The eCommerce market has been growing competitive for years. Once dominated by the likes of Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, and Alibaba, reports suggest there are more than 24 million companies fighting to chew a bigger piece of the market.
Gaining the organic traction for your eCommerce website is no longer a cake walk. With nearly 43% of organic traffic coming from Google, e-retailers simply can’t afford to ignore SEO in their blanket internet marketing strategy.
Have a look at the traffic distribution of Wolfgang Digital from its European and US market, from July 2017 to June 2018.
With hundreds of online businesses vying to get the top spot in the search engines, you can’t expect to swim and survive with the old gear when tides are high. The old formulas need to be shunned and replaced with a measured yet insightful SEO approach in 2020.
We, in this blog article, will focus on areas that need not be missed out when drafting or reassessing your eCommerce SEO strategy 2020.
Without much ado, let’s discuss five important areas concerning eCommerce SEO:
How integral is an SEO strategy for your eCommerce business?
On-page SEO for your eCommerce website
Off-page SEO for your eCommerce website
What’s an ideal website architecture for your online store?
Can sound technical SEO make a difference in your eCommerce business?
1. The role of SEO behind the success of your eCommerce Business
As per a study, 80% of users ignore paid ads in search results, and entrust website links found without any compulsion. Users prefer genuine results rather than being compelled to purchase from website A over Website B.
The reasons can be anything, from the intruding paid ads inhibiting their browsing experience to purchase at your own volition. Having said that paid ads do have their influence in driving user opinion, especially if they have a clear intent of making the purchase.
SEO delivers results but over a few months or even years; it demands consistent and calibrated efforts to build online presence, pique user curiosity, and attract organic clicks.
As organic traffic and business revenue are closely interlinked, boosting search engine optimization will give you the much-desired increase in eCommerce sales. So, how do you do it? Find out more on this in the next section.
2. On-page SEO tactics for eCommerce business
A user will click on your website only if it appears in the 1st search engine results page (SERP), So how do you bridge the gap between users and your eCommerce website? That’s where keyword research comes into the picture.
At the heart of a typical eCommerce SEO campaign lies keyword research. Tactful & tenacious, the initial efforts to find relevant keywords can be the real game-changer.
As reported, “The first page of Google captures 71 percent of search traffic clicks and has been reported to be as high as 92 percent in recent years. Second-page results are far from a close second coming in at below 6 percent of all website clicks.”
Every eCommerce website wants to rank on the 1st page but that doesn’t come without smart on-page SEO strategies. Invest your efforts in selecting the right keywords that drive the right users to click on the website and find the right products.
In an otherwise case, you’ll be playing around with keywords that hold no value to your online store. So, how do you do that?
What to do and avoid in eCommerce Keyword Research?
As per Internet Live Stats, “over 63,000 search queries done per second”. Such mammoth data is mined and processed on the search engines every single second but not every web source is relevant and worth clicking on. Right?
How can we cut down the mindless browsing for our customers and help them reach out to your eCommerce website? This is fairly simple if you focus on the basics.
Use and draft website content using product-focused keywords with medium to high search volume.
Use transactional keywords such as ‘buy black shoes on Amazon’. Optimizing your website for keywords like these will drive the organic traffic to your website for conversion.
Map buyers intent by configuring which stage they are in the sales funnel. For someone searching ‘Pink Dress’, he or she is conducting a basic search and is possibly at the top of the sales funnel. Whereas, a search query ‘ pink dress for young girls’ filters down the user intent and is possibly in the middle or bottom of the sales funnel.
To reach out to your targeted customers, build a list of keywords that are relevant to the search queries. From short-tail keywords to long-tail keywords, including a mix of keywords can help you put your products in front of the right audience. Manual work is practically not feasible, herein, we recommend a list of SEO tools that help in keyword planning for any eCommerce campaign.
Short tail Keywords are typically a bunch of words. They can be commonly used terms such as ‘black shoes’. They receive clicks but not necessarily convertible.
Whereas long-tail keywords are more of an elaborate form of a short-tail keyword. For instance, ‘where to buy black shoes online’. Certainly gain more clicks and converts for your business.
Then, there are brand terms that have value of their own. For instance, Amazon black shoes. Got the gist?
Commonly Used Keyword Research Tools for eCommerce SEO
Google Keyword Planner
SEMRush Keyword Magic Tool
Ubersuggest
Keyword Dominator
Amazon Suggest
Google AutoSuggest
Prepare a list of keywords for individual categories and product pages and optimize the eCommerce website
Optimize Your URLs
Optimize Your Title Tags/Meta Descriptions
Optimize Your Images
Draft High-Quality Content For Each Page
Add Schema.org Markup
Focus on Internal Linking
Add Compelling CTAs on the Page
All these factors combine to make your eCommerce website visible for maximum search queries pertaining to the finalized keywords.
3. Off-page SEO tactics for eCommerce Website
Off-page SEO forms the core of an eCommerce SEO strategy. It includes all the activities performed to promote your eCommerce business but not on the website. This primarily includes building the trust and reliability of your online store on third-party websites and platforms.
Link building is a strong ranking factor to rank better in google and other search engines. Google gives a lot of weightage to off-page factors which ideally are independent of your business control. If you’re serious about flourishing your online presence and create digital relevancy, a well-formulated link building strategy is a must.
Winning the trust of a reputed website to earn a backlink from is an endorsement of the products or services you’re offering. Thus, Google keeps a close tab on the malicious or fishy practices performed to grab bulk links.
Special Note: Having a backlink from a random website adds nothing to your eCommerce business. Instead focus on earning high-quality links from authoritative websites. Keep your backlink profile clean of spurious and spammy links that bring the website ranking down.
Read the 5 facts of a successful link building exercise to steer clear off all the troubles that may come knocking if you play against the algorithms written by Google and other search engines.
What else can you do for a high-performance backlinking profile?
Find and fix broken links to your pages
Find relevant research groups and other event-based social media groups
Ask for genuine links from product retailers or suppliers
Draft high-quality and research-based blog articles for guest posting
Associate with websites that justify the niche of your business
Look for social media influencers
4. Optimize the site architecture
Selling hundreds of top-quality, branded products in an ill-designed website wouldn’t make any difference. In fact, this will shoo away users in the first look. Do not underrate the importance of having a powerful and stunning online store and instead consult web design experts in India for some exceptional solutions.
Instead of going for a deep structure, consider developing a simple, flat architecture that is easy to understand, for users and google crawlers. A well-optimized website makes way for an outstanding user experience and attracts many loyal customers.
Do not create unnecessary categories or navigation bars that confuse users; instead spend a good deal of time in designing the UX of the eCommerce website. Needless to say, a mobile-optimized and responsive eCommerce website is a necessity to keep drawing more customers.
5. Technical SEO for e-Commerce Website
A website that takes eons to open is a sure shot turn off for users. Do you know, an average user won’t take more than 7-8 seconds to dump a website? Yes, and thus you’ve to keep the eCommerce website up and running, giving the best performance, every single second.
Things to consider polishing technical SEO for your eCommerce website:
Optimize the page speed
Optimize the checkout process
Add schema markups for products and reviews
Create a clean and organized URL structure for your eCommerce website
Switch to HTTPS for a more secured user experience
Fix 404 errors
Include pagination to avoid endless scrolling
Add rel=”canonical” tag to the original product page
Measured internal linking
Follow the 4 easy steps to improve the response time of your website and experience the difference in user experience for your e-store. Find and fix technical glitches that invariably affect the performance of your eCommerce website.
The bottom line
The digital space is changing, in the blink of an eye, but what remains as the cornerstone of every online store is a consolidated SEO strategy. Engineering a perfect SEO strategy for your eCommerce business is possible but no easy task.
Try the recommended SEO tactics to gather the momentum and yield high-quality organic website traffic and hence the sales for your products. Do not expect magical results overnight but staying on the right tangent keeps you in competition.
If you find it overwhelming to manage the SEO of your eCommerce website, consult the best SEO company in India for a hassle-free experience.
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