If you ignore these below mentioned On-Page optimization tips for your eCommerce store, then be confident that your business will die very soon. 2017 comes with a lot of changes in Google Algorithm if you don’t follow them, you are a dead man.
After years of hard work coming up with and sourcing products, you decide to go online to increase sales. Despite using popular platforms to run your store, you may be struggling to grab new customers. You might have spent a ton of money on ads, only to have wasted it.
Instead of spending a lot of money and getting poorer, you could benefit from the organic traffic. Nearly 30% of traffic that comes to your site is organic. To capture more of this traffic, you should try on-page optimization for your e-commerce website.
What Is It?
Suppose a user decides to search for a widget you sell, and your website comes up in the search results. When the user clicks on your page, you have benefited from organic traffic. The better your rank, the more you benefit. Ideally, you want to rank in the top 10. One method that could help is using on-page optimization, where you make right changes on your website’s pages. These changes range from putting up customer reviews to improving speed.
Speed
How fast your pages load plays a critical factor in search engine rankings. Google’s goal is to bring users content that is both relevant and which delivers on user experience. If your site is too slow, then you will hurt your rankings. You need to be sure that your site loads within 2 seconds.
One way to quickly improve speed is to switch to better hosting. If you are using shared hosting, you put your website at the mercy of traffic going to other sites, because hundreds of other sites share the server hosting your site. Instead, try switching to dedicated servers or VPS (virtual private servers) plans to improve speed.
If your budget permits, you can also hire developers or attempt on your own to reduce the size of HTML and JavaScript code on your pages. Also, try to use tools such as PageSpeed Insights to generate optimized versions of HTML code. Use jsmin and YUICompressor to help optimize CSS and JavaScript code. Besides optimizing code, reducing image size can also improve speed.
Reviews
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. In the e-commerce world, customer feedback can make or break your business! Make sure to create or buy a system to collect customer feedback on the products you sell, and publish them on your website. Not only will customer feedback improve your product, but it will also give a wealth of topics to choose from for your content.
Be sure to not only publish good reviews. Customers can tell if the review is from your marketing department. Amazon is a great example of a website that does well despite having negative reviews published on many products that it sells.
Videos
Besides adding reviews, you can also add videos. If you want to enhance your sales, don’t just put a canned description up there. Add videos of your products. By doing so, you provide your customers with great content, help them make better decisions, and help YOURSELF get more sales.
For your products, you can do videos displaying the product in more detail or do demonstrations on various uses of the product. You can also record videos addressing burning questions your customers have about the product or even resolve some of the negative reviews.
Pagination
As an e-commerce master, you are currently expanding your product base and want to sell more. As your store grows, so do the number of product pages. In order make sure that Google or other search engines go through all your pages and transfer the equity across all pages equally, you should look into fixing pagination issues.
Pagination problems result in duplicate content being generated by search engines, or the wrong page ranks for your search terms.
Some methods to resolve these issues include adding a View All link. This link will display all the items of the search results in one page. However, you must make sure this link will load the pages fast (within 3 seconds).
Besides, add rel elements, including next and prev to your page links. For example, if you are on page 2, your rel next link would go to 3, and your rel prev link would go to page 1.
Microdata
You can also improve your on-page optimization by using microdata. Use relevant elements to mark up parts of your page so search engines can deliver consistent results from your website. For example, microdata for a product will contain elements such as color, manufacturer, and model.
Q&A
Customers will always have questions about the products you sell. Often, many customers will have the same issue. To address this, include a link to the frequently asked questions (FAQ) document for each of your products. A better way is to integrate Q&A tools, which show customer questions and your answers on your product pages.
Including questions and answers provides you with user-generated content and great ideas for website articles or product improvements. This will also give you a chance to address customer concerns and possibly improve sales.
Social Media (Ignore this you are dead, dead, dead!!!)
You can also try to include buttons linking to social media websites like Facebook and Twitter. After a customer purchases a product, you can add a button to encourage the client to tweet a review or share it on Facebook. This will increase your social media presence and help spread the word about your site. You could also offer a discount in exchange for a Like on Facebook.
Search
If you want to include a search box, make sure that the search returns expected results. Use tools provided by your CMS to keep track of searches and improve your site. Also, try to offer discounts for the search terms. To enhance the user experience, add code to display images in the product results page.
Images
Make sure that the images you use are high-quality. When you add images, use a file name that describes the image, and includes ALT text in case the image does not show up. This will help search engines understand your images better and link them to your products.
Meta Tags
Make sure to include meta tags for title and description. Include the title of your product and call to action. Always work to improve your meta tags if you want to generate more traffic.
Conclusion
If you want to get rich from your e-commerce store, then improve your on-page optimization with these basic tips!
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