E-commerce is a modern phenomenon with undeniable staying power. People love to shop online. They also love to use the internet to research potential buying options. For these reasons, smart e-commerce business owners know that they need to embrace e-commerce SEO as an integral piece of their marketing mix if they want to reach the millions of potential customers who are ready, willing, and able to buy.
Why Do E-commerce Sites Need Good Ecommerce SEO?
Just like any other type of business, if your customers can’t find you or don’t know you exist, they can’t buy from you. This is why SEO is important for an ecommerce site.
Optimising your online store for organic search traffic can not only drive new potential customers to your site, it can also increase visibility and raise awareness of your brand. Whether you rely solely on search traffic, or combine SEO with other channels such as social media, email marketing, PR, or paid ads, becoming SEO-savvy can provide a powerful boost to sales and success in your e-commerce business.
How to Do SEO for E-commerce Sites
Many universal SEO strategies can help boost rankings for your site and traffic to your product pages. For instance, the role of keywords, the power of link-building and the benefits of a technically sound site can be the foundations of a successful SEO strategy for an e-commerce business.
Yet, there are some differences between e-commerce sites and other websites that can impact the kind of SEO strategy you choose and how effective it will be for your business. An effective ecommerce SEO strategy can significantly impact your business by addressing these unique challenges and opportunities.
To help you understand the subtle differences, as well as become familiar with universal practices, the following is a short guide to Search Engine optimisation that’s specifically designed for e-commerce businesses.
Ecommerce Keyword Research & Long-tail Keywords
Keyword Research is managed slightly differently for e-commerce sites, when compared with non-commercial sites or informational SEO strategies. For example, modern content marketing is based on the principle of list-building, i.e. using informational content to encourage people to subscribe to an email list, and then nurturing leads and sales from there. While this strategy can certainly work for e-commerce businesses, you have an additional opportunity to maximise sales.
Ecommerce keyword research is crucial for identifying the search terms that potential buyers are using. When people are ready to buy, they’re usually very specific with their search terms. For this reason, it can reap dividends to perform Keyword Research and discover precisely the search terms those eager buyers are using. These tend to be long-tail keywords, ie more detailed and specific than broader generic terms. This is because by the time your potential buyers are ready to make a purchase, they’ve usually done their research or they know exactly what they want to buy, having bought it in the past.
Understanding the subtle nuances in search terms that are a feature of the Buying Mindset is one way e-commerce businesses can use SEO to reach this lucrative market.
Image Optimisation
Images can be a powerful tool for all website owners, and they can be utilised for SEO benefits by any kind of business. However, when it comes to shopping online, images are not just a useful feature, they can make the difference between potential buyers adding to cart or clicking away.
It goes without saying that your product images will create more sales if they are well-shot, bright, and clear, and show the item in its best possible light. Beyond these basics, however, there are some search engine optimization practices that can help your images become an integral part of effective SEO results.
Perhaps the most obvious way to optimise your images for SEO is to pay attention to the Image Alt Tags. These are great places to incorporate some of your Keyword Research. This is another opportunity for e-commerce business owners to tap into additional advantages in reaching online shoppers.
When you use the product names and long-tail keywords you identified as the precise terms your potential buyers are searching for, there’s a good chance they’ll see images of your products in the search results. This is especially true if they use the Image Search feature, which is becoming increasingly popular. It can also help your products rank in the covetable Product Listings on the search result pages.
If you want to maximise the chances of your product images ranking well, pay attention to the size and quality of your photos. The sweet spot is a high-quality image that’s not too large that it takes a long time to load. This kind of technical optimisation is a core piece of classic SEO strategy and as such it can help with both your rankings and your sales conversions. Technical SEO is essential for ensuring that all aspects of your site, including images, are optimized for search engines.
Site Hierarchy & Categories
Many ecommerce websites use a breadcrumb menu as a navigational tool. This can be very helpful for online shoppers, who may want to retrace their steps or skip to another category. These are often a standard part of e-commerce software, or if it’s not included in your platform, they’re relatively simple to set up. A well-optimized category page can significantly improve navigation and sales.
The Site Hierarchy that is most beneficial for online shoppers is a clear category structure. This allows shoppers to filter products and get quickly to the types of items they’re interested in. Optimizing category pages is crucial for improving user experience and SEO. A classic example is an online clothes store that uses categories such as Women, Men, Children etc.
Beyond improving the User Experience, these breadcrumb menus, site structures, and categories on your ecommerce website can also help with your SEO, especially if they’re included in your product page URL. When your item has keywords and relevant categories in the URL and metadata, it sends additional signals to search engines that can help boost the overall site and help individual product pages rank more highly.
Using Schema Markup is another way of structuring your ecommerce sites’ pages in a way that tells the search engines what you’re selling. This can boost your rankings when it matches with searches that are regarded as Commercial Intent, i.e. the user is ready to buy.
These are just a few of the ways that e-commerce business owners can tap into the benefits of SEO. A good foundational setup, combined with a few simple practices can make your business more search engine-friendly, helping your customers to find your products and helping you to thrive online.