12 Tips To Improve SEO For ECommerce

With SEO, it’s important to step back and look at the big picture. What broad tactics and best practices can you use to improve SEO performance for your e-commerce website? They can be summarized into 12 key tactics, which we’ll go through one by one.

This article was written in collaboration with DMI partner NeilPatel.com. 

1: Perform Keyword Research That Considers Buyer Intent

When performing keyword research, don’t focus exclusively on the most popular keywords in your industry. It’s essential to factor buyer intent into the mix.

Buyer intent relates to the intention behind a search query. To identify it, look at the specific phrases and terms that people type into search engines when they’re searching online.

There are two main types of keyword intent:

• Informational keyword intent: These searches contain questions like “how do I?” or factual queries. In these cases, the searcher is looking for more details about a subject.
• Commercial keyword intent: These searches take place when a searcher knows what they want, but don’t know where to find it. They may type in search phrases like “buy smartphone” or “find London hotel deals”. Users of commercial keywords usually have more intent to purchase.

There are various ways to determine keyword intent. You could use a keyword tool like Google’s keyword planner. You could also use a tool like Ubersuggest. This tool is useful for content writers, bloggers and copywriters who want to generate new content ideas or investigate user search queries. You could also consider using Answer the Public. With this tool, you simply enter your keyword on the home page to discover exactly what people are asking about.

2: Don’t Forget Long-Tail Keywords

On SERPs, long-tail keywords usually appear on the right side of the page. A long-tail keyword is a term that typically has low search volume but is still relevant to your business. It usually converts well because it’s a better match for what the searcher is looking for. It also tends to generate higher traffic volumes.

Long-tail keywords can reveal what your customer is looking for and what their intentions are. For example, “shoes” is a short-tail keyword but “best walking shoes for summer” is a long-tail keyword and it provides more information about the customer’s likely next steps and intentions.

Try to rank for long-tail keywords because they’re a valuable source of traffic. They’re particularly useful for:

• Competitive niches
• Increased conversion rates
• Ranking new sites more easily
• Quick wins with a limited budget

You can find long-tail keywords by using Google’s “People also ask” feature or by using a free keyword tool like Ubersuggest or Wordtracker.

3: Optimize Product Pages to Improve Ranking

You can use on-page optimization techniques to attract and acquire new customers and gain more conversions. It’s a good idea to focus your efforts on the areas of your e-commerce site that matter most. These are your:

• Product descriptions
• Images
• Reviews

Product descriptions

Before you start optimizing your product descriptions, ask yourself three questions:

1. What are the most important elements on the page?
2. How can you maximize the visibility and impact of these elements?
3. How can you use this information to improve the effectiveness of your product descriptions?

To optimize product descriptions, you can consider:

• Adding high-quality unique images
• Including keywords
• Including keyword-rich descriptions
• Adding CTAs
• Including testimonials

Images

Images and photos can make a page look more interesting and engaging but they can also be distracting. So, avoid using too many of them in descriptions.

By optimizing your images for SEO, you should get higher search engine rankings and more traffic from potential customers. You may also gain traffic from social media channels.

To optimize your images:

• Choose suitable images in appropriate sizes
• Include captions with ALT tags
• Use the correct keywords in file names

Reviews

Reviews are vital for your success in e-commerce. They help consumers decide whether to buy a particular product or do business with an online store. Reviews also help you build trust with consumers and improve conversion rates.

Encourage customers to leave reviews by sending automated messages whenever they purchase something from your site.

4: Make Sure Your Site Is User Friendly

In e-commerce, it’s crucial to pay attention to the UX – or user experience – of your site. Good design makes your site more visually appealing and enhances its UX.

As well as looking good, it’s important that your site works well. Make sure that ads don’t interfere with the user’s view of the content. Ensure people can navigate easily through your site and that it’s intuitive to use.

It’s important that shoppers can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, that they remain engaged while on your site, and that they generally have a wonderful experience. If Google thinks your website offers visitors a poor experience, it may rank it lower.

To improve UX, ensure your site:

• Loads quickly
• Is mobile-friendly
• Is clutter-free
• Is easy to navigate
• Includes CTAs
• Uses consistent styling
• Is accessible

5: Use a Simple URL Structure

When your e-commerce site has a simple URL structure, it enhances the UX of your site. It improves your SEO e-commerce efforts, as it provides more relevant data for search engines. It also makes it easier to share products on social media and other websites.

URLs should be easy to read and understand and as short as possible.

POOR EXAMPLE: https://www.example.com/article-about-baking/

GOOD EXAMPLE: https://www.example.com/baking-articles/

It’s important to include keywords in your URLs. These are called “meta tags”. They tell search engines what the content of your page is about. Search engines scan the URL and use the keywords in the URL to decide where the page should rank in SERPs.

You can also use a navigational tool like breadcrumbs to help website visitors retrace their previous steps and return to where they started. You can add them using markup tags or via JavaScript to boost SEO.

Also, avoid using stop words in URLs. Stop words include “the”, “and”, “of”, and “a”. These can decrease your content’s readability and may lower your SEO rankings.

6: Use Schema Markups to Help Google and Users Understand Content

You can use schema markups to improve your SEO for e-commerce activities. These are HTML tags that provide additional information about the content on your web pages.

When you use schema markup, it produces rich snippets. Search engines use these to show more information about specific items in search results. They also help users find what they are looking for.

There are many kinds of rich snippets, including product markup snippets, music snippets, and review snippets. In e-commerce, you mostly use these kinds of schema:

• Product schema: This provides rich product information, such as images, price, and availability.
• Review schema: This enables online reviews.
• Product availability schema: This is a list of products that are available to purchase.
• Video schema: This is a type of metadata used to describe the content of a web page containing an embedded video.
• Price schema: This enables the sharing of product pricing information with search engines.

7: Avoid Duplicate Pages and Duplicate Content

Many online retailers fall into the trap of including duplicate product descriptions and images on their websites. You can reduce the amount of duplicate content on your site by:

• Using a CMS with site-wide 301 redirects or adding canonical tags on every page that you know might have duplicates; for example, pages with similar titles or that share an identical URL
• Adding a suffix to the URL
• Using different product images
• Adding unique keywords on other pages

8: Don’t Let Page Speed Kill Your Ranking

Page speed is a ranking factor – and an important one. Consumers simply won’t wait around while a site loads. The ideal page speed is about two seconds.

You can test your page speed by using Cloudflare or Google’s own PageSpeed Insights tool.

If your site is too slow, it may be because:

• Your site has too much content for your server to handle
• Too many scripts are slowing down load times
• Images are taking too long to load
• Your web host is malfunctioning

You can speed up your load times by:

• Using fewer images
• Compressing files
• Using fewer social media widgets
• Optimizing images
• Avoiding clutter
• Using lots of white space
• Limiting redirects
• Limiting HTTP requests

In addition, you could consider changing web hosts or upgrading your hosting package.

9: Improve Your E-Commerce Content

Written content plays an important role in your SEO for e-commerce strategy.

Uploading regular high-quality content:

• Attracts organic traffic
• Helps you build trust with customers
• Boosts your website rankings
• Enhances your reputation as an expert in your niche

You can include many different types of content, including:

• How-to articles
• Articles that answer frequently asked questions
• Updates on new product launches
• Glossaries
• User-generated content (UGC)
• Testimonials
• Video demonstrations
• Question and answer sessions
• Webinars

To improve your e-commerce content:

• Carry out research into your audience and get to know them better. This helps you create content that addresses their everyday concerns and suggest products that solve their problems. You can use buyer personas to help you do this.
• Find out what kind of content your audience prefers. Your content data should identify the content types that get the most views. You can also survey your customers to uncover this information.
• Maintain a regular content calendar to streamline your content production and keep your content creation efforts on schedule.
• Target your content at every stage of the customer journey.
• Use A/B testing in key areas like titles.
• Finally, measure your performance and tweak your content strategy if necessary.

10: Link Building for E-Commerce

Link building is an important ranking factor for SEO. High-quality links signify to Google that your site has credibility. Backlinks also help your site rank for keywords.

To create quality backlinks:

• Write guest posts
• Use social media ads
• Share content on social media
• Issue press releases
• Create infographics and share them online
• Publish whitepapers and case studies

Avoid buying links. Some paid links violate Google’s guidelines. In addition, cheap links are often low quality. Poor quality links lead to lower rankings and reduced traffic. They can also negatively impact your site’s reputation.

11: Add a Sitemap

A sitemap is a visual representation of your website. It should detail all the pages on your site, as well as all the subcategories, products, and other content within those pages.

You can develop a site map manually or use an automated tool. Sitemaps use both XML and HTML. HTML sitemaps are more helpful to visitors.

You can use these tools to create a sitemap:

• Google’s Webmaster Tools
• Lucid Sitemap Generator
• Powermapper

12: Make Social Sharing Easy

In most cases, social media sharing doesn’t directly impact SEO. However, when you share your content on social media, it increases brand exposure and allows people to get more familiar with your business.

In addition, it can be beneficial to grow the number of mentions you get on social media. Social media mentions can influence SEO by:

• Driving organic traffic
• Increasing visibility
• Improving local SEO
• Expanding content reach
• Enhancing brand recognition
• Increasing backlinks

You can use Buffer and Hootsuite to automatically post content from your site across all your social media accounts at scheduled intervals. This will increase your social media shares.

Related

• How to Check for Duplicate Content: Tools and Tips
• 5 Trends in SEO and Content
• Infographic: The 5 Steps of Keyword Research
• On-Site SEO Audit Handbook and Toolkit
• How to Choose the Best Social Media Channels for Your Business