Want your online store to rank higher on search engines? Research shows that over a third of eCommerce traffic (37.5% exactly) comes from search. By upping your SEO, your online store can use this large source of traffic to its full advantage. Below are a few of the top strategies for eCommerce search engine optimization.
Make sure your site isn’t slow
The average online user doesn’t have much patience for slow loading webpages. In fact, 40% of us abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load.
A slow-loading webpage can also have an impact on your search rankings. As a result, it’s crucial to improve your site’s loading speed – not just to ensure that visitors stick around but to attract visitors in the first place.
There are many things that can affect page speed. Google Lighthouse and Pagespeed Insights can highlight a few of these basic issues. By fixing these, you could make your eCommerce site faster and increase its rankings. Some of the things that can cause a website or page to load slowly include:
- Unoptimized images
- Bulky code
- Too much flash content
- Too many ads
- Using a slow website host
Make sure you are taking advantage of fast website hosting services in order to improve your page speed.
Create detailed product descriptions
If your product descriptions are too short, it’s likely that customers won’t buy your products due to not getting them enough information. However, you could also be preventing customers from coming across your products in the first place by not taking advantage of the opportunity to include more keywords.
A detailed product description allows you to use a variety of keywords that could help to attract buyers to your product. By doing thorough keyword research, you can find the most effective keywords to optimize. Avoid keyword stuffing (using the same keyword too many times) as this will negatively affect your rankings – make sure that each description reads naturally. Try to also use small paragraphs and bullet points in favor of large walls of text.
Encourage customer reviews
Customer reviews don’t just have an impact on your company’s reputation but also your SEO. Keywords found in reviews can help search engines to more effectively rank your website.
For this reason, it’s worth encouraging customer reviews as much as you can. A great way for eCommerce sites to do this is to send an automated customer feedback email to every customer once they have received your product.
Use content to optimize long tail keywords
Long tail keywords account for roughly 70% of web searches, and so it’s worth integrating them into your content. These tend to be keyword phrases consisting of more than 3 words. They’re often more specific than short-tail keywords (e.g. ‘king size mattress for dust allergies’ instead of ‘king size mattress’ or ‘hypoallergenic mattress’).
How do I work out the best long tail keywords to incorporate into my content? There are a number of keyword research tools that you can use. Some of these tell you how often a keyword is searched, as well as how many sites are optimizing that keyword, to give you a good idea of whether you should optimize it. Such keywords can be integrated into blog content, product descriptions or even customer reviews.
Use internal links
Internal links are hyperlinks that lead to other pages on your website (opposed to external links, which lead to other websites). On top of helping visitors to navigate your site by possibly helping them to find related products, internal links are great for SEO. Turning a keyword into an internal link can sometimes help the page to which it leads rank higher for that search term.
Try not to use too many internal links per page as this could have the opposite effect on your search engine rankings. Make sure that every internal link is different. Finally, make sure that each link is relevant so that it doesn’t look forced.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Your online store needs to be mobile-friendly. More than half of online users nowadays are on a mobile device – if your website loads slowly or the text and buttons are too small when viewed on a mobile device, it could be a simple way to put off over 50% of your visitors. Mobile-friendliness is also factored into search engine algorithms, so your website could also rank lower as a result.
Make sure that there is a version of your site that is optimized for mobile users. Make sure that text is readable, make sure that buttons are large enough to tap with one’s finger and make sure that each page loads quickly enough.
