11 SEO Tips for eCommerce Stores
For an eCommerce store to thrive, it must consistently attract new customers. eCommerce SEO enables your store to rank high in organic search results for certain keywords relating to your products and services. This increases website traffic. With highly targeted traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs), you might not need to spend any money on paid ad campaigns that attract the same results. When your store ranks high on SERPs, visitors are likely to trust that your brand is legit, increasing conversion rates and leading to increased sales revenue. SEO (search engine optimization) helps improve your site's user experience by ensuring it's easier to navigate, more intuitive, and faster.
With eCommerce SEO, you don’t need a significant marketing budget. Implementing best SEO practices can help you rank on organic SERPs easily. It’s also an excellent way to promote your offering while increasing brand awareness among prospects actively looking for your products or services.
Implementing eCommerce SEO can be challenging, especially if you don’t have the knowledge or understanding. Here are 11 SEO tips for eCommerce stores.
1. Use relevant keywords
Keyword research is essential for eCommerce SEO success. An effective keyword research strategy can help your store leverage the benefits of SEO. It lets you identify the search terms users use to find your store. To find the best keywords, consider search volume, keyword difficulty, and search relevance. Before starting your keyword research, know where your store ranks in relevant searches. This will direct your efforts toward updating old content or creating new one. Use a keyword tracker to ascertain your position in relevant searches.
To attract prospects to your site, consider search intent to ensure you're ranking for the right keywords and attracting the right target audience. Search intent can be commercial, informational, navigational, or transactional. You can then do your own research or research your competitors to find target keywords.
Once you identify a few, check if there are long-tail keyword options you can add to create blog posts and product pages. Consider spying on your competition to see the keywords they’re ranking for and find ways to beat them.
2. Create a search index for your products
A search index allows users to conduct fast, accurate searches on your site. With this index, search engines don't have to crawl thousands of pages, making it possible to conduct searches in seconds. A search index boosts your store's click-through rates and user experience.
Users anticipate instant results whenever they type a search query. Search indexes allow search queries to be processed without server resources, producing quicker results. When creating a product database for properly functioning search indexes, clean your data, utilize convertible measurement units, add inventory stock data, consider product variants, ensure products aren’t duplicated, and promote multilingual eCommerce.
3. Optimize product pages
Optimized product pages are designed to be found through search engines while converting browsers into customers. Product page optimization is usually aimed at getting your store on top of SERPs. Using top-quality photos to sell products, including product-relevant keywords in product descriptions and page title tags, ensuring good image spacing, sharing customer reviews and testimonials, incorporating video views and descriptions, and ensuring consistent logo placement and branding can help optimize your product pages for good visibility results. This increases the possibility of more conversions and higher search results.
4. Ensure a user-friendly website
User-friendly eCommerce websites make it easy for visitors to find information with any device. A user-friendly site is easy to use, meaning users will spend more time interacting with it, leading to conversions and improving sales. It creates a positive user experience, which is good for SEO. It’s also great for your brand’s credibility, customer loyalty, and reputation.
Your eCommerce store should have quality videos and photos, an effective search, accurate product descriptions, promote related products, and be branded. A user-friendly site should have a fast page load time, be easy to navigate, have clear policies, and be accessible on any device, including mobile phones. It should have a seamless checkout experience to reduce shopping cart abandonment, and the design shouldn't distract users from shopping.
5. Address duplicate content
Duplicate content includes content blocks that are fully identical or quite similar. While Google doesn't penalize duplicate content, it filters it, which may result in low rankings for your site pages. To avoid internal duplicate content concerns, ensure every page on your website has different headings from other site pages, and a distinct meta description and page title in the page's HTML code.
Your product descriptions should also be unique for better ranking. You can also prevent external duplicate content issues by avoiding content scraping and considering content syndication. If your content-rich web pages' rankings are decreasing, check whether your content has been duplicated and find ways to manage it.
6. Fix broken links
Broken links negatively impact user experience, which is a ranking element. While fixing these links can be time-consuming, it helps improve the user experience while ensuring better site rankings. You can find all the broken links on your site using site audit tools such as Google Search Console. If you have a misspelled URL, correcting it should be simple. For a 4xx internal link, consider why the link is broken. If it's because you moved it to another URL, set up a redirection for it.
Remove the link if it's due to a service or product page you no longer offer. When addressing 5xx internal links, check the hosting provider or your server because they could be the source of these problems. If you’re experiencing 5xx and 4xx outbound links, it could be because the site you linked shut down or no longer exists. In such cases, you can link to other sources or remove the link to solve the issue.
7. Optimize your store for mobile devices
Around 76% of American adults shop online with their smartphones. This implies that making your eCommerce store mobile-friendly is essential for its success and growth. Users also expect to shop on your site using their phones. If they can't, your user experience will be hurt, and you risk losing potential customers. Optimizing your store for mobile improves user experience while ensuring happy customers. Mobile-friendliness is a vital ranking factor. If your store can serve mobile and desktop users, search engines might favor you, increasing your rankings.
If you're looking to make your eCommerce site mobile-friendly, consider avoiding pop-ups, optimizing menu navigation, adding a search function, ensuring readable text, optimizing videos and images for mobile, and accepting various payment methods. You should also provide a responsive web design, position CTAs clearly, add viewport meta tags, and make contact details easily accessible.
8. Increase website speed
Your eCommerce store’s speed directly impacts search engine rankings, conversion rates, user experience, and repeat business. Increasing your site’s speed improves user experience and helps you rank higher on SERPs. When looking to increase website speed, finding a fast eCommerce platform is essential because it increases conversion rates and revenue while reducing bounce rates, average server response time, and average page load.
Fast, reliable hosting and content delivery networks (CDN) can boost store speed. You can also reduce page size, compress data, monitor site speed, avoid redirects, state image dimensions, and combine several files to ensure lesser round trips for improved site speed.
9. Create content
Content is a vital SEO strategy element you should leverage. Regularly posting valuable content drives organic traffic, increases site rankings, boosts customer trust, and positions you as a niche expert. User-generated content, how-to blog posts, glossary pages, webinars, responses to FAQs, product videos, and brand news are content ideas you may consider. Knowing your audience can help you learn the pain points and significant concerns.
With this information, you can create content focusing on these issues and provide products or services that help solve them. Once you have content ideas, use buyer personas to know your customers and their preferred content. Create a content calendar and publish relevant content for different purchase cycle phases. Measure your results and adjust accordingly.
10. Invest in link building
Link building is an SEO ranking element. Quality links indicate that your site is credible, relevant, and authoritative. Backlinks also determine how your store ranks for specific keywords. For effective link-building, consider publishing link-worthy content, including educational content, how-to- blog posts, entertainment, research that the industry finds beneficial, and trends and data.
Add an FAQ section, directories, and fix broken links and 404s, and remove redirects. Consistently publishing new content and introducing new ideas about your industry can help you become a thought leader. This may result in people trusting your content and using it as proof. It can also help improve your rankings on search engines.
11. Leverage local SEO
Local SEO increases your store’s visibility in location-specific searches, resulting in improved click-through rates and increased brand awareness. It aims to gain top rankings in local SERPs to boost traffic and increase sales.
You can optimize your eCommerce store for local SEO by claiming your Google My Business Profile listing, building local citations, and ensuring your name, address, and contact details are consistent over the internet. Adding schema markup to your store, posting customer reviews, building links from reputable local brands and sites, optimizing for mobile devices, and boosting your on-page SEO can help optimize your eCommerce site for local SEO.
Endnote
Online businesses need SEO to thrive. Implement these eCommerce store SEO tips to improve conversions and increase
With eCommerce SEO, you don’t need a significant marketing budget. Implementing best SEO practices can help you rank on organic SERPs easily. It’s also an excellent way to promote your offering while increasing brand awareness among prospects actively looking for your products or services.
Implementing eCommerce SEO can be challenging, especially if you don’t have the knowledge or understanding. Here are 11 SEO tips for eCommerce stores.
1. Use relevant keywords
Keyword research is essential for eCommerce SEO success. An effective keyword research strategy can help your store leverage the benefits of SEO. It lets you identify the search terms users use to find your store. To find the best keywords, consider search volume, keyword difficulty, and search relevance. Before starting your keyword research, know where your store ranks in relevant searches. This will direct your efforts toward updating old content or creating new one. Use a keyword tracker to ascertain your position in relevant searches.
To attract prospects to your site, consider search intent to ensure you're ranking for the right keywords and attracting the right target audience. Search intent can be commercial, informational, navigational, or transactional. You can then do your own research or research your competitors to find target keywords.
Once you identify a few, check if there are long-tail keyword options you can add to create blog posts and product pages. Consider spying on your competition to see the keywords they’re ranking for and find ways to beat them.
2. Create a search index for your products
A search index allows users to conduct fast, accurate searches on your site. With this index, search engines don't have to crawl thousands of pages, making it possible to conduct searches in seconds. A search index boosts your store's click-through rates and user experience.
Users anticipate instant results whenever they type a search query. Search indexes allow search queries to be processed without server resources, producing quicker results. When creating a product database for properly functioning search indexes, clean your data, utilize convertible measurement units, add inventory stock data, consider product variants, ensure products aren’t duplicated, and promote multilingual eCommerce.
3. Optimize product pages
Optimized product pages are designed to be found through search engines while converting browsers into customers. Product page optimization is usually aimed at getting your store on top of SERPs. Using top-quality photos to sell products, including product-relevant keywords in product descriptions and page title tags, ensuring good image spacing, sharing customer reviews and testimonials, incorporating video views and descriptions, and ensuring consistent logo placement and branding can help optimize your product pages for good visibility results. This increases the possibility of more conversions and higher search results.
4. Ensure a user-friendly website
User-friendly eCommerce websites make it easy for visitors to find information with any device. A user-friendly site is easy to use, meaning users will spend more time interacting with it, leading to conversions and improving sales. It creates a positive user experience, which is good for SEO. It’s also great for your brand’s credibility, customer loyalty, and reputation.
Your eCommerce store should have quality videos and photos, an effective search, accurate product descriptions, promote related products, and be branded. A user-friendly site should have a fast page load time, be easy to navigate, have clear policies, and be accessible on any device, including mobile phones. It should have a seamless checkout experience to reduce shopping cart abandonment, and the design shouldn't distract users from shopping.
5. Address duplicate content
Duplicate content includes content blocks that are fully identical or quite similar. While Google doesn't penalize duplicate content, it filters it, which may result in low rankings for your site pages. To avoid internal duplicate content concerns, ensure every page on your website has different headings from other site pages, and a distinct meta description and page title in the page's HTML code.
Your product descriptions should also be unique for better ranking. You can also prevent external duplicate content issues by avoiding content scraping and considering content syndication. If your content-rich web pages' rankings are decreasing, check whether your content has been duplicated and find ways to manage it.
6. Fix broken links
Broken links negatively impact user experience, which is a ranking element. While fixing these links can be time-consuming, it helps improve the user experience while ensuring better site rankings. You can find all the broken links on your site using site audit tools such as Google Search Console. If you have a misspelled URL, correcting it should be simple. For a 4xx internal link, consider why the link is broken. If it's because you moved it to another URL, set up a redirection for it.
Remove the link if it's due to a service or product page you no longer offer. When addressing 5xx internal links, check the hosting provider or your server because they could be the source of these problems. If you’re experiencing 5xx and 4xx outbound links, it could be because the site you linked shut down or no longer exists. In such cases, you can link to other sources or remove the link to solve the issue.
7. Optimize your store for mobile devices
Around 76% of American adults shop online with their smartphones. This implies that making your eCommerce store mobile-friendly is essential for its success and growth. Users also expect to shop on your site using their phones. If they can't, your user experience will be hurt, and you risk losing potential customers. Optimizing your store for mobile improves user experience while ensuring happy customers. Mobile-friendliness is a vital ranking factor. If your store can serve mobile and desktop users, search engines might favor you, increasing your rankings.
If you're looking to make your eCommerce site mobile-friendly, consider avoiding pop-ups, optimizing menu navigation, adding a search function, ensuring readable text, optimizing videos and images for mobile, and accepting various payment methods. You should also provide a responsive web design, position CTAs clearly, add viewport meta tags, and make contact details easily accessible.
8. Increase website speed
Your eCommerce store’s speed directly impacts search engine rankings, conversion rates, user experience, and repeat business. Increasing your site’s speed improves user experience and helps you rank higher on SERPs. When looking to increase website speed, finding a fast eCommerce platform is essential because it increases conversion rates and revenue while reducing bounce rates, average server response time, and average page load.
Fast, reliable hosting and content delivery networks (CDN) can boost store speed. You can also reduce page size, compress data, monitor site speed, avoid redirects, state image dimensions, and combine several files to ensure lesser round trips for improved site speed.
9. Create content
Content is a vital SEO strategy element you should leverage. Regularly posting valuable content drives organic traffic, increases site rankings, boosts customer trust, and positions you as a niche expert. User-generated content, how-to blog posts, glossary pages, webinars, responses to FAQs, product videos, and brand news are content ideas you may consider. Knowing your audience can help you learn the pain points and significant concerns.
With this information, you can create content focusing on these issues and provide products or services that help solve them. Once you have content ideas, use buyer personas to know your customers and their preferred content. Create a content calendar and publish relevant content for different purchase cycle phases. Measure your results and adjust accordingly.
10. Invest in link building
Link building is an SEO ranking element. Quality links indicate that your site is credible, relevant, and authoritative. Backlinks also determine how your store ranks for specific keywords. For effective link-building, consider publishing link-worthy content, including educational content, how-to- blog posts, entertainment, research that the industry finds beneficial, and trends and data.
Add an FAQ section, directories, and fix broken links and 404s, and remove redirects. Consistently publishing new content and introducing new ideas about your industry can help you become a thought leader. This may result in people trusting your content and using it as proof. It can also help improve your rankings on search engines.
11. Leverage local SEO
Local SEO increases your store’s visibility in location-specific searches, resulting in improved click-through rates and increased brand awareness. It aims to gain top rankings in local SERPs to boost traffic and increase sales.
You can optimize your eCommerce store for local SEO by claiming your Google My Business Profile listing, building local citations, and ensuring your name, address, and contact details are consistent over the internet. Adding schema markup to your store, posting customer reviews, building links from reputable local brands and sites, optimizing for mobile devices, and boosting your on-page SEO can help optimize your eCommerce site for local SEO.
Endnote
Online businesses need SEO to thrive. Implement these eCommerce store SEO tips to improve conversions and increase
