What are the SEO Best Practices for eCommerce Sites?

Increasing traffic to your ecommerce website is one of the finest methods to reach out to new consumers – but that’s easier said than done. You could use digital marketing, but with Product Listing Ads (PLAs) growing more expensive by the day, engaging in keyword bidding wars with larger ecommerce firms is simply not possible.

However, there’s one saviour: SEO. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the greatest ways to reduce your reliance on sponsored channels, rank higher in Google searches, and increase organic traffic to your website.

There are around 20 million ecommerce sites on the internet, and it is estimated that these online platforms will account for more than 90% of all purchases in the next 15-20 years. This should give you some insight into how companies eBay, Amazon and others like them became market giants in such a short time. 

But the question is: What matters most today in dominating the ecommerce market, aside from having high-quality items and excellent customer service? Well, your online store must be at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), and this is where ecommerce SEO comes in.

While SEO is beneficial for all types of websites, it’s especially beneficial for ecommerce businesses. This is because, when it comes to online shopping, most people use a search engine rather than going to a specific ecommerce platform to get what they’re looking for. As a result, it’s critical to get your ecommerce website at the top of search engine results so that it can reach a niche audience before your competitors, resulting in increased traffic and higher conversion rates.

And if you can’t get your website on the first page of Google, you may as well forget it. As the saying goes, “The safest place to hide a corpse is on Google’s second page.” 

With this in mind, we’ve compiled a list of the top 7 SEO methods for ensuring the success of your ecommerce site.

Find Relevant & Optimised Keywords

When it comes to ecommerce SEO, keywords are the dominant player, and you must be extremely careful and attentive when searching for keywords for your ecommerce platform. 

Keywords that are most relevant to your items should be used. So, before using a keyword for a product or category page, you must first determine its search volume, cost-per-click, user’s purpose for choosing that specific keyword, and other considerations. You can also look at a rival’s website to get keyword ideas. Long-tail keywords are usually preferred in SEO, since they frequently match user intent and enhance conversion rate.

For example, if your website sells men’s clothing, you might use keywords like “red cotton t-shirt for boys”, “blue round-necked men’s shirt”, and so on. There are a variety of keyword research tools available to assist you in finding specific and relevant keywords for your site.

In addition to mentioning the keywords in product names, descriptions, and other sections of your website, you can also use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords on your website. But don’t try to overload or stuff these keywords into the web page – it might have the opposite effect of what you’re trying to do.

Keyword optimisation is frequently regarded as one of the most difficult tasks in search engine marketing. Because keyword optimisation is tough, most website owners, marketers and bloggers don’t devote enough effort to it. This is odd, given that keyword optimisation is the most crucial part of SEO. You will not be found by consumers if you do not choose and employ keywords that your consumers are searching for. That translates to no traffic, no purchases, and no money.

Establish an Easy Site Architecture

Navigating through your ecommerce website and the layout of its category or product web pages are all aspects of its architecture. The architecture should be user-friendly and simple for both consumers and search engines. Keep one important criteria in mind when designing the site architecture: Each product page should be just three (or fewer) clicks away from the homepage.

Focus on On-Page SEO

The most important part of ranking a website in the search engine results pages has always been on-pThe most important part of ranking a website in the search engine results pages has always been on-page SEO. When our SEO company talks about on-page SEO in the context of an ecommerce site, we’re usually talking about the process of optimising product and category pages to rank higher for specific keywords and get more traffic and conversions.

However, while the on-page SEO methods for an ecommerce site are the same as any other website, there are a few additional techniques you should consider. Some of the most significant on-page SEO techniques for an ecommerce site are listed below:

• Use optimised meta titles and descriptions.
• Use short and keyword-rich URLs.
• Mention Product descriptions and include main & LSI keywords.
• Add Schema Markup.
• Do internal linking.

Meanwhile, incorporating authentic, relevant, high-quality photographs or other infographics might also help you boost your results. Consider the search engine ranking and the user experience while implementing on-page SEO for your ecommerce site since a good user experience will keep your audience coming back to your website.

Write for Humans – Not for Search Engines

Although we’ve emphasised the need for optimising your ecommerce business for search engines, everything you do with your online store should ultimately benefit your customers. After all, your customers are not robots! A paragraph of keyword-stuffed, meaningless material may assist your ranking slightly, but it will not help your conversion rate.

Hiring an expert copywriter who can walk the delicate line between material that people want to read and content that search engines want to rank is your best chance. If you can’t afford a copywriter, you might try to master the art yourself by attending online seminars or following tutorials.

Technical SEO for eCommerce Stores

Technical SEO is all about repairing problems with your ecommerce site so that you don’t lose visitors. It’s all about deleting duplicate information, correcting broken links, and removing unnecessary pages from your business. To implement some technical SEO for your website, you should ideally utilise a programme like Ahrefs.

Create Unique Product Descriptions for Each Product

This is the most underappreciated aspect of ecommerce SEO. And it may be acceptable in certain circumstances – such as when an ecommerce site has several goods in the same category, making it hard to provide a unique description for each product – but using the same descriptions, on the other hand, raises concerns about content duplication, which lowers your site’s ranking and, as a result, traffic and conversion rates. Therefore, creating an appealing and unique description for each product is pretty essential.

Improve Site Loading Speed

Let’s assume that you’re looking for a watch, so you use a search engine to find it online. But the first ecommerce site on the SERP takes a lot of time to load, and you’re getting impatient. What would you do in this situation? You will almost certainly shut down that site and move on to another.

A slow-loading website may cost you a substantial number of clients, regardless of whether you have high-quality merchandise, crucial services, or other standard features. And apart from the user’s bad experience, search engines also consider site speed as one of the factors in their ranking algorithms, suggesting that the faster your site loads, the higher it’s ranking on the search engine.

High-resolution photos are a major cause of slow ecommerce site loading times. Since ecommerce platforms rely heavily on product photographs, it’s not recommended that image quality be compromised in any way. Instead, you can optimise the pictures and lower the file size without sacrificing image quality.

Build High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinking has long been thought to be the most genuine and beneficial SEO strategy for a website. And in the case of ecommerce SEO, it becomes much more significant because if your platform is recommended to the public by some reliable sources, it may result in a large amount of traffic to your website. 

When creating backlinks, keep in mind that the third-party resource must be reputable. The linking should be related to your topic, since spammy or irrelevant links may result in your site being penalised. You may start building backlinks for your ecommerce site by using infographics on social media platforms, directory submissions, and Q/A platforms (such as Quora).

Guest blogging is ideal for generating high-quality backlinks because search engines reward it. You can submit blogs related to your niche, but you must guarantee that the provided material is valuable to the consumers in addition to your link building.

Another standard method for obtaining backlinks is to search for expired backlinks related to your industry. You can locate these websites with broken links and contact the person in charge to offer them an alternate link (yours).

Clean Up Broken Links and Optimise Your 404 Page

Broken links have traditionally been viewed negatively in SEO. They have an effect, not just on the performance of your website, but also on the consumer experience. When you interlink with broken product pages and categories, you are effectively halting consumers in their tracks. Some may stay and navigate to new pages, while others will most certainly exit your site altogether.

If you have an SEO tool, such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz, you can simply find all of the broken links on your site and take the time to fix them. It’s as simple as unlinking them from wherever they’re linked. If you have a Shopify store, you may use one of several broken link applications to automatically resolve them.

However, it’s not the end of the world if you miss a few faulty links. This is where a well-optimised 404 page comes in handy, as it can be used to direct consumers to other areas of your website where they may find new items.

Maintain Site Security

Because an ecommerce platform handles millions of customers’ data and hundreds of transactions every day, it’s important to keep the website secure. Furthermore, as the number of cyberattacks on ecommerce platforms grows, such as the theft of financial information and account hacking, customers become more sceptical and want a more secure website to land on. 

The first and most important thing you must check is whether your ecommerce site is protected by HTTPS and SSL certification. Search engines definitely consider the security of your site while ranking it on SERPs.

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) allows the browser to establish a secure connection to the server on a standard port, while SSL (Secure Socket Layers) provides an additional layer of security for data encryption.

Furthermore, you should always back up the site data so that if it is lost or damaged, you can quickly restore it without interrupting users. You can also urge your users to change their account passwords on a regular basis to lessen the risk.

eCommerce SEO Is an Ongoing Process

It’s important to optimise an ecommerce store. However, if you lack sufficient experience, you should always hire a professional. 

Some of the most important SEO methods for an ecommerce site may help you rank higher in the SERPs, resulting in more traffic and increased conversion rates. So, don’t pass up any opportunities to conquer the ecommerce world by optimising your web platform!

We recommend the best practices for ecommerce SEO listed above, so that business owners may improve their rankings and conversions while also avoiding search penalties. You should now know some basics about top SEO techniques for ecommerce sites and how to implement them on your website. So what are you waiting for? Contact the best SEO agency to assist you and Let’s grab this (SEO) bull by the horns!