So, ecommerce is important because it’s the best way to get your products out into the world. If you don’t rank well on search engines, you won’t get many customers. The better you rank in the SERPs, the more profit you can expect from your store. Follow our advice for achieving great SEO rankings and your business will have a better chance of success. Whether you want to speak to one of our SEO strategists about implementing our SEO tips on your website, or you just have questions about how we do our work, give us a call at +1 202 915 6200.
What is ecommerce SEO?
You might not know this, but search engine optimization (SEO) is a game-changer. No, ecommerce SEO doesn’t challenge you to climb Mount Everest. All it takes is knowing what you’re doing, which isn’t as challenging as it may seem at first. But because competition online is fierce and there are so many ecommerce stores out there, optimizing for SEO has taken on a whole new level of importance. So what does SEO involve? To start with, you need to create keyword-rich content and provide a user-friendly interface for browsing. Then you need to optimize the site elements like page titles and URLs. You might be doing some of these things already without even thinking about them because they come naturally to you, but some others might be new territory.
About our List of ecommerce SEO Best Practices
In this article, we’ll share the SEO best practices we recommend for ecommerce sites. By following these recommendations, you’ll learn about the best SEO practices for ecommerce sites and how to implement them on your website.
1. Use Important Keywords
Product pages should be easy to understand, use universally comprehensible language, and be accessible globally. A good tactic is to provide measurements in standard, metric, or both depending on the regional preferences of your visitors. When deciding if you should hide prices, consider the trade-offs. This means that while they may not affect SEO directly, they will impact the visitor’s view on your page — with a higher bounce rate likely being one of them. You should also strive to keep product information up to date. This includes adding new information from manufacturers as it becomes available.
2. Design With Shoppers In Mind
To make your product information understandable and accessible to shoppers, measure, price, and other details should be easy to find. If you have visitors from different regions, you should consider displaying measurements in their respective units and your images should be accurate representations of the size and color. Retailers sometimes hide prices on their product pages, which can impact your SEO. If a customer doesn’t see pricing information on a product page, they may leave right away and this could increase your bounce rate, which we will discuss in the next section. In addition, you should get it as up to date as possible. When a manufacturer updates their information to you, do your best to include it! Not only is it important for shoppers but it will also help to rank for more keywords on your page.
3. Avoid Cluttered, Complicated Urls
A website visitor’s address to a page on your ecommerce store is called a URL. URLs can contain a variety of information in a small space, including category names, product names, file types, or even actions (like “_blank” to open a new window). A search engine may not be able to interpret any keyword information from the URL if it’s too long and complicated. For example: http://www.websiteurl.com/cat?=328/product?=237828/main.html A search engine is more likely to get what the content of a website is from a URL like this: http://www.websiteurl.com/lawnmowers/green-gas-powered-lawnmower.html This may not only include keywords about the content of a website, but it also provides context. If someone shares the link with someone else, they will say “oh, a lawnmower!”, which tells them what the url leads to before they click on it. The first example URL could also lead to just about anything, right?
4. Use Alt Text In Images
One of the first things we learned about when we started working in product management was alt text. It’s work which “alternate” text that can be used in various ways. It can display instead of an image if the link is broken, for example, or it might show up when a user’s cursor hovers over the image. Alt text is a great way to get some keywords on your site that search engines scan. When an engine crawls through your site, they can’t figure out what images are or why they are there. However, alt text lets them know that this image is of a lawnmower – which helps the engine know that this page has content about lawnmowers. Avoid using alt text where it may not show up, like with a product image in Flash. It might sound like a lot of work to include additional keywords on the product or category page, but images help engines scan your site and find that information as well.
5. Allow Customer Reviews
You probably know about alt text, sometimes known as “alternative text”. Alt text is often used for images on websites; for example, if the image is broken, or the user hovers over it with the cursor. It can also be used to display a product image in Flash. Even if you have other keywords on your pages such as those in a product or category page, alt text provides additional information to search engines that can help them rank your website and display your content in related search results.
6. Avoid Duplicate Content
There’s nothing wrong with duplicating content that you find on a few different pages of your site. But these days, search engine algorithms are smarter than ever and can detect any duplicated content. So to avoid hurting your rankings, you need to create new and unique descriptions for each item you carry. And it doesn’t make it easy when you have a lot of products to describe. But these descriptions are what separate you from the competition, so it’s worth the time and effort.
7. Create Unique Content
If your website only offers a few products or lacks original content, it may be difficult to rank well with your selected keywords or phrases. One way to combat this: content marketing. Many retailers have a company blog where they talk about their latest news, trends or developments in their industry. This is a great way to provide more content for your website and give search engines something new to rank your site with. If you repeatedly blog about one topic, a search engine is more likely to consider you an expert in that area. And your readers will love it too, as long as the posts are well-documented and accurate.
8. Write For Humans – Not For Search Engines
Although we’ve stressed optimizing your ecommerce store for search engines, make sure that anything you do benefits the needs of your customers. Your customers are not robots and they deserve the best experience possible in your store! This might mean writing content that is actually readable by humans, rather than an algorithm. Your best bet is to hire a copywriter who has a good sense for what works on the internet. If you can’t afford a copywriter, there are plenty of online resources to help you learn this skill yourself.
Need Help Using These Ecommerce SEO Tips?
At Proximate Solutions, we pride ourselves on creating high-quality ecommerce websites with excellent SEO. Whether your store needs an update or you’re building a new one from scratch, we’re here to help! Read on for our ecommerce SEO tips and tricks.
Ecommerce SEO Services from Proximate Solutions
Looking for an Affordable Ecommerce SEO Services? Look no further than Proximate Solutions. We offer a comprehensive suite of ecommerce SEO services that are designed to help your online store rank higher in search engine results pages, driving more traffic and sales. Our team of SEO experts will work with you to develop a personalized ecommerce SEO strategy that takes into account your unique business goals and target audience. We’ll then implement that strategy across your website, from optimizing your website content and structure to building high-quality backlinks.