Unlock the Full Potential of Your Website with SEO: Drive Traffic, Elevate Domain Authority.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a crucial digital marketing technique that can improve your website's visibility on search engines and drive targeted traffic to your business. As search algorithms become more complex, it's essential to understand the intricacies of SEO to stay ahead of the competition.
Our team of consultants specialise in decoding the complexities of organic search, demystifying its key concepts, and providing effective strategies to elevate your online presence.
With our comprehensive SEO services, you can unlock the full potential of your website and gain a competitive edge in the digital landscape. Partner with us to harness the power of SEO and drive sustainable, long-term success for your online business.
SEO boosts website visibility in search results, increasing exposure to potential customers.
SEO drives targeted traffic, attracting visitors actively searching for your products or services, resulting in higher quality leads.
SEO is a long-term strategy delivering sustained results with ongoing organic traffic and business growth, without ongoing advertising costs.
At Clear Click, our 4-step SEO roadmap drives business growth. We maximise visibility, attract targeted traffic, and generate high-quality leads. With strategic keyword targeting, content optimisation, technical enhancements, and performance monitoring, our SEO roadmap ensures sustained search rankings and customer acquisition. Unlock the full potential of SEO with us for sustainable business growth.
It’s no secret that ecommerce has grown massively in recent years. During the Covid-19 pandemic alone, ecommerce grew by a whopping 55%. All this growth is fantastic news for ecommerce websites, though it also means that competition has never been fiercer: while there are roughly 12-24 million ecommerce sites worldwide,, fewer than a million of them make sales over a thousand dollars annually.
On-page SEO for ecommerce websites is nothing short of vital for any retail business who want to be one of those million sites. On-page SEO increases your ecommerce business’s visibility to people looking for your products online, helping you attract visitors to your website, and eventually convert as a sale.
In this guide, we’ll go over all the different aspects of on-page SEO and how you can utilise them to make your ecommerce website stand out in the SERP.
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the process of optimising your website in order to appear higher in search engine results.
For example, if a potential customer is looking for your product online, typically, they start by searching for the product on search engines like Google to compare prices and features of similar products in the market, read reviews, and search for tips and advice. So, if you follow SEO best practices, your ecommerce site will appear high up in the searches when this person is looking for your product, and they are more likely to shop from your business.
However, content-centric websites' SEO practices differ from those of ecommerce websites. This is because the goals an ecommerce website has for its website traffic are different from those of, say, a news website.
While a news website is looking for people to spend a lot of time reading a page and interacting with it by reading linked articles, commenting, and sharing content on social media, an ecommerce website needs people to add items to cart and make purchases.
Before we share some ways to help improve the on-page SEO for your ecommerce website, let’s first understand the difference between on-page and off-page SEO practices.
As the name suggests, on-page SEO for ecommerce websites means optimising various elements of your website to add more value for the customer - which in turn helps you to rank higher in search results. This includes, among other things, keyword optimisation, improving your website’s load time, and simplifying your website architecture.
On the other hand, off-page SEO is the process of optimising elements outside your website, like increasing the number of backlinks pointing to your website and growing your social media reach. The purpose of these activities is to increase your site's domain authority, essentially telling Google you’re a reputable resource. This, too, will help you rank higher in the SERP.
It’ worth noting that ecommerce websites are susceptible to ranking lower in search engines because many websites selling the same or similar products have similar product descriptions and product titles. So, as an ecommerce business owner, you need to work on your off-page SEO alongside your on-page SEO to set your business and products apart from the competition.
Google’s whole mission is to provide its users with the most useful search results possible. For your site to be deemed ‘useful,’ you need to be implementing the key on-page SEO techniques outlined below.
It’s good to remember that optimising your website takes time, effort, and patience before you see results; a time frame of 3 - 12 months is normal for SEO. The following techniques can help you get to the top of the SERP as fast as possible.
Keyword research and placement are essential to increase your online visibility. Keyword research involves finding out what terms your ideal customers are using to search for products like yours online, and then peppering them into various relevant places on your website so Google can tell that you’re a good resource on the topic.
For ecommerce sites, you should keep search intent in mind when doing keyword research. Depending on what stage of the buyer’s journey your prospective customer is in, they’ll be looking for a solution to a problem, researching their options, or looking for the best deal on their chosen product.
You can use keywords to target people in each of these stages, but for the purposes of today’s guide, we’ll focus on commercial and transactional search intent - essentially people who are getting ready to purchase.
For example, a consumer looking for a laptop might search for “buy new laptop” or “best deals on Dell laptops,” so you might want to incorporate these keywords into your site’s content.
Commercial keyword users clearly intend to buy a particular product and are likely to purchase it if they visit your site. So, using these commercial keywords on your site will help you attract an audience that is more likely to shop with you.
Some other things to keep in mind while incorporating keywords into your content are:
You can find out more about doing keyword research here. Once you have found some relevant keywords, it’s time to put your research to use.
Once you have identified the right keywords to use on your page, it’s vital to place them strategically to maximise traffic. Appropriate keyword placement allows search engines to index your site for those keywords, resulting in a higher ranking on the SERP.
You should focus on the following elements to master your keyword placement:
They should include information such as return or exchange policy, reviews, shipping time and charges, and suggestions for other similar products. This way, prospective customers will find it easier to shop with your business because they have all that they need to make an informed purchase. This will help convert your organic leads into paying customers. You should also make sure your product descriptions are unique to your business - more on this below.
As an ecommerce website, there are two key aspects to remember when creating content for your product pages:
1. Your product descriptions and on-site content should be original and not plagiarised from another website, such as your manufacturer.
2. Your content shouldn’t be copied from another page on your own site, either. For example, you shouldn’t use the same description for a blue t-shirt and a red t-shirt that are on two different product pages.
Unfortunately, not following these two suggestions will significantly lower your search ranking because Google looks for unique content and fresh perspectives.
The solution for this is simple: draft unique content for each product on your site and ensure it’s entirely original. Of course, this can be labour-intensive if you sell hundreds of products.
One solution for this is to group variations of a product and display them on the same product page. This way, you can use the same description for product variations without duplicating your content. This also makes your e-commerce site more user-friendly because customers can easily find product variations without leaving the product page.
Page load time measures how fast an internet user can open your website page. Essentially, your page load speed depends on how much time it takes to download all the elements on your website, like images, content, and stylesheets.
Most ecommerce sites take around 6 seconds to load, while other websites take around 2-3 seconds.
Your website loading speed is an important ranking factor, and if you’re not sure what your load time currently is, you can find out using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
If your site takes a long time to load, people will often leave your website quickly. This increases the bounce rate and reduces the average time people spend on your website. Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm sees this as an indication that your site is not helpful and ranks your site lower in the search results. Therefore, good site speed is essential for SEO.
A good page load time is essential for conversion, and the highest ecommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0 and 2 seconds.
If your site is currently slow, some common issues could be because:
If you want to speed up your site’s speed, you can try:
Audit your site to track and resolve issues affecting your ecommerce site's user experience.
You can enhance your site's user experience by ensuring the design is intuitive and that the person visiting your site can quickly find what they are looking for. Good navigation tools, review features, and functional page designs give your site a better ‘feel’ and lead to a better user experience, improving its Google ranking.
Here are some actionable guidelines to ensure your page provides a good user experience:
Website optimisation and consistent designs improve the user experience of your ecommerce site and boost your search engine ranking.
Because so much of search traffic now comes from mobile phones, Google uses the mobile version of your ecommerce site when ranking of your website. This is called mobile-first indexing.
So, ensure that your ecommerce site's mobile version is optimised to be as fast and user-friendly as possible. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to assess how mobile-friendly your site currently is.
Here are some quick tips to help your website be more mobile-friendly:
According to Insider Intelligence, the US mcommerce (mobile commerce) will nearly double its share of total retail sales from $359.32 billion in 2021 to $728.28 billion in 2025. Given the massive surge in popularity of using smartphones for online shopping, optimising your online store’s mobile version is crucial.
Having valuable blog content is a powerful tool to boost the on-page SEO for your ecommerce website. This is because blog content allows you to target valuable keywords and provide more value to your website visitors, making them more likely to purchase from you.. Writing blog posts also allows you to display expertise in your niche and attract a new audience interested in reading your posts.
Here are some tips for creating informative, SEO-friendly blog posts for your ecommerce website:
Regularly posting blog content on your ecommerce site will help you gain your audience’s trust and boost your website’s rankings.
Customer reviews are crucial in showing new customers that you are a credible business. People tend to trust the word of their peers over someone who wants to sell them something. Online reviews serve as social proof that other people have shopped and had a good experience with your company.
Customer reviews also do wonders for your SEO because the search engine algorithm views your business as more credible when you have many reviews. These product reviews can also pull into the SERP, grabbing attention and increasing click through rate (CTR).
According to Reviews.io brands that display product reviews have a 18% higher conversion rate and a 11% higher average order value (AOV).
Encourage your customers to leave reviews whenever they make a purchase, perhaps with a discount code for their next purchase, and ensure you respond appropriately to your customers’ reviews.
Structured data – also known as schema markup – allows you to feed the search engines information regarding your website in a language they can understand.
As we all know, search engines use algorithms to evaluate your page. So, it’s essential to use language on your site that can be easily processed by search engines. Basically, you don’t have to depend on the search engine algorithm’s ability to correctly understand the content of your site alone; you can use structured data to directly feed this information to be displayed in the SERP.
By using structured data, you can display crucial information such as reviews and ratings, price range, and product availability right on the SERP. This improves your click-through-rate as customers have more relevant information about your product before even visiting your site.
Creating links between different pages on your website improves the organic ranking of your website. This is called internal linking.
You should implement two strategies for internal linking: linking between pages to spread link equity and capitalising on anchor text. Internal linking allows you to build a strong interconnected network within your site, allowing search engine bots to efficiently crawl and index your site. It essentially creates a clear road map of your site for them. As with most elements related to SEO, it also improves UX by enabling easier navigation for customers.
Depending on the size of your site, you may have numerous pages, including layers of categories and subcategories. As consumers make their way through your site, the pages can go from general to highly specific. So, strategic internal linking is an effective mechanism to tell search engines and visitors about the most important and relevant pages.
Ecommerce is a fiercely competitive landscape, and you need to invest in SEO to ensure your business stands out from the crowd. While you can start implementing the strategies we’ve outlined in this guide on your own, improving on-page SEO for ecommerce websites can be a lot of work and require lots of expert knowledge. This is where Clear Click comes in.
Here at Clear Click, we help businesses like yours build and implement comprehensive strategies for their on-page and off-page SEO in order to reach a larger audience, stand out from the competitors, and ultimately drive more sales.
If you’re interested to know more, book a free consultation call with Clear Click.
SEO is one of the most cost-effective ways for ecommerce businesses to build brand awareness and generate more website visits. But how do you get started with SEO? And how do you know how well you’re doing and what you should improve? That’s exactly what this guide will teach you.
In this article, we’ll go over things you should add to your ecommerce SEO checklist in order to develop a strong marketing strategy for your business. This should provide you with a brief but comprehensive list of things to get you started with improving SEO for your ecommerce website.
The number one thing you need to ensure is that Google can find and crawl your website correctly - otherwise, it won’t show up in search results. In order to crawl and index your website effectively, Google’s crawlers need a clear map. This is where your sitemap.xml and robots.txt files come in handy.
An XML sitemap is a file that maps out your most important pages, telling the search engine to prioritise them, while not placing as much emphasis on things like old blog posts from several years ago.
You’ll also want to make sure you have a robots.txt file in your root directory. It works hand in hand with your sitemap.xml file to ensure your website can be crawled effectively and that the information Google’s bots find is indexed accurately.
Your robots.txt file is essentially a list of instructions for crawler bots. While you can also submit your XML sitemap directly to Google, it’s enough to have your robots.txt file point to it. Your robots.txt file can also include a list of pages you don’t want to be crawled and showing up in search results, such as your checkout page and WordPress admin page, which is very useful.
Having a relatively flat structure to your website makes it easier for Google bots to crawl your website, but it also makes for a better user experience.
You should link to all your most important pages from your homepage and they, in turn, should link to their most relevant subpages. In order to keep things as simple, you should be able to navigate between any two pages on your website in three clicks or less.
Additionally, internally linking to other pages within your website helps Google crawlers understand the structure of your website and the links between different topics. Make sure you use keywords in hyperlinks and remove broken or outdated links periodically.
Structured data is a way to organise the data on your website in a way that Google can understand. The “language” used to do this is called schema markup. It essentially tells the search engine what type of content lives on a page - is it a product page, a how-to-article, or maybe a review?
Adding structured data to your website makes for a richer listing for your website in the SERP (search engine results page). This way, when people google something that brings your website up, the listing might include star ratings, extra navigational links to different pages on your website, example products, and more.
All of this makes it more likely that the searcher will click to visit your website. Structured data can even help you land the coveted spot as the featured snippet at the top of search results. You can find out more about schema markup here.
It’s hardly surprising to say that smartphones have changed the way we do almost everything - online shopping included. And Google has taken notice, which means that if your website isn’t optimised for mobile, it won’t appear in the SERP.
Making sure your website is optimised for mobile means, among other things, that your website copy is readable on mobile, that images scale properly and that your links are large enough to click. Luckily, Google has a dedicated tool for testing your website’s mobile-friendliness.
Your website speed is another technical element that can have a large impact on both your user experience and the way Google ranks your website in the SERP. If a website takes longer than a second or two to load, many people will navigate away instantly. Your website’s loading time also plays a key part in making sure your website is mobile-friendly.
Some ways to increase your website’s loading speed include:
Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great SEO tool for optimising your website’s load time.
In order to show up in the SERP, your website needs to provide answers to the questions your potential customers are asking also known as a search query. This is where keyword research comes in.
Doing keyword research helps you provide the best possible user experience to your website visitors. It’s also essential for optimising not only your blog posts and product pages but also your home page, contact page, FAQ section, and metadata (more on this later).
Your keyword research can help you recognise good opportunities for SEO writing in order for you to become a trusted authority on your chosen topic in Google’s eyes.
For more information on finding and using keywords relevant to your business, check out our dedicated guide to doing keyword research.
In order for your website to rank high in the SERP, all of your web pages have to be populated with enough original content.
For ecommerce sites with hundreds of product pages, this can be daunting. It can be tempting to simply copy product descriptions from your manufacturers, but Google recognises and penalises duplicate content. If you have a lot of duplicate content like this on your website, it’s a good idea to start with creating original content for the product descriptions of your top sellers and work from there.
Things like category pages are often left pretty empty but these too need original content. 300 words is a good number to aim for, and this is only a few paragraphs that can live at the bottom of the page, underneath links to individual products.
When it comes to product pages, your “body copy” should focus on the unique aspects of the product and the problems it solves for the buyer. Some things other things you might add include:
On category pages, you can include more information about the products within the category. You can also make comparisons between different products to help your customer choose the right one. When it comes to the products featured on the category page, make sure their descriptions are coded as text rather than embedded as an image so that search engines can crawl these bits of copy.
Your metadata includes things like meta descriptions, page titles, and URLs. These should all be the optimal length and include relevant keywords. You can use a free SERP optimiser tool to make sure your site title and meta description display correctly in search results. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Having reputable, popular websites link back to pages on your website tells Google you’re a trustworthy authority within your niche. Links like this are called backlinks, and while it can be a lot of work to gain them, they’re highly valuable.
By following other SEO best practices listed here, you make it more likely that you gain backlinks organically as people discover your website on Google. However, you can also work on building backlinks deliberately.
There are lots of great strategies out there for getting more backlinks, but here are just a few:
Hopefully today’s ecommerce SEO checklist has given you a good idea of where to start building your SEO strategy. If you’d like to learn more about search engine optimisation and why it’s important, you should also check out our dedicated guide to SEO for ecommerce businesses.
If you’d like some help building your ecommerce SEO strategy, you’ve come to the right place. At Clear Click, our mission is to help small to medium-sized businesses secure their place in fiercely competitive fields like ecommerce. If you’d like to find out more about working with us, book your free, no-strings consultation call with us.
By the end of 2022, the eCommerce market will grow to account for approximately 20.4% of global retail sales. This suggests that an increasing number of retailers are shifting from traditional retail methods to the internet to sell their products and services. As the eCommerce space becomes crowded, ranking high on the search engine results page (SERP) has become more important than ever. Getting noticed in a competitive environment can be a challenging task.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) for eCommerce is one of the most cost-effective yet fruitful ways to improve your ranking on SERPs. According to data from Google, 49% of online shoppers say they use Google to discover or find products. Additionally, 59% of shoppers say they use Google to research a purchase they plan to make in-store or online.
This signifies that a large amount of users do not arrive on your eCommerce web page directly. This is especially true for businesses that have very little brand awareness online. Unless you’re Amazon, chances are most of your consumers find you through Google.
Visitors don’t bother looking beyond the top few results on the SERP. According to Search Engine Journal, the click-through rate of the top 5 links on Google is 70.4%. So, if your website is not ranked highly in the SERP, you’re most likely missing out on high amounts of organic traffic. This is precisely why SEO for your eCommerce website is non-negotiable.
SEO is proven to have the highest ROI of any marketing campaign. However, many eCommerce businesses ignore SEO and tend to focus on social media campaigns or paid ads. While these may be great strategies, they require constant efforts and large budgets.
No matter how creative and value adding your products and services are, even the best of them can get overshadowed if you do not optimise your eCommerce site. To ensure you’re receiving a constant stream of high-intent visitors, it’s imperative to follow the best eCommerce SEO tactics.
This article is your guide to eCommerce search engine optimisation. We’ll discuss what it is, its various benefits, and most importantly, how to improve eCommerce SEO.
Like most SEO practices, eCommerce SEO is the practice of helping you rank higher on Google search results. Customers generally tend to search for products and services online. For example, if someone is looking for a vacuum cleaner, they’re more likely to Google “Buy a vacuum cleaner” than go directly to your website to look for one.
This is why it is critical to understand how Google ranks websites. While there is no definitive guide on precisely which ranking factors are considered and in what capacity, SEO practices are an effective method to rank higher on Google and get more traffic.
A eCommerce SEO checklist includes multiple SEO practices – basically anything that is beneficial for your retail website. It includes technical aspects (such as site structure and loading speed), as well as on-page and off-page SEO practices. Each product page should be optimised to draw maximum traffic from search results. Apart from product pages, you should also ensure that your home page, about us page, F.A.Q. page, blog articles, help centre answers, and contact page are optimised.
Google ranks websites based on their relevance to the keyword terms that users search for. Google seeks to improve UX as much as possible – the main purpose of the algorithm is to find exactly what people want in their search. While different search engines may have different algorithms, it makes the most sense to focus on Google. As of May 2022, Google accounted for a whopping 92.48% of the search engine market share worldwide. On the other hand, Bing and Yahoo account for only 3.08% and 1.3% of the market share, respectively.
Another way to gain more traction is to create content in the form of blog posts, videos, podcasts, expert opinions, and more. Having high-quality content helps with positioning yourself as an expert on topics related to your product and services. It also builds authority and consumers start to trust your brand more, leading to higher conversions and sales.
Strategically applying eCommerce SEO practices unlocks numerous benefits for your business. Without SEO, your site will be buried under hundreds of other websites. The ultimate aim of any SEO practice is to increase the number of people that visit your site and convert them into customers. Here are some ways in which eCommerce SEO helps your business:
If you’re a new online retailer or have recently shifted your brand online, chances are most people won’t know about you. Brand awareness is a critical first step in generating sales. eCommerce SEO is one of the most cost effective ways to improve brand awareness. The higher your site appears on the SERP, the more likely it is that potential consumers will click on it and engage with it.
You can also consider appearing in Google’s answer box, which is known as a featured snippet. Google’s main aim is to provide consumers with information as quickly and as accurately as possible. If your content or website can quickly answer one of Google’s most searched questions, your website will gain the top spot in the highly visible “answer box.” eCommerce sites can appear in the answer box, which is considered prime real estate.
A customer’s online purchase journey takes the form of a funnel. From visiting your website to the checkout process, consumers are lost at each stage. The traditional marketing funnel includes awareness, interest, desire, and action. It relies on a constant stream of new customers entering the funnel. SEO is one of the best ways to constantly drive low-cost top-of-funnel traffic at the awareness stage.
In addition, customers start their journeys from interest (research) to action (making the purchase). Their keyword choices are likely to change as they move from the informational to the transactional phase. It’s crucial to target the correct intent at different points in the customer journey. It encourages customers to move to the next stage and increases the probability of conversion.
Cookies are a powerful tool your paid search team can use to remarket your brand to audiences. When customers arrive on your site, either through organic or other channels, your team can place cookies for remarketing campaigns. This way, you can show ads to these customers even when they’re not on your website and have continued with their journey elsewhere.
The higher the number of people visiting your site, the larger your remarketing audience is. Retargeting improves the ROI from SEO, as the same customers who visited your site due to good SEO practices will be reminded of your brand repeatedly as they continue their online journeys. They’re more likely to come back to your site if they’re reminded that you provided them with a good user experience.
To convert site visitors into customers, your site needs to have good usability. Because SEO keeps the needs of the consumer at heart (such as the keywords consumers are using or what they’re looking for), it helps with building a strong UX, which ultimately drives conversions. Better usability also leads to a higher ranking for your site.
Keyword research also allows businesses to better understand what consumers are looking for. If you can fill that gap before the rest of the market, you’re more likely to make a sale. For example, if customers are searching for “affordable black denims,” it makes more sense to highlight the affordable options, which improves usability. Moreover, UX has multiple additional benefits, such as customer loyalty and brand differentiation.
Lastly, a great UX is something Google takes seriously. When visitors arrive on your site in large numbers only to leave it quickly, Google marks this as bad UX. It demonstrates that your site isn’t relevant for that query or hasn’t been able to satisfy customer demands. This can hurt your rankings considerably. So, it’s crucial to ensure a strong UX.
This is a cost-saving yet hidden benefit of eCommerce SEO. Companies spend billions of dollars on paid search costs. While these can be effective, SEO is a much cheaper alternative with a higher ROI. It helps you generate organic traffic without needing massive budgets.
In the Search Advertising segment, the average ad spend per internet user is approximately US$286.60 in 2022. This is a massive number considering you need hundreds or thousands of users visiting your website. With the increased use of ad blockers, the ROI on your paid campaigns may be falling. In this case, SEO is an effective, low-cost alternative.
Even if you’re considering paid search, SEO helps. Google’s quality score, which measures the relevance of the ads to the landing pages, is used to determine the cost per click. Optimised landing pages imply better quality scores, leading to lower cost per click, while also automatically ensuring higher performance in organic search.
eCommerce SEO is not about any single variable. It involves working on multiple factors simultaneously to make your website optimised. Broadly, it can be divided into technical SEO and product page or on-page SEO.
Technical SEO refers to website and server optimisation techniques. This includes factors such as site architecture, a secure and responsive design, or a faster loading time.
Website structure is perhaps one of the most important factors in SEO – it directly impacts search engine rankings as well as user experience by making it easier for both users and search engines to find your website and products.
Most eCommerce companies should include a homepage, category pages to outline the major type of products on their site, and product pages for individual products. One of the most important decisions in your website structure is how to categorise products. This requires research and a detailed understanding of how people search for products, making it context-specific for your website. For example, if you’re a fashion retailer, you may want to categorise products based on gender, type (formal, informal, trousers, and denims), season, or material. Whereas if you’re a book retailer, you might want to categorise based on genre or age. Make sure each category is populated with at least a few products (2-3 minimum).
Next, make sure your site is well connected by focusing on how the areas of your site are internally linked. Global navigation should include links to key pages on the site, allowing customers to navigate to priority categories with ease. Make sure to not overdo this and link every category to the global navigation. This can result in a choice overload for customers, leading to bad UX. Additionally, this hinders search engines’ ability to verify the relative importance of pages – pages with higher links are seen as more important, making them more likely to be prioritised on the SERPs.
You should also focus on the crawl depth of your website – how many links it takes from the homepage to reach any specific page on your site. Of course, the crawl rate depends on the purpose of your product. A key category should be linked directly to the global navigation (a crawl depth of 1), whereas niche products or informational pages can be much deeper within your site. Basically, ensure you match the importance of a product or any page with the crawl rate, which helps search engine bots get access to important information quicker.
Lastly, make sure you keep your site lean. Given the intense competition out there, you don’t want to let search engines crawl on your pages unnecessarily. Help it find your products and pages quicker – search engines should crawl the pages you want to rank higher more frequently. This includes editing filters to prevent unnecessary URL creation, editing categories to link directly to product pages, and processing out of stock and discontinued products.
The speed at which your site loads is critical in determining its ability to rank higher on the SERPs. Sites that load slowly lead to a bad user experience, causing customers to leave your site. This indicates to Google that your site provides a bad UX, which could lead to a potentially lower rank. Moreover, customers leaving your site also leads to lower conversion and sales.
There are various methods to improve the speed of your site. Such as using a fast DNS (domain name system), making your image files as small as possible, compressing your webpages, and more. You can also use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to discover some insights. By putting in your URL, Google will score your site on mobile and desktop from 1 to 100 and give you suggestions to minimise loading time.
An XML sitemap is a file that provides search engines information about your pages. It tells Google which pages are the most important ones, allowing it to prioritise certain pages and crawl your site more efficiently. Essentially, it acts as a roadmap for search engines. It also contains information such as when a page was last modified and how frequently it is updated.
Optimising product pages involves using on-page SEO practices. As the name suggests, these are factors that are on your page, such as title tags and meta descriptions, which you can optimise to improve the visibility of your site.
Keywords are critical on every aspect of your page – title tags, meta description, URLs, product name, and any other content you produce – as they increase the chances of your website showing up on the SERP if you include keywords and phrases that consumers are most likely to search for.
The first step is to find keywords, this is done by conducting keyword research to gain a detailed understanding of what consumers are searching for. Owners of eCommerce sites are often looking to attract visitors with strong buying intent. For example, users searching for “buy black hair extensions” have a high likelihood of purchasing these products. You can either use a keyword research tool (like Ahrefs and Semrush) or use the Google and Amazon search bar to see what they suggest when you type something.
Next, you must select the right target keywords. You should consider factors such as keyword search volume, search intent, keyword value, and difficulty before making a choice. Overall, the keywords you select should have high search volume but low competition, allowing you to fill that gap. Then, you must optimise the selected keywords by placing them strategically in your content. This can include inserting them in your title, URL, and other headings and subheadings. Keywords also help with developing product categories, as they convey what customers are looking for, which helps with structuring your website.
Title tags are the headlines that appear on the SERP, whereas meta description is a quick summary of your product or page that appears under the title on the search page. Naturally, both title tags and meta descriptions should have the relevant keywords as that determines if a customer will click on that page. If the keywords you mention are more likely to align with a customer’s search query, they’re more likely to open your page.
According to Google guidelines, meta descriptions should be unique and be limited to 160 characters or less. Keywords in the description also allow Google to understand what your products are about and rank them on the SERP accordingly. Lastly, promotional modifiers like “X dollars off,” “free shipping,” or “xyz deal” boost your ranking. It piques customer interest, making them more likely to click on your webpage.
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) are nothing but online addresses for your website. Again, optimising URLs includes using the right keywords so that the search engine as well as users know what your page is about.
There are numerous guidelines for creating the right URL. Some of them include: using short (less than 50 to 60 characters), easy-to-read and easy-to-interpret URLs because Google prioritises accessibility. Remember to use keywords in URLs as they show up in search results. However, excessive keywords are likely to impact your Google ranking. Every page on your site, such as the category page and product page, will have URLs – make sure you optimise each of those.
The online retail sphere is growing, and with that comes intense competition. Whether you’re a new business or a company looking to shift some of their business online, it’s critical to ensure your website and pages are search engine optimised. Customers don’t look beyond the top few search results, making rankings one of the most important factors when it comes to making sales online. eCommerce SEO is the most cost-effective method to gain awareness and improve conversion rates.
If your website needs SEO support book a consultation call with us. Our SEO team help optimise your eCommerce store to strengthen your organic search traffic.
