Buying something online means that you are not able to touch, verify or try out any product before making the purchase. However, that has not prevented the e-commerce stores from becoming a raging success today. Studies indicate that e-commerce has helped consumers to shift from midnight snacking to shopping. Online shopping has become a favorite leisure activity and lifestyle habit for most.
E-commerce business owners are aware of two vital facts! First of all, they do not need to update customers on the pros and cons of online shopping, and secondly, the online shopping vertical is expanding exponentially, which is bringing excess competition, and there is a need to stand out as the best in the crowd. That is precisely where e-commerce SEO comes into play!
What is e-commerce SEO?
Simply put, SEO is a combination of different methods that enables a website to rank high in the SERPs. The moment a user searches for a keyword or phrase using search engines such as Google, the algorithm presents the most relevant list of results. The same way when users search for products, the search engine displays a list of e-commerce sites that sell the same, allowing customers endless choices for it. It is observed that the significant chunk of the traffic, which is 60% or more, goes to the top three websites in the SERPs.
Reasons to execute SEO best rules to enhance ecommerce sales
Going by a data from Fortune, Facebook and Google enjoy the most significant share in the online ad market. Back in 2015, Google received $30 billion ad revenue with Facebook following up at $8 billion. That evidently highlights that SEO does play a role in the expansion of any e-commerce business today and will continue to do so in the years to come.
Are you planning to boost your ecommerce SEO and sales? If yes, here are some of the best SEO practices that you can apply to your e-commerce site to enjoy better results in terms of better web traffic and increased sales.
Opt for distinctive title tags for your product pages
One of the primary blunders that most e-commerce sites are guilty of is having replicated title tags. All your title tags should be distinctive and created in a way that it has an appeal of its own. It helps to grab the attention of the search engines. To locate title tags in any website page, you can press CTRL + U in the web browser. The same manufacturer product pages must be worked out with unique title tags, which might seem challenging.
A smart solution to implement here is resorting to distinctive phrases instead of keywords. Shoppers use the key phrases to search for products, and they hope to obtain what they are looking for. When you have your e-commerce product pages optimized with these phrases, that is when you witness the ranks going up. For instance, if you are into the retail industry, you can easily implement the title tag formula as “Brand-Model-Item-Type”.
Optimize the category pages by adding the best keywords
Category pages are more crucial than the individual posts or pages! It is essential to have the same optimized so that they appear in the top ranks of the search engine results page. For instance, if there is an e-commerce website that specializes in chic clutch bags, then by rule, it should refrain from optimizing every product pages as “chic clutch bags,” or else each will become a competition for the other, which will hurt the page rankings. It is crucial to optimize every page based on the brands and the models, and link it all to “chic clutch bags.”
If you want to increase web traffic to your e-commerce category page, it is crucial to optimize it using the following tactics:
- SEO permalinks
- Keyword in the H1 tag
- Keyword in image ALT and file name
- Keyword in the page description
- LSI keywords all through the post
- Keyword in the page title
Conduct a permanent 301 redirect to the expired product URLs
A permanent 301 redirect is helpful for redirecting a web page to a detour page! It is essential for SEO as it enables you to update the search engines about the location of old content. When you use a 301 redirect, every aspect of the redirected web page, for instance, the page authority, PageRank, and traffic value get shifted to a detour page.
Also, when you cannot redirect a page, the search engines can locate the “404 Not Found Page”, which leads to loss of ranking and web traffic. A 404 Not Found page completely diminishes the link equity for an expired product page. Hence, follow the traditional SEO best practice, and work towards redirecting the expired product URL to a similar looking product page or a page that has some dynamic content to offer.
Deploy a Schema Markup for adding in useful snippets to your product pages
When you use descriptive snippets for the different pages on your site, it automatically maximizes the online visibility of the products that are available. It also offers more vital details which compels the users to click on your website in the SERPs. It helps you to generate more and more leads that eventually turn into customers. In addition to that, the Schema markups allow the search engines to understand all your product data and then highlight the product details in SERPs that maximizes the CTRs to a product page.
Furthermore, some of the usual rich snippets comprise of events, recipes, reviews, products, and software. Going by what Google fosters, useful snippets do not maximize SERP ranks. It instead enables the search engine crawlers to decipher the web content and showcase relevant data in the results pages.
With an increasing number of online businesses being introduced every day, the competition in e-commerce domain is becoming fierce! Every market player is putting their best foot forward to grab the substantial chunk of online presence, web traffic, customers, and profits. The ideal way to boost your e-commerce sales and website visibility is to follow these core SEO best practices and notice the difference.
SEO is really a great way to boost your e-commerce sales but the thing is top ranking in google search should go hand in hand with good reputation. Get people to review your products or services, have guest posts or have other bloggers write about your products, and use survey services.