’; these are some of the common and popular keywords. Not only the selection, but prioritizing which keywords you need to target based on a number of factors that include relevance, search volume, competition, your business type (online only or online and in-store both), anduser intent.
Location- specific keywords also provide a good opportunity to capture local search traffic. It is important to remember that keyword research is an ongoing process that needs to be analyzed to adapt to the changing consumer behavior.
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Optimizing Product Pages for Search Engines
On-page optimization is crucial to the search engine ranking of e-commerce websites. And this means you have to optimize all the pages, starting from the home page to category pages and the product pages.
Whilst the strategy for optimizing home pages and to some extent category pages is standard, optimization of product pages needs a specific approach. This practice includes using the target keywords naturally in page titles, Meta descriptions, heading and content.
- The product descriptions need to be engaging and clear in defining the product and its features and functional use
- Ensure to use multiple, high-definition, different angle product images. Furthermore, the product images should be compressed to reduce the website loading speed
- You should optimize the image tags with right keywords and information
- Ensure to add customer reviews section
- Use call-to-action
- There should be ease and quick page-to-cart process
Remember that your product page acts as a landing page and this must be approached that way.
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Optimizing URLs, Meta Tags, and HeaderTags
It is important to make URLs search engine friendly. This includes using relevant keywords and making URLs descriptive. Also, remember to follow a standardized and Google-suggested URL structure.
On the other hand, the Meta tags and header tags should effectively reflect what the page is all about and what information it contains. Also, it is crucial to ensure that each page has unique meta tags and header tags.Using duplicate meta and header tags can negatively impact SEO.
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Mobile Optimization For Better User Experience
This is one of the most important and top-ranking strategies to improve your store’s online visibility and ranking potential. With the growing use of mobile devices for shopping, ensuring the mobile-friendliness ofecommerce websites is also crucial. Optimizing your website for mobile devices helps improve user experience which automatically leads to better conversions.
You should ensure that the page loads fast and consistently across all the devices, provides ease of navigation, smooth navigation and quick checkout functionality.
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Monitoring SEO Performance
Google Analytics and Search Console play a crucial role in optimizing user experience. While Google Analytics provides user behavior and engagement data, Google Analytics helps to assess website’s performance in search engines. These tools help understand and identify and address all the site’s SEO related issues as well as measure performance metrics.
This is an ongoing process that needs continuous monitoring to improve search engine rankings and user experience. Without monitoring and tracking your site’s SEO performance you won’t have quantifiable data to know what is going right and what more or new you have to do.
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E-commerce Content Strategy
When it comes to creating a content strategy for your e-commerce website, it is important to note that consistency and quality are key factors. If you have heard about Google’s E-E-A-T principle then you can pretty much understand what we are talking about. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are the key factors that define how valuable your content optimization and strategy is.
Creating informative tutorials, guides, and blogs can help establish authority and build trust. It is also important to evaluate and adapt your content strategy based on your target audience’s preference and purchase journey to meet the evolving needs of the audience.
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Link Building for E-Commerce
Link building is a crucial part of every search engine optimization. This was, is, and will remain (in the near future) one of the most important ranking factors that you should be implementing to the core. Getting high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites helps improve website authority. To build high-quality and relevant backlinks you can reach out to website owners and influencers, and it is important that you manually earn those links from top sources in your niche.
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Internal Linking
Internal linking has many benefits for any website. It is something that many webmasters or SEO professionals often overlook, but your eCommerce SEO service should not overlook it at all costs. It is as important as any other SEO strategy for your site’s growth and online visibility and positioning.
It helps distribute link juice and enhance user engagement. At the same time, internal linking improves indexing and crawling of web pages by providing a clear path for search engine crawlers. And not just for crawlers but it works to provide smooth and effective navigation to the users. This technique can also be strategically used to improve conversions and boost sales. Ensure that you are using internal linking to strategically link two relevant pages only, so that you are providing value to the users and search crawlers to assess more information on any subject or product. This all works to improve engagement as well as improving the site’s authority and credibility.
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Understand the Key Differences Between Traditional SEO and EcommerceSEO
Traditional and e-commerce SEO have many similarities. Several marketers or webmasters commit this mistake of applying the traditional SEO tactics to an ecommerce site’s optimization and marketing. But that can cause a big blunder. However, e-commerce SEO has specific requirements such as individual product pages, site navigation, and user reviews.
Right from focusing on commercial keywords to local SEO, to product page optimization, significance of product images and website load, there are several things that needs specialized approach when doing SEO of an ecommerce site.
Conclusion:
Search Engine Optimization is a set of techniques to increase organic traffic and boost sales. It can be a cost-effective way to boost sales compared to other types of marketing. Apart from boosting sales, the techniques also help build trust and credibility. And your approach for ecommerce marketing services should revolve around presenting a valuable and befitting store in front of the users and the search engines.
Interesting Related Article: “The eCommerce Game-Changer: Emergence of Online Order Tracking“