To have an eCommerce site that drives targeted traffic and is highly visible in Google, you must invest…
To have an eCommerce site that drives targeted traffic and is highly visible in Google, you must invest the time and effort into optimising it using the right eCommerce SEO practices.
Shared in this article are tips by Digital Animals’s SEO experts who have nearly a decade of experience working on various ecommerce stores. We never undermine the importance of SEO for an ecommerce store and understand that there is no one-size-fits-all SEO policy. Every business owner or webmaster needs to assess their stores and have a custom ecommerce SEO strategy developed to improve rankings and targeted customers.
Here are 7 proven ecommerce SEO tips based upon our expertise with clients and our knowledge in the industry:
- Use PPC and SEO together – SEO and PPC together work hand in hand in any ecommerce SEO strategy. They offer the best return for online stores. PPC is good, but the costs will burn your budget if you don’t perform SEO for your store as well. Without SEO, if you stop PPC, you will likely lose traffic almost immediately. Do not solely rely on paid advertising as not all customers place their trusts on banners, advertisements and paid ads. Hence, it is advisable not to put all eggs in one basket and use SEO & PPC together as core elements of your ecommerce marketing strategy.
- Stop using duplicate content – Due to the nature of ecommerce sites, there is a large amount of duplicate content. You are not at fault here, since we know that blue jeans and light blue jeans are very similar in nature and would most likely have high levels of copied content. What you should know is that constant ignorance of this issue would eventually wash away your site rankings when a new Google update is released. To avoid duplicate content, either hire a content developer who can writer unique product descriptions for each product, or wisely use the rel=”canonical” tag to de-index and no-follow pages with similar content.
- Keep on blogging – Research states that blogging not only helps in improving your site indexing rate, but also helps improving your rankings and targeted traffic. Keep blogging regularly on your ecommerce store with unique content that is relevant to your industry and products. For example, if you site is selling iPhone covers, you may have a blog post titled “iPhone cover guide: 5 tips to buy iPhone covers.” You can then internally link important keywords with the pages having “iPhone covers.” Regular blogging is essential for any ecommerce SEO store, adding fresh and unique content to your site helps improve rankings for targeted keywords.
- Optimize product images with alt tags – Content is important, but with each product comes product image for which you need unique product descriptions and alt tag. How do you think Google Image Search turns up relevant images of any keyword that you enter? This is because of the alt tags. Search engines still cannot “read” and understand what your image is all about. Alt tags include important keywords mentioning your product images. Every keyword should be highly relevant to your product images for higher rankings.
- Unique meta descriptions and titles – For maximum on-page efforts, you should have unique meta descriptions and titles for each and every single page of your website. While Google doesn’t give much SEO value to meta descriptions, having a relevant keyword in your meta description can increase the chances of a customer clicking on your SERP if they search for that keyword in Google.
- Unique navigational structure – Your website’s navigational structure should follow Google best practice guidelines and your site should be SEO-friendly too. This includes having landing pages for the most important products of your website.
- Redirect expired product URLs – A time comes when an ecommerce site would run out of products that have become obsolete or gone out of fashion. For products like these, Google suggests to use permanent 301 redirects to directly related products, instead of deleting that page and leaving lots of 404 error pages.
Digital Animals is an ecommerce SEO that have extensive knowledge in ecommerce, digital marketing, SEO, Magento, consumer psychology, and data intelligence which all help in crafting a custom Ecommerce SEO strategy.