On-Page SEO is an important first step if you are interested in getting more traffic and sales to your eCommerce site.
There are a lot of tutorials and articles online that offer general SEO advice, but most of them don’t do a good job in addressing the needs of most eCommerce entrepreneurs.
This article is going to cover the basics of on-site search engine optimization for eCommerce. This is going to make sure you have enough to get started and ensure you are sending the right signals to Google so you can succeed with SEO.
What is Ecommerce SEO?
This is the process of making your store more visible on the search engine results pages. When people search for a product or service you offer, you want to appear as high as possible because it is going to translate to more traffic.
Paid search can help you get traffic, but SEO is going to cost way less. Ad blindness and ad blockers can reduce the effectiveness of paid search. This is why you need to focus more on optimizing for search.
Ecommerce SEO will involve optimization of headlines, metadata, product description, navigational structure for search, internal structure, and user experience. Make sure each product you are selling has its dedicated page so that you can design it to get traffic from search engines.
You also need to remember static and non-product-oriented pages on the site, like:
- About page
- Home page
- F.A.Q page
- Contact page
- Help centre answers
- Blog articles
Creating a list of the keywords for these pages and related keywords will help. You can make use of tools such as Ubersuggest that will help you find a long-tail keyword and semantic keywords to go with it.
Why SEO For Ecommerce is Important
What do consumers do when they are looking for a given product or service? Most will visit the search engine and look for the product. They look for tips, options, comparisons, and other information that might help them make decisions about the product.
If your site doesn’t appear in the search engine results pages, you are losing access to interested and qualified eCommerce customers. You might have space online for your products, but can the customers find them?
This is where eCommerce SEO comes in. you get the chance to reach your target audience without having to pay for any ads. When they visit your site, they are going to be delighted with the quality products, a great copy, and a call to action.
You are doing your company a disservice if you just optimize your site for people only. SEO for eCommerce is going to handle the first step, acquiring new customers by getting them to visit your site. If you are looking for mobile optimisation then see here.
Developing an Ecommerce SEO Strategy
This can seem like a huge task, especially if you have a website with a lot of products. It can take you time to work on every product, but you can speed things up by using a solid strategy.
Prioritizing pages: start with the pages with the most traffic. If you have a flagship product that you want people to focus on, start by optimizing that first then moving to the other pages.
Creating a workflow: you have to meet a lot of specific requirements when it comes to SEO. Adding metadata, choosing keywords, incorporating related keywords, adding image alternate attributes, and naming your images correctly.
Checking out your competition: Your strategy needs to outwit your competition. Check out your competitor’s site and see what they are doing in terms of their SEO efforts. Look for ways to be better.
Following through with CRO: You should follow SEO with conversion rate optimization (CRO).
