E-commerce websites have two fundamental goals – to popularize the business across the widest section of consumers and earn maximum revenue. SEO is the magic tool that can help to achieve both the goals with an affordable budget. Regardless of the size of your company, big or small, you cannot do without SEO for E-commerce because it is the only way to change your fortune by maximizing profitability. If you want to reap the benefits of using the web as a marketplace by setting up an e-commerce business, then implementing SEO is a basic need because it provides the highest return on investment (ROI).
Online visibility matters most in popularizing the business online, and the best way of gaining high visibility is to ensure that your website ranks well and appears on the first page of the search results. It means that you must make your website attractive enough to draw the attention of search engines so that it stands out from the crowd by using some special techniques of search engine optimization or SEO. It consists of optimizing your website around specific keywords related to your business, product, or services that help to rank higher in search results.
Higher search ranking means earning more clicks that increase the traffic flow to the website, which raises the prospects of higher lead generation and conversions and more revenue earning. Earning a place on the first page of search results is extremely important because 95% of searchers do not go beyond the first page. Moreover, there is a considerable difference in revenue earning potential between the websites that rank higher and those that rank below it. To know more about implementing SEO for E-commerce, log on to https://www.seosingaporeservices.org/ecommerce-seo-guide-for-marketing-online-store/.
In this article, we will focus on how to rank your e-commerce site.
Research
Knowing the competition and the keywords that searchers typically use to find your business are the fundamental requirements for launching an SEO campaign. You must research for both do that you leave nothing to chance. Targeting the wrong keyword can be a nightmare as it can ruin the SEO campaign.
- Keyword research – The keyword research should aim at finding keywords for your home page and product pages by considering search volume, relevancy, and ranking difficulty. The other purpose of keyword research is to find relevant keywords for blog topics. Blog content helps to rank for additional keywords that could not find a place on the website.
- Competition research – Find out the keywords that your competition is going for and the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) it generates. If the competitor’s DA and PA are higher than yours, it makes sense to target those keywords to gain mileage.
Identify current problems
Conduct a site audit to identify problems that you need to fix. Use some free tools like Screaming Frogs to detect site errors by evaluating the CSS, images, apps, and script from an SEO perspective. It will then generate a report containing top errors like changing 302 redirects to 301 redirects, redirecting 404 pages to actual content updating pages of duplicate content, meta descriptions, and meta titles.
Next, focus on website speed because a slow website can harm the business prospects as visitors would quickly quit it and look for some speedier website. If it takes more than 3 seconds for the website to load, visitors will soon abandon it.
On-page optimization
On-page optimization consists of all actions you take on the web pages to facilitate better ranking. It consists of various aspects of SEO like keyword optimization, usability, site structure, mobile version of the website, internal linking, rich snippets, customer reviews, and social media integration.
- As you want to optimize your website and blog posts for one keyword, you must ensure strategic placement of the keyword in the header, page title, sub-headers, product descriptions, URLs, meta tags, etc.
- The website structure affects the site’s usability and is critically important. The architecture should be flat and simple so that it requires a few clicks to transit from the home page to the product pages.
- Internal linking consists of linking your web pages to one another, which helps to establish your own anchor text and facilitates ranking with your top keywords.
- Usability is paramount because it attracts users to the website by enhancing user experience so that they keep coming back.
- Having a mobile version of the website is a must to capture the largest audience as mobile searches are higher than desktop searches.
- Integrating the e-commerce site with social media is a must to give completeness to SEO.
Add blog content
Keywords are critical for SEO success, and you would like to use a few keywords for optimization but can place only one chosen keyword on a web page. To accommodate many other keywords that you want to rank for, but which does not fit into the page, you should add a blog to the content which could accommodate those keywords. Blogs allow you to optimize each post for a single keyword, and having multiple blogs can accommodate more keywords. Ensure that the blogs re reader-friendly and high quality.
Link building
Earning inbound links is a critical activity to improve ranking. Launch a link building a campaign to acquire high-quality links from other websites that enhance the authority and drive more traffic. Avoid low-quality links, which you can usually tell by looking at it because it can do more harm than good as it will reflect poorly on your website quality and affect ranking negatively. Target a high-quality authority website that you can connect with for earning links. You must offer some value to them in exchange for links so that they feel interested.
Tips for Local business
As Google blends organic and local search rankings, if you have a local business interest, you must submit your business to major directories as well as relevant niche directories. Use location-based keywords in your descriptions as far as possible. By improving the local ranking factors, it is possible to push up some lower-ranking organic results over other organic results.
Use some SEO tools like Google Ads keyword tools, SEO Moz Keyword Explorer, Screaming Frog, etc. to augment your SEO efforts.