eCommerce SEO. How to improve it?

Tired of not getting the results you want? Want to upgrade your eCommerce website to produce more traffic naturally? eCommerce SEO may be what you are looking for. Search Engine Optimization is a critical step to achieve traffic and get audience attention for your website.

Several tutorials on exactly how to improve SEO; however, very few touch on eCommerce SEO.

In today’s article, we will focus on the best practices to optimize your eCommerce site for search engines. We can’t make any promises, but after this tutorial, you should be able to start optimizing your website; Therefore giving the right signals to search engines to gain more traffic.

What Is SEO?

We have touched on this multiple times, I know, but not everyone is reading all of these articles, so we’ll recap briefly to get everyone up to speed. Fair enough?

SEO stands for Seach Engine Optimization, and as the name implies, it involves optimizing your website for search engines, shocking, right?
The more optimized your website is, the higher it’ll rank on search engine’s result pages (SERP for short).
Aside from traffic, why do you need it? Good question. Search engine optimization lets Google, and other search engines too, know what your website is about, what’s its content and if it contains the answer to a query.
In today’s example, eCommerce SEO, the next time someone looks for the best laptops, yeezys, or the latest iPhone, guess who will show up?
The website that signals to the search engine “Hey, this whole website is about the best laptops, come and look”
I sincerely hope this explanation was good enough, but enough rambling. Let’s get started already.

What are the Best SEO Practices

So, without any further chase, all of them are the best, and all of them will help you rank. Not the answer you were looking for, right?
The truth is, there is no shortcut to SEO, it takes time, and you must do everything by the letter. SEO is a combination of efforts and not just the push of a button.
SEO Practices are essential to any eCommerce website as these strategies will help your products rank amongst billions of others in search engine results pages.

Research Competition

The truth is, you should know your niche, who are your competitors and what they are up to. The odds are they have already been through this step, especially if they have been longer in business. And you can learn a thing or two from them.
This can give you a kickstart on keywords, the number of backlinks needed and other SEO practices.
On this step, we’d advise you to use a tool called SEMRush. It’s pretty complete and provides very useful information.

Using the Correct Keywords

Keywords are one of the big players in SEO. They are the ones that tell the history of your content. You should know a couple of things:

Don’t overdo them: you should assign one keyword per page/product. Optimizing for more than one keyword may send the wrong signals and end up not ranking at all.
Pick the right ones: We suggest going for high CPC, high volume ones. Those are the ones that are going to return the most traffic.
Pick keywords with high intent: Although some keywords may have a higher volume of search, not all of them have the same intent, you should pick the ones with higher intent of making a purchase. Long-tail keywords usually fair better in this aspect, but it may vary according to your niche.
As a last tip, remember to fill your product headline, descriptions, meta description & data along with image alt attributes and subheadings accordingly.

For this step, we suggest trying tools like Keywords Everywhere, UberSuggest and Google’s Keyword Planner.

Focussing On Your Homepage

The most crucial element of any website is the homepage.
The homepage tells us a lot about the company. Your homepage should look to inspire confidence in the buyer.
For SEO, focusing on the homepage will rank best on search engines. Now, we aren’t saying it’s the only page you should focus on, but it’s one of the most effective ways to optimize the website with minimal effort and budget.
To optimize the homepage, add homepage title tags, homepage meta descriptions, and content containing keywords relevant to your niche.

Simplify Your Site

The best way to sell is by making the products readily available to the customer. If they can’t easily find what they are looking for odds are they are not buying it from you.
Creating fewer clicks to view products and an easier to navigate website will certainly improve SEO and improve customer satisfaction and usability.
Search engines like “Google” reward websites that are more responsive and simpler in navigation with higher positions on SERPs.
Using internal linking can also help boost SEO optimization on eCommerce websites as it shows how one page can be related to another.
We recommend using tools like Google’s PageSpeed or seositecheckup.com in this step.

Create Backlinks For Your Site

Creating backlinks is another powerful way of signalling to search engines. A backlink is a link that goes from one site to yours.
An easier way to understand how they work is with an example. Imagine you are looking at a blog, and the author mentions “delicious pizzas,” and there is a link attached to it. You say heck yea, and click it and get redirected to “Mama Joan’s Pizza.”
When Google crawls said blog, the anchor text “delicious pizzas” and the link get associated, and with enough people signalling “delicious pizzas” to “Mama Joan’s Pizza” Google will start showing up Mama Joan’s when you look for delicious pizzas on Google.

A rule of thumb is, the more backlinks you have from high-quality websites, the more powerful your links become. This is thanks to something called Domain Authority.

A simple way to achieve this is by guest posting on blogs which are to do with your niche category.

Utilize Bootstrap for Developing

Using a good Bootstrap framework is crucial for the responsiveness of websites these days. What Bootstrap does is optimizes the view according to which device visits the website, ensuring it’s always sized correctly to the screen.
That isn’t to say that Bootstrap is the only way to do it. You may not require to use it at all, but it’s what we advise in this step.

Avoid Cluttered URLs

Cluttered URLs are a nightmare for any search engine as they contain so many stop words. With stop words, search engines tend to ignore the full link, which means it ranks lower.
To optimize the URL optimally, try to create links with no stop words like “A” or “No.” Instead, use the main keyword separated by dashes (-).
A must mention, don’t use names that aren’t related to that particular webpage either as that won’t be SEO optimized appropriately.

Design & Edit With Consumers In Mind

With consumers as the main focus on eCommerce websites, you must think like a consumer and design your website with them in mind; This will better optimize your site and provide the best possible user experience for your customer.
Make sure your content is for humans and not robots, making it feel more personal & meaningful.
If you aren’t design inclined, you could always reach out to a Software Development Company to help you.

Links to the Tools mentioned:

Wrap Up

While it is exciting to jump straight into the development of an eCommerce website, you should take many considerations to have the best possible chances at success. One of those is a website that attracts loads of traffic for free.
You can achieve this with Search Engine Optimization. With the practices and tips listed above, you should have your eCommerce website on good track.
The tips above are suited for all technical expertise background levels meaning anyone can apply at least one of the SEO tips above to achieve the desired effect.
Big Kitty Labs is a leading app developer in Columbus Ohio that has been developing applications, websites, and software for over 10 years. Contact us for free discovery and consultation on your next project!

Ulises Cordero

April 4, 2023