What are the SEO strategies for e-commerce websites? There are about 20 million e-commerce sites on the internet, and in the next 15-20 years, it is expected that more than 90% of all purchases will be made through these online platforms. Chances are you’ve learned from it how startups like Amazon, Flipkart, and others can become giants in the market in less time. Yes, the reason is the rapid growth in demand for online shopping. But did you know that apart from having high-quality products and first-class services, what are the most important factors that dominate the e-commerce market? It’s that your online store must appear at the top of the SERPs – this is the scene of e-commerce, where SEO comes in!! Let’s take a look at the 7 best SEO strategies for e-commerce websites.
However, the process of search engine optimization is crucial for all kinds of websites, but it has a greater impact on e-commerce sites. This is because when shopping online, people usually search for the desired product on a search engine instead of searching for any particular e-commerce platform. Therefore, it is necessary to rank your e-commerce site at the top of search engines so that it can be seen by audiences related to your niche before other competing sites, and you can get better traffic and conversions. At the same time, if your website doesn’t rank at the top of search engines, then it doesn’t have any value, and as people say, the safest place to hide your body is the second page of Google. With the same in mind, we have mentioned below 7 of the best SEO strategies to ensure the success of your eCommerce website.
Find relevant and optimized keywords
Analysis of Effective SEO Ecommerce Website Optimization Techniques: Keywords are the main players in e-commerce SEO, so you need to be very careful and attentive when looking for keywords for e-commerce platforms. You should use keywords that are highly relevant to your product. Before you use a keyword for a product or category page, you must determine its search volume, cost-per-click, the user’s intent to use that particular keyword, or other factors. You can also analyze your competitors’ websites for keyword ideas. At the same time, it’s recommended that you use long-tail keywords, as they often align with user intent and increase conversions. For example, if your website offers men’s clothing products, then you could use the following keywords: red cotton t-shirts for boys, blue crewneck men’s shirts, etc. There are various keyword research tools available that you can use to find the right and optimized keywords for your website. Some of them are listed below:
- Keyword editing
- SEMrush
- Sofleur
- Miracle Search
- Keyword input, etc
In addition to mentioning keywords in areas such as product titles and descriptions, you can also use LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords on your web pages. Yes, don’t try to overload or stuff web pages with these keywords.
Build a simple site architecture
Ecommerce Website SEO Strategy Essentials: Ecommerce website architecture involves the navigation process of your website and how the website is made up of category or product pages. It should be simple and accessible for users and search engines. When dealing with site architecture, there’s one key rule you must always keep in mind – it states that each product page should only be clicked three times (or less) from the homepage. Let’s use it to understand an example: two site architectures named A and B are given below:
Now you can see that the Site A schema is very deep and difficult to navigate. Since it’s not scalable, you need to analyze and organize things every time you add a new category or product. And the most impactful vulnerability is that in deep site architecture, the authority passed by your site’s homepage is weakened until it reaches the product page. Whereas, in the case of the site B structure, it is easy to access the desired page (product page) in just three clicks or less. Not only does it improve the user experience, but it also ensures that product pages get relevant authority from the homepage, making it easier for search engines to categorize and index pages.
Focus on on-page SEO
What are the SEO strategies for e-commerce websites? On-Page SEO has always been a major factor in ranking any website on search engine results pages. When we talk about on-page SEO from an eCommerce website perspective, it mainly focuses on the process of optimizing product and category pages to rank higher on specific keywords and get relevant traffic and conversions. However, on-page SEO techniques for ecommerce sites are somewhat similar to any other website, but there are a few additional methods that you must consider. Some of the main on-page SEO techniques for ecommerce websites are listed below:
- Use optimized meta titles and descriptions.
- Use short and keyword-rich URLs.
- Mention the product description and include the primary and LSI keywords.
- Add schema markup.
- Do internal linking, etc.
At the same time, you can use real, relevant, high-quality images or other infographics to get better results. Additionally, when doing on-page SEO for your Commerce website, it’s important to not only consider ranking on search engines, but also to focus on the user experience, which will keep your audience on your website often.
Create unique product descriptions for each product
Example of an SEO strategy for an e-commerce website: This is the most overlooked aspect when it comes to e-commerce SEO. Somehow, it can be justified because ecommerce platforms can have a lot of products in similar categories, so it becomes very difficult to write a unique description for each product. But the same description can lead to content duplication issues, affect your website rankings and reduce traffic and conversion rates accordingly. As a result, it becomes even more important to write compelling and unique descriptions for each product. Here are some tips for writing product descriptions:
- Try to write a product description of nearly 1000+ words.
- Use the main keyword in the description 3-5 times.
- Sprinkle LSI keywords appropriately (don’t stuff them irrelevantly).
- Add modifiers like “buy“, “sell“, and click on magnet keywords like “50% off“, “free shipping”, etc.
- Highlight the specifications and important details of the product.
Also, don’t try to copy descriptions from other websites, as this can negatively impact SERP rankings, which may also reduce trust between you and your audience. Also, try to entice users to use your website by asking them to write product reviews, service experiences, and more.
Improve website loading speed
What are the SEO strategies for e-commerce websites? Let’s say you turn on your smartphone or laptop and do some online shopping. You’re looking for a watch for yourself, so type relevant keywords into a search engine. In a SERP, you open your first e-commerce site, and it takes enough time to load and navigate. Now, what would you do? Of course, you’ll shut down that site and use another one. That’s the turning point. Despite having a quality product, valuable service, or other standard features, a site that loads slowly can cost you a significant customer base. And in addition to being from a user’s point of view, search engines also show that site speed is one of the factors in their ranking algorithm, which means that the faster your website loads, the better the search engines will rank.
A big reason why e-commerce websites load slowly is the large size of the images. While e-commerce platforms rely heavily on product images, it’s not advisable to compromise on image quality and standards anyway. So, what you can do is to optimize the image and reduce the file size without losing the image quality.
Build high-quality backlinks
Introduction to Effective SEO Ecommerce Website Optimization Techniques: Backlinks have always been considered the most authentic and valuable SEO practice for websites. And in the case of e-commerce SEO, it becomes even more important, if your platform is recommended to the audience by some real resources, then it will generate huge traffic on your website. When building backlinks, you have to keep in mind that third-party sources should be authentic and the links should be relevant to your niche, as any spam or irrelevant links will penalize your site. There are various ways you can start building backlinks for your eCommerce site, such as by using infographics on social media platforms, directory submissions, using Q&A platforms (Quora, etc.), and more.
The best way to get high-quality backlinks is guest blogging, as it is a search engine favorite. You can simply publish blogs that are relevant to your niche, and at the same time you have to make sure that in addition to building links, the content posted should be beneficial to users. Another go-to way to get backlinks is to look for expired resources that are similar to your niche. What you need to do is identify these non-work sites and contact the relevant people to provide them with replacement links.
Maintain site security
Introduction to SEO strategy for e-commerce websites: As an e-commerce platform, you have to deal with millions of user data, and a large number of transactions occur on the platform every day, so it is particularly important to maintain the security of your website. In addition, considering the rapid increase in cyber attack cases on e-commerce platforms, such as leaking financial credentials, account theft, etc., users have also become more cautious and prefer more secure websites. Yes, search engines also consider your website’s security level in order to rank it on the SERPs. The first thing you have to make sure is that your e-commerce website must have HTTPS and SSL certifications to protect sensitive data or information. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) allows browsers to create secure connections to servers on standard ports, while SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) adds an extra layer of security to data encryption.
In addition, you must always back up your site data so that in case of data corruption or interruption, you can easily recover it without disturbing the user. Additionally, you can remind your users to change their account passwords regularly and keep your website updated to minimize risk.
What are the SEO strategies for e-commerce websites? These are some of the main SEO strategies for eCommerce websites that can help you rank higher in the SERPs, which in turn will bring you more traffic and better conversion rates. So, don’t miss any opportunity and optimize your online platform to dominate the e-commerce market!!
