Ecommerce SEO is vital for the success of every online business. This is the reason why top brands spend millions of dollars to grab the attention of their customers and motivate them to make a purchase.
Business-owners understand that an engaged customer is more likely to make a purchase than a non-engaged customer and therefore they build an omni-channel strategy to enhance the online experience of their customers. This helps their customers take an informed decision about buying a product, improve its recall value and make a repeat purchase and recommend/ share the experience with others.
Ecommerce SEO plays a vital role in this entire customer journey and helps people locate the exact online store and the specific product that they are seeking to buy. How does this happen?
Below are some strategies that help optimize eCommerce SEO:
Identifying the right eCommerce SEO keyword
Finding out the right keyword is the first and most important task. It helps you in offering the right product to the right audience at the right time. For example, a keyword such as “cotton shirts for men” in your website will direct buyers to your site, if they are looking for such shirts. Keywords can be identified from:
- Amazon suggestions:
Amazon is the world’s leading eCommerce website and serves as a goldmine to identify keywords. It offers a list of long-tail keywords that are product-specific. For example, “100% cotton shirts for men”. Such long-tail keywords convert better and are also cheaper.
- Keyword Tool Denominator:
This tool brings together search suggestions from various platforms such as Amazon, Etsy, and eBay and lets you choose the best keyword.
- SEMRush
This is an analytics tool that helps in analyzing a brand’s online visibility. By clicking “Organic Research” in the sidebar you can check what is ranking for which specific keywords. To get a view of how all keywords are performing just click on “Competitor’s” report.
Optimizing your website architecture
If your eCommerce site runs on a CMS such as Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, then you might not have much to worry about, but in case you are having a homegrown system and have used patches and fixes to grow your system, then you might require an optimized stack to improve page performance and decrease site load time. Below are some suggestions:
- Use the 3-click rule
The structure of the website should be simple so that each product page is only 3 clicks away from homepage. Any page that requires more than 3 clicks to navigate back to home page should be reconsidered.
- Add Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs enable Google bots better understand your website’s hierarchy and help online visitors better navigate through your website. Breadcrumbs could be:
- Location based – Highlights the position of a page within the website hierarchy.
- Attribute based – Uses a specific keyword or another attribute to represent the page.
- History based – Shows the path the user has taken to any page.
- Optimize site links
Optimize your sitelinks so that Google algorithms are able to pick them and present them to users.
- Keep a proper internal linking structure
Link your website internally so that each and every product page is interlinked to other website pages, especially to those pages to whom you wish to give more value.
Hopefully these SEO strategies will help you optimize your eCommerce website so that you rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPS). In the next post, we will discuss some strategies to help you with on-page and off-page optimization for your eCommerce website.
