After building your ecommerce website, the next thing that comes to your mind is to drive visibility and website traffic so you can make sales but there’s a high chance you’ll not make sales without setting up SEO for.
As an ecommerce company, if you want to experience steady visibility, earn consistent traffic and make increasing sales, one of the biggest steps you need to take after setting up your website is to find ways to set up ecommerce SEO for your website immediately.
You can’t afford to abandon your website after uploading your products because unlike other websites, your chances of getting organic visibility without a proper search engine optimization are very low. And besides competing with millions of other websites, you’re also battling with regulators like search engines, social media platforms and their ever changing algorithms.
So if you want to stay on top of your game and find ways to make actual sales from your online stores than you need to implement SEO for ecommerce website immediately.
What is SEO for eCommerce?
SEO for ecommerce is simply search engine optimization for online stores. It is a collection of search optimization strategies evolved and implemented to drive website visibility and traffic for ecommerce websites.
One of the things that make SEO for ecommerce stand out is the fact that ecommerce websites are not exactly like regular websites and as such, optimizing for an ecommerce website requires more intensive keywords research and a clear understanding of user intent, to drive a well-targeted audience.
Why is SEO for eCommerce Important?
SEO for ecommerce is crucial for online stores because without getting your website optimized for optimum visibility, it’ll be nearly impossible to make sales from your stores or achieve any business growth.
Outside getting visibility, without a proper SEO for ecommerce implementation, it is very difficult to get the right target audience over to your website. So, even if you were to be able to manage to get some visibility, it might end up as a total waste without search optimization as the audience may not be interested in your products.
Steps to Set up SEO for eCommerce Websites
Setting up SEO for ecommerce websites can be quite demanding but the moment you have it properly set up, you can expect to start getting results in terms of website traffic and sales in a few months.
I’ll be discussing in details, the steps you can use to implement search engine optimization for your ecommerce business in the following paragraphs…
Start a Keywords Research
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The first step to set up an ecommerce SEO for any website is to implement a keyword research. This is very crucial because you want to first of all understand what your audiences are searching for in regards to your products.
As soon as you’re able to identify clearly what your audience is searching for, you have to go a step further to use these keywords properly while describing your products.
I’ll break it down further into the following sub heads;
- Identify Keywords: Use keywords research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to find relevant keywords for your products.
- Target Long-Tail Keywords: Go for long-tail keywords. If you’re selling Nike shoes for example, instead of using “Nike Shoes” as keywords, consider optimizing for a keyword like “Nike Shoes for Racing, Nike Shoes for Kids” etc. as these are oftentimes less competitive.
- Understand User Intent: To get a well-targeted audience, do not merely optimize for Keywords. Take time to understand the intent of your target users for specific keywords and then pay attention to get your product page to deliver exactly on that.
As soon as you’re done with keyword research, head over to install your preferred SEO plugin and then kick start the initial on page optimization for the entire website.
Optimize your Product Pages
For ecommerce SEO, oftentimes users are going to be sent directly to your product page. Even where you already have your entire website optimized for visibility, you still have to take time to optimize your product pages.
While optimizing your product pages, the following are some of the key areas you have to look into:
- The Title Tags: The product title space is a key area you can use to add the primary keyword for the specific product you’re uploading.
- Meta Descriptions: Don’t just repeat a product description here. Take time to write a compelling meta description for each products, making sure to add your relevant keywords.
- Product Description: Here, take time to create a unique and detailed description for each of your product. Define what makes them unique, benefits etc. while making sure to use relevant keywords naturally.
- Image Optimization: Before uploading product image, compress the images and then change the default file name to a descriptive file name of course, the alt text. To a name that reflects the specific product and your keywords.
Generally, for best outcomes, I do not advice a bulk image upload for an ecommerce website unless you’ve already sorted out your image optimization before attempting a bulk image uploads.
Make your Site Easy to Navigate
Naturally, most people forget that it is also important to factor in website architecture and ease of navigation while optimizing your ecommerce SEO.
Truth is, even where your website is well optimized, when people find it difficult to navigate your website or leave as soon as they land on the website, that’s automatically telling the search engine that your website is not what they’re looking for.
And you know what happens next when this goes on repeatedly? You get lower visibility.
Now, since you do not want this to happen to your website, you want to take steps to make it easy for users to navigate your website so they can spend more time on it.
To make your website easy to navigate, work with your website developer to do the following:
- Create Website Menus: With a navigation menu, you get website users to move around your website pages more easily.
- Categorize sections: Create categories and sub categories to organize your products more easily
- Mobile Optimization: Make your site mobile-friendly. Since majority of web searches are coming from mobile devices, over the years, search engine sites like Google have always used a mobile first approach to as part of their ranking and visibility preferences. You want to optimize your website to meet up with this.
PS: As an aside, part of website navigation also extends to your color choices. Even when you plan to keep your website tightly on brand, be sure that your preferred design choices are not driving users away from your online store.
Fix your Technical SEO
Technical search engine optimization is a big part of SEO that can make or break the success of your website. It is also part of the key things search engine providers like Google are on the lookout for while ranking your website for visibility.
While implementing ecommerce SEO, one of the things we usually put in place at the early stages is the technical SEO. And I’ll encourage you to take this approach, if you really want to see some decent results for your ecommerce SEO.
That said, the following are key areas you want to consider while implementing search optimization for an online store.
- Website Speed: Optimizing your website to deliver web pages for users at a faster rate is an important step that will get you a better search engine ranking. Using tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights, GTMetrics, Pingdom tools etc. you’ll understand your website speed and the areas you need to improve.
- Implement Site Caching: Implementing a caching mechanism on your web page can improve the overall speed of your website.
- Install SSL Certificate: While the use of secret socket layer security for your website may not come off as the foremost ranking indicators for the search engine algorithms, using SSL certificates can encrypt user data while also securing your website generally.
- Fix XML Sitemap: In most cases, your sitemap will be automatically created and submitted to search engines if you have your SEO plugins linked to your Google Search Console however, you can always crosscheck to make sure your sitemap has been submitted properly.
Use Content Marketing
Content Marketing is an important tool that’s very useful for ecommerce SEO especially when it comes to keywords positioning, link building and customer targeting.
You cannot afford to upload your products on your online store and then get all relaxed. Content marketing is the key strategy that will get you to further use your keywords across the website, build backlinks and then curate your preferred customers more accurately.
To get started, you can opt to create and post content around your products. It could be themes like guides, ‘how tos’, tips etc.
You can also use storytelling as part of your SEO for ecommerce strategies to create brand leadership and position your business for niche authority.
While creating and sharing content, you want to focus on identifying the needs of your target audience and then taking these into consideration, to create content that specifically meets that need.
By this I mean that before creating a piece of content for your audience, you should identify the audience first, find out their needs and then create content that addresses that need far better than any other content on the internet.
As part of your strategies, optimize these content using the right keywords, relevant images etc.
Implement a Link Building Strategy
Be it internal or external link, generally, search engine optimization thrives on link building. Ecommerce SEO is no different.
So, you want to implement both on page and off page link building strategy that will get your website delivering better navigation for users and higher ranking for your business.
Start with an audacious internal linking strategy, linking from your cornerstone content to specific content and pages on your website and vice versa.
Afterwards, implement an off page link building strategy to get natural links from other websites, over to your website.
Keep in mind, one of the key ways to attract natural off page links is by creating top quality content. But beyond that, you can also attract links through a robust link outreach strategy, guest posting, social media posting and other link building options.
PS: Prioritize building relevant and high quality backlinks over spammy links. This is very crucial to get you decent outcomes.
Set up Analytics & Monitoring
Setting up search engine analytics and monitoring steps you can use to analyze and measure your website traffic outcomes. The data you curate from this analytic tool can inform you on things to prioritize for your website.
As part of your ecommerce SEO, you have to set up and connect your website to the search engine for both analytics monitoring and measuring.
Starting with Google search console, you want to set up a web master tool on Bing, Google and other search engine. For Google, this tool is called Google search console while Bing calls it Web Master Tool.
Set up and claim your website for both search engine platforms and start measuring and tracking your traffic, ranking keywords, conversion rates etc.
Afterwards, set up an analytics account specifically for your Google search engine. This account will give you further insights on your website performance.
Integrate with Social Media
Most businesses do not see social media integration as a major part of SEO but it actually is a key aspect of your brand that can help in building trust for your brand.
Beyond that, social media platforms can also get you new visitors when you share you content on the platform and it can also be relevant in your search engine indexing and ranking.
That said, if you do not have an active social media page, its time to head over to your preferred social media platforms, create a handle for your online store on those platforms and then a link over to your website.
At intervals, post content and engage with followers on that social media platform. Curate and share Informative and helpful content that’s capable of meeting the needs of your target audience. And then from time to time, share the links from your blog posts on your social media platforms.
This will attract new visitors to your blog from the social media.
Final Words
Creating and implementing a robust ecommerce SEO can bring an impressive turnaround for your business but to achieve this effectively, you need to do it rightly.
Remember, SEO is very dynamic and algorithm changes at intervals so you want to keep updating your website to meet with new search engine ranking guidelines and demands.
That said, using these steps you just learned today, you can get started on your journey to getting a better visibility, profit and sales for your ecommerce business.
And if you want to achieve even more, get our experts to work with you to get your ecommerce SEO to the next level like we’ve done for others by reaching out here.
Now, it’s your turn. What are your key challenges when it comes to setting up ecommerce SEO? Drop your comments below.
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