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.
As an ecommerce store, your website is your shopfront - so you need to make sure people can easily find it. That’s where ecommerce SEO comes in. It’s essentially your way of getting your business on the map so that your potential customers can discover you.
In today’s guide, we’ll go over what’s included in SEO services for ecommerce and what value they offer to your business. This way, your ideal customers can find you and fall in love with your brand.
Appearing on the first page of Google search results is not just a nice-to-have - it’s a necessity.
71-92% of Google searchers don’t go past the first page of search results. And while you can also drive traffic and purchases through things like social media, PPC advertising, and word of mouth, traffic from Google is vital for online store. Google is the most visited website in the world, and almost half of product searches begin on the search engine.
The bottom line is that there’s no value in having a great website if people can’t find it. And the way for people to find your website is through Google, the search engine that dominates over 90% of the market share.
The way to get to the first page in the SERP (search engine results page) is by utilising ecommerce SEO tactics like keyword optimisation and link building. Read on to discover the most important ecommerce SEO services.
Seeing results from your SEO efforts can take some time, often several months. However, those results provide value for a long time. This makes SEO one of the most cost-effective marketing tools in your arsenal Below are some of the strategies we use at Clear Click to improve our ecommerce clients’ SEO.
When working with an SEO agency, the first order of business should be to find out your current SEO standing. After all, if you don’t know where you are, how can you figure out where you’re going? An SEO audit for an ecommerce business will check that:
The findings from this audit will help to build an SEO strategy that addresses areas for improvement. It’s also not a one-and-done activity - you should carry out an SEO audit of your website regularly in order to evaluate the success of your SEO strategy and to make further improvements.
As we already alluded to, in order for people to find your website, Google’s bots have to be able to crawl and categorise it effectively first. Optimising your website for SEO from the technical point of view includes things like:
If all of the above sounds like gibberish, don’t worry - that’s what SEO experts are for! If you’d like to learn a little more about these topics, check out our recent ecommerce SEO checklist.
The way to get discovered on Google is by using the right keywords that match the search queries your ideal customers use to find what they’re looking for. There are a variety of free and subscription-based tools out there that allow you to find keywords that are relevant to your business, how popular they are, and what kind of search intent is linked to them, among other things.
Once you’ve done some keyword research, you can apply your keywords to things like metadata and existing website content from product pages to blog posts.
SEO content writing is one of the most valuable keyword implementation strategies. It helps nurture Google searchers who’d like to do a bit more research on their options before purchasing, earn quality backlinks to your website, and gain a higher ranking in the SERP for keywords relevant to your business. Publishing helpful content around your niche on a regular basis also helps to establish your business as a thought leader within your industry.
Your product pages are arguably the most important part of your website, so making sure they’re optimised for search engines is vital. Each page should ideally have:
On-page SEO is hugely important for ecommerce websites, but it’s not the only form of SEO to focus on. Link building is one of the most powerful off-page SEO activities. It relies on reputable websites linking back to your website in order to signal to Google that you, too, are a trustworthy resource.
Backlinks will naturally appear over time when you regularly publish quality content, but you can also build backlinks deliberately. This can be somewhat labour-intensive because you want to make sure each link is earned, relevant, from a reputable source, and links to high-quality content. However, the benefits of a healthy backlink profile make it worth the effort.
Your website is the biggest advertisement for your business. Investing in SEO services for your ecommerce website helps to boost your brand as a whole, while PPC campaigns will only be able to highlight a few of your product pages at a time. Both can offer great value for your business. If you’d like to learn more about SEO services for ecommerce at Clear Click, book your free, no-commitment consultation with us today.
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.
