The 5 Pillars Of Ecommerce SEO

The 5 Pillars Of Ecommerce SEO

 

Want to attract higher volumes of relevant traffic to your store? Want to become friends with those Google bots and rank higher? Well then the answer is simple, you need to focus on SEO for your ecommerce site.

Ecommerce SEO can be difficult and there is plenty you need to do to make your site stand out from the crowd.

I have 5 strategies that focus on SEO which will help you achieve the above.

#1 Site audit.

Most who are new to ecommerce SEO make the mistake of not completing this step. It is important that before your start working on link building you get the foundations of your site to a strong point.

You can use a few different tools but you should start with Screaming Frog.

Screaming Frog will identify

• Duplicate Content


• Missing Canonical Tags


• Missing or Duplicate Title Tags


• Missing or Duplicate Meta Descriptions


• Missing Alt Tags


• 404 Error Pages


• Deindexed Pages


• 302 Redirects

You can also use sites like Siteliner to help with duplicate content and SEMrush who have their own dedicated auditing tool.#2 Website Architecture

The key here is simple. Yes I said it…. SIMPLE!

A good rule to stick to, is to make sure your visitors can get from your homepage to your product pages with just 3 clicks. This will not only make it easier for search engines to crawl but also your viewers!

This is what you want your stats to look like….#3 Site speed

Do not underestimate the importance of this step. If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load you lose 40% of visitors.

So unless you are prepared to wave goodbye to all those potential earnings, I recommend going to GTMetrix and get a speed analysis. You will get a recommendation of things to improve your speed.

In my personal experience, I have been able to increase earnings by $30,000 in 6 hours by increasing my website’s speed.

 

#4 Keywords

Keyword research can be tricky, especially with ecommerce SEO, there are 4 main factors you need to consider when doing research for this specific type of keyword.

• Search Volume - the best way to determine the best volume for a keyword is to take other high-traffic keywords as a benchmark.


• Relevance - picking relevant keywords is simply a matter of thinking what you can offer that matches the given keyword.


• Competition - you must pick keywords for which you can realistically rank.


• Intent - you want people to get to your website who are at the right stage of the sales funnel.

You can use tools like AHrefs and SEMrush to assist you in your keyword research.

#5 Optimize your onsite SEO

Here is a list of factors that you need to look at...

• Your Title Tags - Adding your target keyword in the title tag will help you increase the rankings of your pages.


• Meta Descriptions - a great way to include some additional keywords and really drive home your message to attract clicks from the search results.


• Headings and Subheadings (H1, H2, etc.) - you should always try to add both your main keywords as well as your LSI keywords


• Images - make the filename fit the product name, make sure to add a relevant alt-tag and optimize the size of the pictures to lower its size and make your pages faster to load.


• Schema Data - Integrating microdata and rich snippets can not only help you stand out against the big boys but also help you draw more qualified traffic and increase your CTR even further.


• Internal Linking For Ecommerce - allows you to establish your own anchor text, which can help you with ranking for your top keywords.


• Show Your Value Proposition - the value proposition is what makes your company stand out from the rest; it’s what makes a visitor want to buy from you.


• Use As Many High Quality Pictures As Possible - one of the main challenges customers face online is the inability to touch, try, and feel the products they shop.


• Write Amazing Product Descriptions - having great product descriptions allow customers to understand what a product is and what it does.


• Use Testimonials (or customer reviews) - Testimonials work because people want to see what other people think. Psychologists call this “social proof,” and it’s an easy way for you to increase your conversion rate and trust.


• Link building - The more high-quality links you get pointing to your store with a favorable anchor text, the more it will help you increase your store’s positioning in the search engines.

 

Wrapping it up.

We have looked at the importance of getting your site audited, how the architecture of your site effects google bots, how having a slow site speed loses you customers, the best way to do keyword research and then how to optimise.

To get a full step by step over the shoulder guide for each of these strategies you can visit my full ecommerce SEO guide.