With the increasing use of smartphones and 4G & 5G network, online shopping has become the most convenient and essential part of our hectic lives. Many brick mortar retailers have jumped onto the online wagon but apart from big eCommerce portals like Amazon and Walmart, very few, have been successful in turning their digital presence profitable. The reason being that they miss on the most basic part of establishing their brand and driving traffic to their site. According to the latest survey, search engine optimization and content marketing outranks the contribution of paid ads and social media ads and with long term benefits, only a naive business owner can ignore the importance of google search results. Here we shall discuss some important SEO factors that are key in ranking eCommerce sites.
Site Architecture
Providing user experience should be the motto of every webmaster. This can be easily achieved by working on a simple site architecture, making every page reachable from any corner in not more than three clicks. This should be the bottom line of a user- friendly navigation system which also promotes internal-linking, another crucial element of site optimization. Further, it also helps in increasing page loading speed of the site. However, in a commerce site with thousands of sub-categories and products, it is essential to maintain a simple architecture with user friendly, keyword specific urls.
Site Design
This is also very important for engaging the visitors. Sites like Amazon and Apple attracting loads of traffic have white backgrounds with minimum design. The search bar is placed at a prominent location for easy navigation while importance is given to a large buy button. Each product should have high resolution images with alt tags and description explaining the usage and benefits of the product. Since google awards pages with large content (more than 1000 words), you can add most thorough answers about the product while working around three to four keywords only or your site could be penalized for keyword stuffing. You can also add a slider with relevant products so that the visitor does not need to navigate to other pages. The site should have mobile friendly design, so you do not miss on mobile users.
Keyword Research
This is the first step for optimizing your site. If you have a niche eCommerce site or running a marketplace, you should first find your target keywords. Google provides free tools like Google Keyword Planner, Adword and the Google search box itself to help you in finding phrases via which visitors can reach your site. You just need to type your basic keyword and wait for Google’s suggestion and then you can scroll down to find a list of LSI keywords (synonyms of your keywords). Tools like ahrefs and Semrush helps you spy on your competitor sites and track keywords for which they are ranking or running paid ads. You can then use them in the Title tag as well as in the url. Keyword research is an important task and needs concerted effort because you would not like wasting time and energy working on keywords with high difficulty nor ones with low difficulty and very low search volume. It is always prudent to choose keywords with volume above 200 and difficulty less than 5 in the initial stages of optimization, but this will again depend on the type of the product.
Content Marketing
It is important to add a blog to your website, you can call it a knowledge-base or help center but it is vital for SEO purpose. Informative content can drive traffic to your site. Link building for each product page is difficult for a large eCommerce site, but when you create authority back-links for your content, you can easily pass the link juice to the related product page via internal linking. Useful content helps establish your brand and yes, Google awards those sites that can indulge the viewers for longer duration. Simple link building techniques like forum posting and blog commenting where you share your insights can increase domain authority of the site.
While redesigning a website or making a website from scratch, it is important to perform a complete audit of the site. Technical SEO plays a pivotal role in eCommerce site optimization. Tools like ScreamingFrog are very handy in checking proper url redirects, broken links and missing tags. Many SEO experts also provide social media marketing as Google also counts social engagement for ranking.
With digital marketing strategies like integrated Facebook’s ads and Ad-words, you can expect immediate results but SEO alone can provide long term benefits and once the keywords start ranking in the first page, the process runs on autopilot and you can scale your ROI easily. Though a good site design and easy navigation results in a faster site but informative content can provide a better user experience. Implementing content marketing will help you climb the SERP faster and make you more visible in search engines as well will drive organic search traffic.
If you have an eCommerce store idea, you can get expert design as well as optimization help from eCommerce web developer.