Being visible in search engines is essential for every eCommerce business if they want to be successful in today’s highly competitive market. That's why businesses use eCommerce SEO to make their ranking better and increase organic traffic to their websites. But to achieve these benefits, there are a few SEO best practices you need to know about, like competitive keyword research, improving site structure, and posting high-quality content or backlinks.
What is eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility by optimizing its content, site structure, speed, and mobile experience. It helps your products and services to appear in search results for targeted buyers when they search for them.
Comprehensive eCommerce SEO Practices for Businesses
There are different SEO practices, and each of them is used to improve a specific area of your website’s SEO health. That's why they are categorized into three parts to help you easily understand which one is the best practice to implement for your eCommerce site.
On-page SEO Practices
On-page SEO includes directly optimizing existing elements of your website. Its purpose is to help search engines understand what your website is about and make it visible when customers search for relevant keywords. The practices to perform on-page SEO are given below.
Conduct keyword research for product discovery
You should focus on keywords that are relevant to the search intent of your potential customers, like informational keywords for blogs and transactional keywords for product pages. Choose keywords that are easy to rank, like a mix of short- and long-tail keywords.
Enhance product page element for visibility
Product page elements include metadata, descriptions, image titles, headings, and product titles. You can optimize them by naturally adding your targeted keywords. You should use high-quality images with alt text to help search engines understand the relevance to surrounding content.
Optimize category and collection page relevance
You should optimize category and collection pages by grouping the products logically to make them relevant for both users and search engines. You can optimize them by adding descriptive meta tags, headings, and brief keyword-optimized content for category pages.
Publish helpful and conversion-focused content
Publish content that can educate the user and give them confidence to purchase your products or services. This content includes blogs or buying guides that contain useful information related to your products. Ensure that you use relevant keywords, clear CTAs, and direct links to product pages in your content.
Off-page SEO Practices
Off-page SEO includes the actions taken outside of an eCommerce website to improve its authority and search visibility. The purpose of off-page SEO is to strengthen the brand credibility. The best practices for off-page SEO are given below.
Earn authoritative backlinks
This includes linking high-quality and relevant links from other websites with your eCommerce site. Reach out to industry-relevant websites or publishers and build relations with them to get quality backlinks. Create shareable content like infographics or guides that you can offer these relevant websites to get mentioned.
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Utilize customer reviews and feedback
Using user-generated content such as customer reviews, feedback, and ratings increases your website’s credibility. Encourage buyers to leave reviews and display them on your product pages. You can also respond to their feedback to improve engagement.
Build brand credibility across external platforms
External platforms like social media, forums, and marketplaces are best for building brand credibility and customer trust. You just have to maintain active profiles on these channels, share relevant content to engage audiences, and collaborate with partners in relevant niches.
Track and refine performance using SEO signals
Analyzing metrics such as organic traffic, backlink quality, and rankings is necessary to track your website’s performance and improve it. SEO tools like Google Analytics are useful for monitoring these metrics. These tools also help in refining SEO strategies based on real insights.
Technical SEO Practices
Technical SEO helps the search engine to efficiently crawl, index, and rank your website. In this part of SEO, the main focus is enhancing a site’s speed, structure, and mobile responsiveness. The practices to enhance overall technical SEO are given below.
Maintain a clear and scalable site structure
A website’s structure should be clear so that both users and search engines can easily understand and move across it. Use a logical sequence for making the site structure clear, like homepage, category, subcategory, and product pages. Implementing breadcrumb navigation and reducing the number of clicks for reaching a product is also helpful for saving the users from confusion or frustration.
Improve loading speed across devices
A website’s load time should be less for better user experience and SEO. Loading speed can be improved if you minimize the use of JavaScript or CSS files and optimize the media or compress it by reducing file size. Using CDN or caching also helps reduce the server load and enhance website speed.
Control crawling, indexing, and search access
Avoid the blocking of important pages on your website to make it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your website. You should also use robots.txt and XML files because they signal to search engines to crawl and index the necessary pages.
Ensure mobile responsiveness
A website must be smoothly functional and accessible across all mobile devices. Making your website mobile responsive can be done by using mobile-friendly layouts and responsive designs. Website buttons or menus should also be easily tappable on touchscreens.
Implement schema markup
Schema markup involves adding structured data on your website for search engines to easily understand your content. You can add schema markup for products, reviews, and FAQs in Google’s preferred JSON-LD format.
Fix duplicate pages and conflicting URLs
Repeated content and conflicting URLs can harm SEO. You can use canonical tags for preventing duplicate content pages and implement 301 redirects for conflicting URLs. You should also create unique content to prevent future issues and audit your website regularly.
SEO tools for Implementing eCommerce SEO Best Practices
Search engine optimization tools are necessary if you want to make your eCommerce site efficient and fast. These tools not only help you implement the SEO practices but also enable you to improve your SEO strategies based on real data insights. These tools are discussed below.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an analytic tool used to track customers' interaction with your online store or website. It can help you measure organic traffic at your site, identify low- or high-performing pages, and make data-driven SEO strategies.
SEMrush
SEMrush is helpful for implementing SEO practices because it is a professional SEO tool. It is helpful for finding relevant keywords to rank your product or category pages and analyzing your competitors' SEO approaches. It can also be used for auditing technical or on-page SEO issues.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a helpful tool for doing backlink analysis, site auditing, and keyword research. It provides features like monitoring backlink quality, auditing websites to fix technical SEO errors, and analyzing the ranking difficulty of a keyword.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
It is a technical SEO tool that is used to crawl websites like search engines for identifying structural errors. It is helpful for detecting broken links, identifying duplicate content on your website, and efficiently auditing large eCommerce websites.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is used to maintain website visibility in search engines. It is a free SEO tool provided by Google. It is helpful for identifying indexing or crawling issues on your website, tracking keyword impressions, and monitoring schema errors.
Common eCommerce SEO Mistakes to Avoid
Ecommerce SEO involves complicated procedures, and even with the best SEO practices and tools, there is always room for mistakes. But having knowledge about these mistakes can easily help you avoid them and achieve your goals. These mistakes are listed below.
- Ignoring SEO strategy: SEO strategy is the main element to prioritize. Ignoring it can lead to inconsistent rankings and make it difficult for you to achieve success.
- Skipping keyword targeting: Randomly adding keywords in content without knowing if it's relevant can cause your page to fail in ranking for relevant search queries.
- Weak product pages: Product pages that lack optimized content and clear structure are weak. This can make you lose the opportunities of converting visitors into buyers and reduce conversion.
- Confusing site navigation: Confusing navigation makes it difficult for both search engines and users to find important pages on your website, and it results in crawl or indexing issues.
- Slow and non-mobile-optimized pages: Websites that are difficult for mobile-first users to access lose their engagement and rankings because of poor mobile user experience.
- Low-quality backlinks: Backlinks that are spammy or come from an untrustworthy website lower the search engine trust, drop ranking, and damage the domain authority.
eCommerce SEO Services provided by Red Star Technologies
At Red Star Technologies, we provide SEO services to optimize your eCommerce website and align it with your business goals. We use professional SEO tools to find relevant keywords for your products or category pages to ensure that they always show up when users search for them.
Our SEO experts design the best SEO strategies based on real data insights to keep your website visible in search engines for the long term. We focus on building quality backlinks to enhance your website's credibility so your customers can trust you. You can partner with us if you are looking to build an eCommerce site that is scalable, highly performable, and keeps you profitable as your business expands.
FAQs
What are the best eCommerce SEO practices?
E-commerce SEO best practices are the key steps you should implement if you want your e-commerce website to rank higher in search engine result pages. These steps involve optimizing your website's product and category pages, maintaining clear site structure, optimizing content, and improving website technical performance.
Why is SEO important for eCommerce websites?
Ecommerce SEO is important for businesses because it attracts organic traffic and potential customers to your site. This reduces your business expense of paid advertising and increases the conversion rates.
How often should e-commerce SEO be done?
E-commerce SEO should be reviewed regularly to maintain your website's performance in search engines. It is also necessary to be done regularly in case of new product-related updates, performance demand changes, and new search engine updates.
What are the 4 Cs of SEO?
The 4 C’s of SEO refer to content, code, credibility, and consistency. These 4 C’s are effective for strong SEO of a website. "Content" means delivering useful or informative content; "code" refers to the website’s speed or crawlability, “credibility” refers to high-quality authoritative backlinks, and “consistency” refers to ongoing performance optimization updates.
