With more businesses migrating to the online world, SEO (search engine optimization) is starting to become a standard marketing practice.
As an eCommerce business, you’re probably already running ads on social media like Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. You’ve probably invested in influencer strategies, and maybe even in affiliate marketing.
But if you really want to amp up your website traffic, increase sales, and save money on marketing campaigns, it’s time to learn these 11 eCommerce SEO best practices like the back of your hand.
1. Create a Keyword List
Step one to any SEO strategy is researching and gathering a collection of keywords. Keywords are the search terms your target customers are looking up on search engines like Google, and by optimizing your content for them, you can increase traffic to your site which translates to more sales.
When it comes to keyword research, your list should reflect quality over quantity. In other words: you can’t just target any keyword.
For one, the keywords you choose need to be highly relevant to your audience. Time spent optimizing content for keywords your target customers aren’t even looking up is time wasted. Even if a keyword gets a ton of traffic, if the people clicking on your web pages aren’t really interested in what you sell or aren’t motivated to buy, you’ll have a hard time converting them.
Additionally, just because a keyword is high-volume doesn’t mean it’s worth your time (yet). As a startup (or if your website simply doesn’t have a relatively high domain authority), your focus should rather be on targeting low competition keywords.
Some keywords–usually those that bring thousands of views–are so hard to rank for that only the big name brands can claim a first-page spot easily. By focusing on highly relevant, low-competition keywords, you can attract customers who already have their wallets ready without the intimidation of corporate companies.
Where to Use Keywords
You’ve got a keyword list–now what do you do with it?
The first places to start sprinkling in these search queries are blog posts, web pages, and product descriptions.
Search engines don’t rank websites. They rank web pages. Although it’s important that your website is also appeasing search engine algorithms (such as being quick to load and mobile-friendly), each page should be treated as a new opportunity to gain a keyword ranking.
2. Target Long Tail Keywords
There are two main types of keywords in SEO: long tail keywords and short trail keywords.
Short tail keywords are extremely broad terms that usually only consist of one or two words. For example, “women’s shoes,” “perfume,” “basketballs,” and “essential oils.” As you might imagine, short tail keywords are usually extremely high-traffic.
Because of their popular nature, they’re also more competitive. So as a business just getting started with eCommerce SEO, here are a few examples of long-tail keywords you can try instead:
- Best women’s shoes for running
- Floral scent perfumes
- How to buy Hulu stock
- Different types of basketballs
- Essential oils for sinus infections
Not only are long-tail keywords–which typically consist of 3-5 or even more words–easier to target for low DA (domain authority) websites, but they also attract visitors who are more ready to buy because they know exactly what they want.
3. Improve Your Site’s UX
If you want a shot at ranking well and keeping visitors on your pages, your eCommerce UX (user experience) needs to be on fleek.
This means keeping a clean and organized site structure, easy site navigation, keeping web pages in the appropriate categories and tags, and making your overall site attractive and easy to look at.
For example, LawRank had a fast-loading site and an easy list of categories at the top of their page to make their website easy to navigate.
They also have their phone number at the top and a great CTA that allows people to schedule a call with them.
Even if you receive 100,000 views per month, that traffic means nothing if your site visitors never convert into customers. Keyword rankings get people through the door, but your website content and UX keep them browsing (and eventually buying).
And believe it or not, UX can drastically affect keyword rankings, the biggest ways being bounce rate and session duration.
Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who leave without interacting with other pages. In other words, the visitor clicks on a product page they found from a Google search, then exits the screen without exploring others.
Session duration is just as it sounds: how long a visitor stays on your site.
High bounce rates and short session durations signal to Google that your website is either untrustworthy or not what the visitor was looking for. This negatively impacts your ranking position because if Google gets the gist that your page isn’t a proper fit for the term it was ranking for, it’ll happily hand over your spot to someone else.
Another customer experience factor that really makes a difference is having live chat on your website. Bay Alarm Medical does this on their website by having a simple chat option at the bottom of their website:
You can add something like this to your own site by using a live chat plug-in.
4. Make Your Site Mobile-friendly
A study by Hitwise found that in the United States, 58% of searches are made through mobile devices. And in some industries, that number is as high as 72%.
It’s clear what this means for eCommerce SEO: abandoning mobile friendliness means giving away up to 72% of potential traffic.
Most of Google’s SEO ranking factors are unknown, but the search engine declared that as of April 2015, mobile-friendliness is one of them.
“Mobile-friendliness” simply refers to how usable your website is on a mobile device. Most websites are developed and designed with the intention of being used on a desktop, which can make them appear vastly different (read: unattractive) on technology like smartphones and tablets. Sometimes, they’re completely dysfunctional.
This is especially important for eCommerce businesses, as many get customers and traffic from social media ad campaigns. This leads to a high number of mobile users visiting your site. But if it’s difficult to use or unattractive, they won’t hesitate to close the page.
5. Do Competitor Analyses and Research
You want to stand out from the competition, but you also don’t want to reinvent the wheel. What’s working for your competitors might also work for you, which is why competitor analysis should be an essential part of your SEO strategy.
To get started, ask these questions during your investigation:
- What keywords are your competitors ranking for or trying to rank for?
- How many backlinks do they have?
- What’s their domain authority?
- Are they ranking for high-volume, short-tail keywords or low-competition, long-tail keywords?
- What kind of content are they publishing? (Blog posts, listicles, how-to articles, infographics, news stories, etc.)
Take note of any content gaps you notice–i.e., content your competitors should be publishing but aren’t. Try to fill in those gaps on your own blog, on top of producing higher quality content on topics they’re already covering.
You could also send out a simple form to your email list if you have one. This form could allow them to let you know how you could improve your customer experience on the website.
SEO tasks like keyword research and user intent research can seem daunting when you have no idea where to start. But by analyzing the brands that compete with you the most, you can work smarter rather than harder when building your own lists and strategies.
6. Build Domain Authority Through Backlinks
Domain authority (often abbreviated as “DA”) is a 1-100 range score developed by Moz that predicts the likeliness a website has for ranking in the SERPs (search engine results pages).
The lower your DA, the less you’re likely to rank for high-competition keywords. The higher your DA, the more likely. This makes DA an effective tool for determining which types of keywords you should target. For example, a website with a DA of 10 should stick to “low hanging fruit” keywords–those with low competition, and thus usually long tail.
However, it’s important to note that your site’s DA score is not a ranking factor and thus doesn’t influence your keyword positions. It should be used more as guidance on which terms are most worth your time to target based on the likeliness that you’ll rank well for them.
So, how do you raise your DA?
The most common and effective way is to build your backlink profile. When another website links to yours, you earn a backlink from them. The more you have, the higher your DA. However, the quality of those linking websites also matters–you’d prefer to have a website with an already high DA link to yours rather than one that’s lower than yours, for example.
Two strategies for link building (and thus, increasing your DA) include guest posting and creating link-worthy content.
By contributing to other blogs, you can include links to your own site–creating a backlink. And by creating useful content like infographics and conducting studies, other creators will naturally link to you because they want to use your findings.
There’s nothing more annoying than clicking on a web page you want to view, then finding out it no longer exists. We’ve all seen those pesky “404 error” pages before, and it’s something you never want your site to host.
Any time you delete a webpage (or it expires), make sure to set up 301 redirects. Simply deleting the pages doesn’t completely take them off the internet–viewers can still find them, and when they do, they’ll be disappointed it’s not what they were looking for.
Redirects are the perfect solution because any time a page is removed and someone happens to click on it, they’ll be taken to a different, more relevant page instead of a 404 error code.
Setting up redirects is simple with tools like WordPress plugins.
8. Improve Page Load Time
Page speed plays a major factor in UX (user experience). When your site takes too long to load, it can affect vital KPIs (key performance indicators) like your keyword ranking positions, bounce rate, and session duration.
But how long is too long?
Well, Google recommends your page load time to be under 2 seconds. However, most websites take significantly longer, with the average time being 15 seconds in 2019. This leaves you with loads of opportunities to outperform the vast majority just by implementing this one practice.
Average page load times of top-ranking blog posts also vary by industry. In the technology niche, for example, the average time is as high as 6.7 seconds.
9. Keep a Regularly Updated Blog
Of course, your product and web pages can bring you organic traffic. But one of the best ways to ensure regular high-traffic months is by creating SEO-optimized blog posts on a consistent basis.
By creating content around questions your target customers are asking, you’ll not only get their eyes on your website but also establish yourself as an industry authority and gain their trust.
Plus, “consistent” doesn’t have to mean “every day.” HubSpot data found that blogging just 1 to 4 times per week as a small business is enough to reap positive benefits.
10. Avoid Duplicate Content
Moz defines duplicate content as “content that appears on the Internet in more than one place,” with “place” meaning any location with a unique website address.
In high school, you probably called it “plagiarism.” The only difference is that in the SEO world, you don’t necessarily get penalized for it.
Google admits that it doesn’t penalize duplicate content, but rather that it can still negatively impact your performance in the SERPs. This is because when content is “appreciably similar” (as Google calls it), the bots that crawl and index pages for ranking have trouble deciding which content is the most relevant for the keyword(s) they’re targeting.
Bottom line: don’t plagiarize yourself or other websites.
11. Optimize Image Alt Text
When including images in your web pages (which you should!), it’s vital to optimize the image alt text with relevant keywords. This doesn’t just tell search engines what the image is about, but also the entire web page, making it easier to crawl and rank.
Plus, your images can appear in the “image” tab for the keywords you target. So when people click to go where the image is from, they’re taken directly to your content.
Author: Freya Laskowski
Gravatar Email: freya@collectingcents.com
https://twitter.com/freyalaskowski
Freya is a personal finance expert and founder of the CollectingCents website that teaches readers how to grow their passive income, save money, improve their credit score, and manage debt. She has been featured in publications like Business Insider, Fox Business, the Huffington Post, and GoBankingRates.