Ecommerce SEO: Bringing Life To Your Online Business

Bringing people to your online store is no easy task. And with more people than ever bringing their businesses into the online world, it’s getting harder than ever to get traffic.

Luckily for you, by using the right eCommerce SEO strategies, you can quickly increase your traffic with life-changing results.

Let’s explain a little further:

Why Does Your Online Store Need SEO

To put it very bluntly, if you don’t incorporate SEO into your business plan, there’s a good chance your store will be out of business within 24 months.

And no, this isn’t being dramatic.

You see, your success relies on one thing, and it’s not by having the best products; it’s about your ability to drive customers to your website. 

This might seem strange at first; surely having the best products would equate to more sales.

And in a way, it’s right, but if you don’t have the traffic coming to your website, you’re going to struggle big time!

So, how do you use eCommerce SEO to help boost your rankings and, in turn, increase your traffic?

The 4 Necessary Stages To A Robust eCommerce SEO Strategy

When people think of SEO, they think it’s going to be super technical, when in fact, it really isn’t.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s a quick task, you still need to put a lot of work in, but it’s not complicated stuff. Keep reading if you want to find out more about eCommerce SEO:

Site Audits 

Before you start any SEO campaign, the first you need to do is check the foundations of your website, and to do this; you need to run a site audit.

Why?

Because broken foundations on your website can kill all the effort you put into your SEO, which is not something you want.

You’re probably thinking, “What issues does a site audit fix?”

The most common problems found on a site audit are:

• Next to no content 
• Duplicate Content
• 404 pages
• Site hard to crawl

It used to be pretty challenging completing a site audit, luckily times have changed since then.

Now you have several SEO tools you can use to complete an onsite audit:

• Ahrefs
• SEMrush
• Screaming Frog

Any of these tools can do a fantastic job at auditing your site, but there are a few things you should know.

Ahrefs and SEMrush cost a bit of money if you want to use them, but they give you all the tips you need to fix the problems they find.

Screaming Frog, on the other hand, is completely free to use for the first 500 pages, but you need a little more knowledge to complete the audit.

Keyword Research

Keywords are one of the main ranking factors used by search engines, so it is something you really need to pay attention to.

Your eCommerce store’s success relies on your ability to pick the right keywords for the product you’re selling.

And to pick the perfect keyword, you need to think about four things:

Search Volume – Most people will pick their keyword based on the traffic it brings, and it’s an important thing to think about, but it’s not the only thing you need to think about.

Try and gauge what regards as high traffic for your niche; it can vary between niches, so what’s high for one might not be for another.

Relevance – This is a very important factor for reducing your website’s bounce rate and increasing conversions.

Here’s the thing:

If someone clicks on a keyword about sports shoes, but they find shorts, they are going to feel pretty annoyed and click away from your store. 

And that’s why you need to think so hard about the relevance of your keyword.

Competition – People often forget to think about the competition a keyword has, or it’s not even something they knew needed to be a consideration.

To have a chance of ranking for a keyword, you need to make sure your Domain Rating (DR) can compete with the other sites we currently rank for that keyword.

Intent – This is a super important factor to think about if you want to increase your conversions. 

You see, the right keyword can attract people who are at the right stages of the sales funnel, which is just what you need to increase conversion and revenue.

If you keep these four things in mind when you pick your keyword, you’ll be setting yourself up for success.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is all about making your website more crawlable for Google and more user friendly for your visitors. You may have heard about on-page SEO if you’ve experience with working on websites.

But, eCommerce SEO works a little bit differently, so pay attention:

Optimize Your Meta Description – Your meta description should give an honest account of what your page is about, but it also needs to draw people into the page.

Another top tip is to sprinkle some extra keywords to give yourself a little boost in the rankings. 

Change Image File Names – When people are searching for specific products, they usually use Google image search. 

Changing the file names to the name of the product or including the keyword will go a long way for ranking your images. And of course, optimize your alt tags along with the same accord.

Use High-Quality Pictures – One of the biggest downsides of shopping online is not being able to touch and feel the product before buying.

For this reason, it’s highly important you start using high-quality pictures of all your products. If you’re not a great photographer your best option is to hire one to take the pictures.

In order to make all of this much easier to do, and more likely to succeed, you might want to consider finding and using a professional team. The best SEO agency will be able to optimize your site much better than you might imagine, and it could make all the difference in the world to how your online business succeeds in the future.

Internal Links For The Win – Internal linking is one of the most underutilized SEO strategies in eCommerce stores. 

Most people struggle to find places for their links, but there’s an intelligent way to do it, just look at how Amazon adds there internal links:

These are just a few on-page SEO factors you need to examine to succeed. But as you can see here, there are plenty of other factors you need to think about.

Link Building

Building links is one of the last things you need to think about when it comes to eCommerce SEO. 

Link building can push a well-optimized page to the top spots quite quickly; they really are that powerful.

There are hundreds of link building strategies you can use to help increase your rankings. Just take a look at this post by Matthew Woodward; he gives you everything you need in one place.

Round-Up

Ecommerce SEO really isn’t as hard as people make out; it just takes a bit of time to complete (if you are doing it properly). 

But If you take all the advice into account and put it into action, the results could have a huge impact on your business.