Ecommerce is the most modern way of setting up your online business and touching out the wide range of the market without hurting your pocket badly. When it comes to eCommerce marketing, an essential aspect that is gaining power with the altering algorithm of search engines and the paradigm shift of shoppers is SEO. However, it is a gospel truth that Search Engine Optimization has to be carried irrespective of the type of business an entrepreneur owns. Companies vary in their nature, product, services and especially because of the multiple and diverse pages that they have on their websites. Optimizing all the diverse pages are of greatest significance to know the optimum way to reach your buyers with the most suitable and engaging content depending on where they belong from in the sales funnel.
Keeping in mind the services you offer and the requirements of your buyers you should strategize your SEO tactics. Understanding your market and your target customers’ needs is the most important factor that can help you to divide SEO tasks into sections and then determine how to present an eCommerce website if they wish to stay ahead of the competition and be successful in SEO.
1. Strategically Using Appropriate Keywords
Properly using keywords is one of the most imperative aspects when you plan your SEO campaign. You have to know and find out which keywords are highly used and can boost your website ranking.
Checklist:
• Have a staff member dedicated to performing extensive research on the types of keywords buyers would be typing into the search engines to land at your products and services. There are numerous keywords research tools that can foster you gather relevant keywords for your business.
• You may also keep an eye on how competitive your chosen keywords are. This will assist you to understand what your position in the competition is. There are tools that can aid you to understand the backlinks that your competition is building and captures your attention to the styles of content through which they are gaining more popularity, specifically on various social sites.
• Just make sure that each page of your website should be optimized for a primary keyword or phrase. You can adjust your products and services to make them tuned with at least one primary keyword.
• It’s not only the primary keywords that should be optimized for your pages but your pages should also contain secondary keywords that too on each page.
• You must optimize your home page as well as a landing page for your brand name. The final objective of this entire activity is that buyers must land on your website effortlessly when they type in your company’s name of keywords you have optimized your services and products for.
2. SEO Driven Page Content
Content is considered to be the king; this is what is actually seen on your web page. This concept is applicable to blogs, articles and all the content that your visitors and audiences view.
Checklist:
• Ensure that your primary keyword appears 2-5 times in the content of every page.
• Don’t overlook adding secondary keywords too, wherever required and fits in smartly.
• Add value to your content to make it gripping by including all kinds of resourceful pieces such as interviews, infographics, videos, surveys, case studies, and more.
3. Synchronizing Social Media
The goal of all businesses is to attract their audiences and social media is the most preferred platform that you can make use of. Just make sure that when visitors land on your website, design elements must get simpler for them to look at and share your content on social media. It will not only enhance your marketing strategy but also signifies a positive vibe to search engines about your website’s performance, which works great when it comes to SEO. On the other hand, social shares won’t influence the website’s ranking but it will definitely increase visibility which is crawled by search engines. Moreover, earning social shares can get eligible backlinks and gives you a boost across the web, supporting you to establish yourself as reliable and get SEO success.
Checklist:
• Integrate social sharing buttons on all the pages of your website. You should without fail to fix these buttons particularly for those pages which you wish your visitors to share. This is completely your own decision on which page you would want your visitors to share. The pages may count the “Thank You” page too. This will foster people to share what they purchased with their friends.
• Make sure your content is appealing enough to be shared which can include services and products pages, blog posts, infographics and more. Although you are selling products, you must keep writing blog posts too for advertising your company’s products and services and their advantages.
• Remember logos and links to your social media pages should be there on the homepage either in the header or footer. It will not only help out in your SEO, but it will also increase followers to your website by increasing your social audience.
4. Page Descriptions
The description of your page also termed as ‘meta’ descriptions, are visible below your page title on SERPs. This provides your readers with the gist of the page that has appeared in search engines and so it can also maximize CTR on your website. It is a chief aspect that is often unnoticed by eCommerce sites. They are majorly concerned about the description of their ads rather than the description beneath organic results.
Checklist:
• Ensure that your page descriptions do not exceed 150 characters.
• Add primary and secondary keywords in your description logically, without looking like keywords stuffed for good results.
• Write pertinent and personalized content for your page, service, and product descriptions avoiding any common descriptions.
5. Interlinking of Pages
Internal links are links seen on any page of your website directing visitors to another page on your website. Though it used to be an SEO success mantra in the past, now search engines are not accepting it and penalizing businesses for over-optimizing the internal links. How can you get the advantage of interlinking without looking suspicious and getting penalized by search engines?
Checklist:
• Don’t interlink all your pages only to your homepage. It should only be done if there is clear relevance among these pages. Instead, you should link any page to other appropriate pages than the homepage. Use your judgment and firmly follow the rule of not linking all your primary or secondary pages to the homepage.
• Make sure the anchor text of your backlink should not be similar to that of your page’s title to which it is linked. Simultaneously, it should not be keyword-stuffed as it might lead to a penalty. All your links should go well with the content naturally.
6. Significant Page URLs
Take care of your business URL as it is one of the most crucial aspects, but most businesses do not pay much heed to it. URLs of your business pages help search engines find and index the content on your pages. The full form of the URL is a ‘uniform resource locator’. In SEO, it is indispensable to ensure that your URLs are well-structured in order to be search engine friendly.
Checklist:
• Make an attempt to include your company or brand name to your domain name, if feasible.
• Make sure each word in your URL is separated by a hyphen.
• URL should be meaningful and prepared in a reasonable manner.
7. Distinctive Page Titles
This too carries a lot of importance in search engine optimization. The assigned titles to your web pages play a big role in SEO. It not only influences your search engine ranking but also draws online audiences and stimulates them to click.
Checklist:
• It should not exceed 70 characters.
• Every page title should be equipped with the primary keywords.
• Make it as unique as possible, specifically to your website.
• It shouldn’t be keyword stuffed; it should be naturally free-flowing.
8. Fast Page Load Time
Page load time is a critical aspect of user experience.
Did you know that if an eCommerce site is making $100,000 per day, even a 1-second page delay can potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales each year?
Hence, it is not only vital for SEO but also essential for mobile optimization as well as user experience. Poor load time results in a negative user experience which influences the eCommerce businesses. Longer load times means customer churn. Besides, Google and other search engines only love websites that users repeatedly visit and enjoy staying longer, which is only viable when your website loads faster. Websites with poor load time might also be penalized by the search engines.
Checklist:
• Make sure that your website pages load in less than 3 seconds.
• Optimize the image sizes so that does not increase the page loading time of your website. You should also check pixel sizes and resolution, which can be affected by the nature of your website and the bandwidth speed.
• Keep the ideal pixel size of your image as 325X550.
• Don’t forget to make use of the right type of images in a preferable format such as .gif, .png or .jpg.
• Turn off your trackbacks and pingbacks as they might lead to poor loading time.
• Have limited plug-ins installed as they can slow down your website?
• Refer to the Google Page Speed Insights tool to get an idea of how to improve the website loading time.
9. Unexpected Website Page Errors
When we talk about SEO pages errors are a big no-no. Google and other search engines hate it as they negatively impact the user experience. Website page errors might include broken links, 404 pages, outdated statistics and more.
Checklist:
• Sign up for Webmaster tools and keep observing for any page errors from time to time.
• Create necessary and valid redirects for error pages to take your visitor to their desired pages.
In a nutshell
Thus, the eCommerce company owner must optimize and do their SEO strategy keeping in mind the above-mentioned tips. It is unquestionably going to impact the overall website performance resulting in a great user experience and ROI.
