The best ways of marketing your eCommerce in the online world are endless. However, you might be tricked into using some of the backdated techniques that won’t fetch you any good results. Considered to be one of the primary digital marketing strategies, e-commerce SEO strategy comes as your best fitting choice to market and promote your eCommerce.
Thus, this further becomes quite essential to implement current SEO tactics for your eCommerce brand.
Here are a few of the most vital SEO tactics that are hand-picked to skyrocket your eCommerce business without risking your hard-earned money:
Getting your Website Architecture on Point!
The very first thing to ensure is to see whether your eCommerce store is present on HTTPS. This aids you in protecting your customer’s valuable information and at the same time is proves its credibility on Google. To make it even better, being an HTTPS link also enhances your SEO functionalities.
When it comes to understanding user experience, one of the most important things is the speed or the loading time of the website. If your eCommerce website takes a lot of time to load, it will repel your customers thereby increasing bounce rates massively. You can check your site loading speed from Google Page Insight.
With smartphones becoming an integral part of modern customers, making your eCommerce completely mobile-friendly and optimized is inevitable. You can check your site mobile friendliness from mobiletest.me
As mentioned above, SEO tactics are very important to boost your eCommerce brand. Backlinking is something that you just cannot afford to ignore. Building high quality and high domain authority links during the sale season is something that can actually bring you results worth every time and money invested.
Meta descriptions are used to augment CTRs on organic search. So, alone meta descriptions cannot rank your eCommerce website on Google but enhancing the click-through rates definitely can.
As an eCommerce brand, it is obvious that your website must have a lot of images, especially the maximum of them to be high-resolution images. Each of these images must have an alt tag that permits the bots to scan the alt text, and improves your SEO ranks.
Another very interesting and effective way of optimizing your eCommerce website architecture is the addition of breadcrumbs. Defining breadcrumbs would suggest them to be a secondary navigation scheme that enables user’s location in a site or web app. Showing breadcrumbs within the search index has proven to enhance visibility on Google.
Sometimes, the errors on an eCommerce website can get really disturbing for the buyers. This happens when you have a discontinued or an expired product. To avoid this, 301-redirecting the URL to a newer product page can be leveraged and will transfer the existing SEO values to the respective new page as well.
Structuring the URLs in a manner that is user-friendly is very important. While doing so, keep in mind that it must be Google friendly as well.
As an obvious element of eCommerce, images speak for your business and have to be of very high quality. This can lead to making your website slow and loading time also increases. To help this situation never arise, compressing your website’s images has to be a mandated action.
Make sure your title tag is optimized and is no more than 60-70 characters each. While executing this, keep the keyword in the beginning to grab the attention of your targeted users’ search terms.
Talking about user experience, one of the latest trends is to implementing live chat on your website. A live chat not just compliments your inclination of response towards your customers but also helps them to get their searches sorted with your assistance. It has also been proven, that with the implementation of live chat, the conversion rates have soared to a maximum of 50%.
As an SEO fundamental, do not miss to engineer and submit a robust sitemap and Robots.txt file to Google. The purpose of indexing properly Google gets quite sorted with this step.
One of the major challenges of any website is the issue of bounce rates irrespective of being an eCommerce or a simple brand presence website. For eCommerce, this even becomes much more relevant due to the sales factor being integrally embedded. With the proper mechanism of having internal linking done on your website, you can have loading time increased thereby making your ranking higher and better. This can also further aid in suggesting related products and services that have been purchased by other users in order to drive sales effectively.
Using keywords as a replacement for anchor texts is a smarter way to rank your page for a few of the specific terminologies.
With a few of the most notable SEO tactics explained above in regards to your website’s structure, there are more to know about further. With SEO being a broad and vast topic, it is important to know about the tactics in respect to it its core branches. When we talk about SEO, we speak, the primary two divisions that are set forth are on-page and off-page. Both on-page and off-page SEO plays an extremely vital role to help your eCommerce get maximum visibility and better ranking on any web page, primarily Google.
On-Page SEO Tactics for eCommerce Website
Let us first take proceed with few of the most effective e-commerce SEO strategies for on-page that will enhance your eCommerce brand on Google.
Keyword Listing
The foremost and most important action of SEO tactics for your eCommerce would be the extensive formulation of the keyword list. Keywords are defined as common search terms which the users or customers input in a web search page to get their desired results in respect to that. Keywords are vital elements and stand out as base components for any SEO activities.
The formulation of the keywords list will take through research involving the knowledge of a few of the most common terms used by customers with respect to your eCommerce industry. For example, if the common term is ‘best Indian spices’, you can take this keyword and use it as ’best Indian spices online sale’. Get relevant terms with regards to the products and services you offer on your eCommerce website.
With the use of any paid or free SEO tool, you can check the demand and search frequency of these keywords. Make sure to have at least 40 – 150 keywords listed for each product or services. Once your keyword list is ready for implementation, evaluate the variations of those being long keywords and add to each main page including the product and category pages.
Un-traditionalizing SEO search terms
Customers these days are very smart and with frequent use of the web they can predict your moves quite well. In terms of using SEO search terms or rather keywords while formulating product descriptions, consider having a very conversational tone. Phrases like, ‘I want to buy, ‘I want to do, ‘Where can I buy…’ can be very smartly used.
Landing Pages
The use of landing pages is like a ritualistic action when it comes to ticking the SEO checklist. Speaking of eCommerce, landing pages becomes very crucial. ECommerce giants will invest heavily in building highly responsive and robust landing pages and use for its multiple promotional activities. This not only fetches you higher rankings on various search engines but also gives productive results during peak sales time. You can also leverage landing for specific promotions as well.
The best part about creating and having landing pages is that it does not have an expiry limit. It will exist and remain for eternity even after the promotional activity is over and continue to gain your essential important link juice from being an old and authoritative link. This phenomenon is often regarded as Trust Flow (TF), and Page Authority (PA).
Product Descriptions
Ensuring optimized content for each product page is a very vital step to keep things on the right track while executing SEO tactics for your eCommerce website. To do this in the right way, there are a few sets of instructions that need to be followed principally. Each product description is written must be within the word limit range of 300-800 only. If the product is listed under the high-selling category, the description can stretch till 1000 as well.
Important specifications or features must be separated in multiple columns and must be placed in accordance with a significant place within the product page. Ensuring internal links between category and product pages must be also checked simultaneously and addition of at least 3-5 links within the product description must be on executed.
Off-page SEO Tactics for eCommerce Websites
Link Building
To accelerate off-page SEO tactics of your eCommerce website, initiate the basic level link building activities for the offers you are providing currently. This can include blog comments, citations, web 2.0 links, posting on a question and answer forums and mandatorily social bookmarking.
Such submission sites might not give you the desired link juice you are looking out for, but at the same, these mandated to gain high rankings for your eCommerce website. When you assess your website’s search rankings, it will give you noticeable impacts for sure.
One of the critical points to keep in mind here is that Google algorithms are subjected to frequent fluctuations and can affect the authority of your website. In order to sustain good rankings, here are points that you can follow:
Try linking the third-party websites with your main landing pages and can consider embedding codes to get your products linked by bloggers who will be writing about your brand.
Try to formulate separate blogs each of which will be subjected to reviewing your website’s products. This will lead to the creation of a Private Blog Network (PBN).
Paid Partnerships
Affiliate marketing is one of the coolest trends in digital marketing. Paid partnerships with noted affiliates in the market can fetch you a real boost for your eCommerce business. The affiliates will work you in terms of very minimal charges or commission and help to get your products or services sold. Leveraging affiliate marketing during peak sales window will not burden you with thoughts of revenue or sales returns. Affiliates can do their job pretty well with an encouraging percentage of ROI for your brand.
Blogger Collaborations
One of the primary components of off-page SEO is e-commerce content marketing. Be it article submissions, or guest blogging the venture of content marketing serves very productively for eCommerce brands. To do this in an accelerated way, you can consider reaching out to bloggers who are writing niche content for the industry you deal with.
Collaborations with the bloggers will help your products and services included in their blogs that are read by countless people on the web. The most prospective part about outreaching to blogger sand leveraging from content marketing is that you can ask for backlinks. At times, few bloggers won’t be agreeing to mention your brand but will be fine with giving out backlinks to your website.
Now that you have quite a bit of transparency on how to manage on-page and off-page tactics for your eCommerce website, you need to stretch further to know the technical aspects of SEO. As the term SEO is not a definite concept and belongs to a cluster of technicalities, you must cover all the aspects in order to leave no stones unturned for skyrocketing your eCommerce website.
Simply putting the keywords and follo9wing the do’s and don’ts of SEO won’t fetch you your desired results. All factors once determined to be on their right track, will get you results that will exceed your expectation bars. After all, you would be looking forward to giving your users the best experience on the eCommerce website. And, that’s what Google eventually cares about too!
Technical SEO Tactics for eCommerce Websites
Execution of SEO Audit
One of the primary actions of doing technical SEO is a thorough audit. To do an SEO audit, you can use the Google Analytics and Google Search Console primarily. This will help you to get a complete overview of the current standing and quality of your eCommerce website.
Further, this will also help you to leverage in creating a task list that outlines the focus areas of on-page and off-page SEO. From result determination to locating the error spots, you get it all done swiftly with extensive insights from executing an SEO audit.
In order to do a spotless SEO Audit, there are few mandatory steps to follow. Consider the below mentioned critically:
Website Crawl
The primary action of executing technical SEO is putting your eCommerce website on a crawl. Crawling your website will reveal insights that show if any broken links are present on your website, locate missing alt text or metadata and encircle out duplicate or thin content. While doing SEO for your eCommerce website you must have knowledge of the things mentioned above to be unhealthy for your website.
Ensuring single browsable version of your eCommerce Website
To make it certain that your website has a single browsable version (which is legally accepted by Google) is one of your primary objectives for executing technical SEO. Multiple ways can be used to link or browse through your site. However, only one domain must be browsable and the rest can be 301 redirected to the canonical version. It is advisable to select the HTTPS version since it is an encrypted and secured version.
Also, this will be essential for enhancing user experience along with Google’s ranking algorithm. Since it’s an eCommerce that has direct bridging with payment gateways, making your website encrypted and secured is very vital. Your users will automatically have confidence in buying from your website along with having faith in your brand credibility.
Evaluating Website’s Home Page’s SEO
Going back to verifying your home page’s technicalities is a vital step while doing technical SEO. For this, the first thing to evaluate is to see whether the home page includes well-formulated and clickable titles. Next, you must ensure the meta descriptions to be customized and optimized for maximising click-through rates. While doing this, keep a check on H1 tag and sub-headers (H2, H3, etc.).
Crawl Report Analysis
By the time, your crawl report is almost finished; you must take a trip back to ensuring all the things have been properly implemented. Be it, Client Errors (4xx)” (aka broken links), missing or duplicate content, duplicate URLs, missing alt text and missing or duplicate meta descriptions.
Verification of Unique Content
Placing duplicate content on Google is considered to be serious misconduct for your ECommerce website. This can also have the legal repercussion of facing a penalty ever since Google’s Panda algorithm update. Check the uniqueness of your content from any paid SEO Tool and analyse the same. Once you are done with the analysis, you will a complete list of URLs containing duplicate content along with a risk factor percentage. Clicking on the URLs will take you to the sites where the duplicate content exits and you can also charge the concerned person for the same
Self-Conducted Google Search
This is a very important step to consider. On priority search the Google web page with your brand name. If you are not a brand new business, your name should pop up first on the search results page. In case, it does not, it might be considered there are few things that haven’t gone the right way. In other cases, if your name is not on the first few result links, consider doing the below-mentioned steps:
- Crafting a few strong, branded links
- Listing some citations on business directories
- Listing on Google My Business is mandatory
- Social media coverage of your website must be present and active
The next step of self-conducting a Google search of your brand is to initiate a search by typing “site” before your domain name. For example, “site:besteCommercebrand.com”. this will give instant results on how many pages of your eCommerce website are indexed so far.
One vital point to note here is that the URLs count must be fewer than shown in your crawl report. If the number is exceeded this might be a sign for junk pages being categorized. Such as blog category pages, product or site searches or tag pages.
Ideally, these pages should be noindexe and will have no content present on them.
Search Traffic Analysis
With the site being updated and crawl reports run properly, one of the essential action element is to have a comprehensive look at the Google Analytics report from day one. Thus will give you clarity on what potential your existing eCommerce website is having on the web and what is the traction happening.
After the Google analytics being critically analysed with in-depth information being pit under scrutiny, the next step is to run the website on Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools). To do this, step one would be going to Crawl -> Crawl Errors to locate any errors that Google indexing robots might be having while crawling your website.
Analysing Backlink Profile
The backlink profile is all about the links that are being currently pointed to your website. Doing this is vital to make sure that no spammy links are coming to your website for which your site can get penalized. While conducting an in-depth analysis for your backlink profile, you must pay attention to three crucial elements of, anchor text (the text that is linked to your site), sleazy links and broken backlinks.
Improving Site Speed
Additionally with crawl speed, comes another very important action of site speed. It is something that has a direct relation with a site’s competence to rank and have a robust UX. As per a study on eCommerce websites, site speed has been accountable for 60-70% of annual purchases. This clearly demarcates that if your eCommerce website is way too slow or buffers more than 1-2 mins on each page, the cut down rate of your purchases grows massively.
To help your website gain adequate speed and to know what errors causing to increase the load time, consider going to Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool and insert in your URL. This will give you an average score, based on smartphone and desktop devices and would also suggest countable steps in order to enhance your site’s speed. As a general note, compressing high-resolution images can help to speed up your website’s loading time alone.
The Bottom Line
Thus, with such a comprehensive and thorough detailed explanation of the latest eCommerce SEO tactics to follow 2019, it is expected to not leave any room for doubts. All the above-mentioned pointers in regards to site structure, on-page and off-page SEO and technical SEO are in alignment with Google’s latest algorithm and thus are subjected to bring you productive results if followed properly. So why wait anymore, get on with the SEO tactics and let the revenue scores of your eCommerce soar high!
