While you are selling products online, you have to make sure that your website should be easily found by your customers or prospects. Which means appearing in the first positions of Google’ SERPs. It would be a tragedy having the best products and website and cannot reach your audience.
This is where SEO walks in. It will support you in ranking higher in the SERPs and make your website be seen by your target. The higher traffic you get, the more probable you are to make conversions.
Now let’s move on to check out the best practices to increase rankings
Domain Authority
It’s of no doubt that the quantity and quality of the backlinks pointing to your site is Google’s top ranking factor. This is also applied to ecommerce websites. But, how can you get someone to link to your site if it’s made up of 100% product and category pages? Actually you can’t. The fact is people want to link to sites that have valuable content. Without that you will have a hell of a time building white hat backlinks which is bad news. The good news is that even ecommerce sites can publish awesome content. When you do, you’ll build up your sites’ overall domain authority, which will help your product and category page rank in Google. In fact ecommerce giants like Amazon very rarely have links pointing directly to their product pages. Instead the rank is based on their site wide link authority.
Find appropriate & Optimized Keywords
Keywords are key players in the case of eCommerce SEO, so you will have to be very careful and attentive when looking out for the keywords for your e-commerce platform. You must use those keywords that are highly appropriate to your products.
Before utilizing a keyword for a product or category page, you have to identify its cost-per-click, search volume, the user intent for using that specific keyword, or other factors. You can also examine the competitor’s website to get keyword ideas. However, you are advised to use long-tail keywords as they often fit with the user intent and boost the conversion rate. For finding suitable and optimized keywords for your site there are different keyword research tools available that you can use. Some of these are listed below:
- Keyworddit
- SEMrush
- Soovle
- WonderSearch
- Keyword In
Other than mentioning the keywords in product titles, descriptions, and other areas, you can make use of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords on the web page. Ensure not to overload or stuff the web page also with these keywords.
Stay away from duplicate content
Duplicate content will become an enemy when it comes to ecommerce websites. Ecommerce websites awfully meet this matter because they deal with a lot of product descriptions. These product descriptions are usually given by a seller- seller which can distribute those products to various websites. It results that ecommerce websites exhibit product descriptions that can be seen on many various websites. Filter and category options can also lead to duplicate content problems as those filters build different URLs with the same content.
Prevent broken links
Wishing to provide the best experience possible to your visitors but ending up clicking on a particular page and landing on a “Page 404 Not Found” is surely not what you expect. So having broken links is a bad idea. You must then run regular crawls to find whether you have 404 issues. Having a lot of them will not be good for your business.
Enhance usability
Make your site navigation simple. The biggest mistake would be to not provide a clear navigation path. Remember to link to your product pages from your home page and to provide appropriate landing pages. This will also support bots to crawl your website.
Wrapping up
Search engines want to offer the best possible results for their searchers. So, taking time to focus on your audience and give them a great experience, you’ll be well on your way to excellent search engine optimization.