A lot of people plan to sell their products online. However, the average success percentage of the e-commerce store is 10%. What keeps those 90% from being successful is the inability to make themselves appear in the search engine results with digital marketing.
If you are planning to sell your products
or services online through a website, then people must be able to find you on
the internet, especially via search engines.
In order to get your products in front of
the right audience, you must optimize your pages for search engines. Follow
these tips and strategies to improve your website ranking on the search engines
with relevant keywords.
1. Conducting Thorough Keyword Research
Keyword research is the most important
step towards search engine optimization. You must identify some keywords for your products that
can be used to build traffic towards different pages.
- Keep an eye on competitors and use
tools to analyze the keywords they are ranking against.
- Look for keywords with higher
search volume. More volume means a better chance to get more visitors to your
page.
- Go with keywords that have lower
keyword difficulty. There is a greater opportunity to rank for these keywords .
- Make sure that the keyword is related to your selected/working niche of products.
- Choose long-tail keywords, as the conversion ratio in long-tail keywords is better.
2. Website Hierarchy & URL Structure (site map)
Website hierarchy plays an important role in distributing link juice to your website. It is vital that all of your pages are connected to the home page.
The home page should be at the top menu, which is further followed by main categories and subcategories. Under subcategories, there are product pages and services.
The same should reflect in your website's sitemap. An XML sitemap should be created that includes all the pages with the division of categories.
3. Unique Product Descriptions
Search engines always value unique content with improved readability. Most of the time, e-commerce website owners do not focus on creating unique product descriptions for similar sorts of products. This could be your biggest mistake and could cost you the ranking in SERPs.
Add details about your products, even the
minor details can help you rank better in the search engines. Details such as
the weight, the dimensions, the color, and the materials used in the product
may not seem important to you, but a consumer looking for specific information
will be seeking this out.
Make sure your product descriptions answer All possible questions they may have about your product to deter them from bouncing off your page. Make sure all the descriptions and content on the website are unique. You can use tools like CopyScape to check for uniqueness.
4. Canonical Tags
Always use canonical tags on all your
pages. In e-commerce websites, most of the content is similar from one another
page. For instance, disclaimers, guarantees, menu, site navigation, etc., are
the same on all the pages. To avoid Google penalizing it for duplication, you
should use a canonical tag.
5. Product Page Optimization
Another crucial step is to optimize your
product page for SEO. You must create unique titles and descriptions regarding
your product to help search engines understand the page contents. Title and
description are important as Google uses them to showcase your page.
Moreover, add related keywords within the
content of the page. Do not forget to add images with suitable alt-tags. Create
some internal links on the page so it can be accurately connected with other
pages of your website.
6. Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are crucial for any
product-based website. Users always look at reviews before making a purchase. In
addition, search engines value a product website that has a review section.
You can also add a section under every
product to write a review. Moreover, you can collectively show all the reviews
from your various products under one umbrella on a separate page for reviews.
7. User-Friendly Website
Since 2018, Google has been prioritizing
mobile-friendly designs. Since most e-commerce website users now use mobile for
their searches, Google advises you to build a mobile-first design for your
website.
Make sure that each and every image,
text, header, and menu item are working perfectly on both mobile and desktop.
8. Optimize Load Time
The best way to optimize the load time of your website is to check it via Google PageSpeed Insights. You can check for several issues your website is facing, including server response time, largest content paintful, lazy loading, etc.
Moreover, with the help of Lighthouse, you can analyze the javascript running on your page and reduce unnecessary scripting that may be slowing down your page. This is exactly what we did with the coursework help page.
9. Add Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are basically a path that
allows users and bots to understand where they are currently on a website and
how far are they from the homepage.
You can simply enable breadcrumbs for the
Yoast SEO plugin in the WordPress setting. They normally appear at the top of
any post or page.
Breadcrumbs represent the hierarchy of
any particular page and are linked with the homepage.
10. Backlink Creation
If you want your website to rank sooner,
you will need to include backlinks.
Backlinks are basically links from your
website to other websites that help increase the authority of your page.
However, you should take care of the following points while creating backlinks
for your e-commerce website:
- Choose a high-quality website to get a backlink from. Check the authority of the website via a tool like Ahrefs or MOZ.
- Look for quality rather than quantity. Avoid getting links back from directories and block comments. Look for guest posts and contextual links.
- Choose suitable keywords for creating backlinks. For instance, Crowd Writer uses buy essay online for their corresponding page. Use your brand name as a keyword where it makes sense.
- Do not create too many backlinks in a single month. You need to be careful about how many backlinks you are creating. Keep it at a normal pace. A total of 2 to 3 contextual backlinks for a page is enough considering the age of your page.
11. SEO Analysis
Along with any strategy you are using to
optimize your website and pages for search engines, you should always keep a
deep analysis of how your pages are performing.
You can use the following tools to
analyze your website:
- Google Search Console to check for the keywords, pages, and their position in the particular region. You can also look for errors on your website.
- Google Analytics to keep an eye on the visitors and their statistics.
- Google Pagespeed Insight and Lighthouse to analyze your website performance and increase the loading speed.
- Ahrefs to analyze complete on-page and off-page planning of your website.
There are many more tools like MOZ,
SEMRush, Ubersuggest, etc., that can help you analyze your website and improve
it with numerous suggestions.
Conclusion
SEO for e-commerce is a long process, but
it is equally beneficial. It takes time, but generates a higher ROI. You will
need to be consistent with your strategies.
Start with the keyword research, and move
on to content creation, on-page SEO, backlink usage, technical SEO, speed
optimization, etc.
Make sure to create a mobile-first design
and always think from the readers' point of view.
The above-mentioned points will surely help you optimize your e-commerce website for search engines and rank them in the SERPs.