Remember why you created your e-commerce website in the first place? More people, more customers, more sales, more profits…
You spent a lot of time and fortune building that highly functional website, but you can still not see any traffic coming in. This is probably because you did not give due attention to its Search Engine Optimization.
SEO is crucial for the survival of your Ecommerce website in this world of cutthroat competition. Counting on the PPC ads alone will not guarantee your website’s visibility for a longer time, but nurturing it with SEO will be rewarding in the long run. SEO makes your web pages rank on the top of Search Engine Result Pages. This will lead to organic growth in your sales by making it visible to the audience searching for your products.
Social media or paid ads will serve the marketing funnel for as long as you continue putting in money and effort to it. On the other hand, the efforts invested in Ecommerce SEO will gradually help you rank, and once you start ranking, you attract high-quality traffic at no recurring cost.
But what should be done? What SEO practices can help you steal the limelight from the eCommerce giants? Let’s unfold the answers.
What is E-commerce SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the science of making your website friendly with search engines, like Google. An ecommerce SEO strategy will make your Ecommerce website visible in the search results as soon as the potential buyer searches for your specific keywords.
But how?
- Present your product with beautiful pictures and videos
- Improve the user experience by reducing the page load time of all the webpages, on both desktops as well as on mobile.
- Keep linking your content.
- Add beautiful descriptions optimized with keywords.
- Add customer reviews that help in making purchase decisions.
- Keep the site interesting in a way that the visitors do not wish to leave to do more comparison or research.
We’ll be talking more on that later, but first things first, let’s add weight to the fact that ecommerce SEO should not be ignored.
Why Do You Need To Take Care of e-commerce SEO?
Did you know, Covid19 necessitated for all businesses to move online because even when the world was not moving, the e-commerce market didn’t stop! As a result, there was a huge rise in the number of e-commerce websites. But eventually, only a few of them make it to the top search result.
Facts say that almost 50% of the buyers head to google before making a purchase decision. And the e-commerce websites that rank organically get approximately 80% of the clicks. This means, if e-commerce SEO is done right, you can get a business of almost $800 million!! Isn’t that huge?
Research by Outbrain stated that search had become the number 1 driver of traffic to e-commerce sites, combating social media by 300%.
SEO is a result of the combined efforts of Marketing, Web design, Copywriting and Networking. But why should you care?
Let’s understand the profit math involved with the following example.
You own a mobile accessories shop, Hello Stylish Store. You want to rank for the keyword “stylish mobile cases”. When someone searches close to your keyword, Google will be showing ads and the organic listings for that particular phrase. (Also, most of the clicks go to organic results, and >95% of people don’t go past the first page.)
Now, let us assume ‘stylish mobile cases’ get somewhere close to 10,000 searches per month. Even if 30% of those searches click for your e-commerce website, ranking #1 for this keyword, you will get 3000 clicks.
And, if you have a conversion rate of 20%, you are most likely to get 600 sales per month!
Now, this is happening with just one keyword; imagine the wonders you can do with multiple keywords. Moreover, you do not even have to invest your money in running ads; only concentrate your efforts on SEO.
You know why to do it, let’s learn how to do it!
1. Keyword Research:
This is indeed the most crucial step. If you target the wrong keywords or if you channel all your SEO tactics on keywords that do not have too much traffic, then it’s all a sham!
You need to figure out the intent of the search, it could be buying, or it could be out of curiosity. For example, ‘buy pink mobile cases’ will be searched by a buyer and “best pink mobile case” will be searched by someone who might only wish to know about the product and not buy.
You can use the following for keyword research for e-commerce SEO:
- Amazon
Type your seed keyword, for example, “mobile case” is the search box and Amazon is going to flood you with the keywords that are highly searched by the buyers. The Amazon Keyword Tool is a blessing, too, wherein you can do 3 free searches, and you know the high-buyer-intent keywords. Do this for all your products, and there you are with the high-performing keywords for your e-commerce website.
- Competitor Research
RULE 101: All is fair in love, war, and SEO!
You can steal the keywords from your high-ranking competitors and perform some PPC analysis. This can be a help, but you must definitely not rely on this finding blindly. An experienced ecommerce SEO agency can also help you through this process.
- Tools for SEO
There are tools that can help in the easy peasy analysis of the most relevant keywords. Type a competitor name in the site explorer tools, and check their Organic keywords. Apply filters like position max 20, volume min 200, etc., to find the top-of-the-chart keywords.
Moreover, the content gap tool becomes your friend and tells you the keywords that your competitors are ranking on but not you. You will be able to know more about such tools here.
Once the list is ready, let’s move on to using these keyword monsters.
2. On-page SEO for eCommerce:
When a visitor lands on your e-commerce website, they immediately get access to all the pages of your website. Therefore, it is inarguably crucial to optimize those web pages. First things first, put your target keyword in the following places:
- In the URL
- In the H1 (Title) tag.
- In the body
- In image alt text (Google can’t see, but can read!)
- In Metadata
SECRET TIP: Write at least 1000 words to be able to rank better because long-format content performs better.
3. Link Building for Ecommerce:
DID YOU KNOW: Backlinks from websites that have high domain authority are the fastest way to improve your ranking?
So, doing off-page SEO for your e-commerce website might be time-consuming, but it reaps gold- for sure! But, how can this link-building be done? Start taking notes:
- Resource page link building will allow you to be a part of a page that has a lot of links related to your product. To find such sites, simply Google “inurl:resources + abc” (abc can be your product, topic, or industry)”. Send them a mail to add a link about your product as well.
- Collaboration with Influencers is a simple act of paying a high domain authority website to ask them to keep a link to your website on their website. This link could be a product page or a blog post, or a PR.
- Stealing Competitor links help you outrank your competitors easily. Use Ahrefs and enter their URL into the site explorer. Click on the backlinks -> One link per domain -> Dofollow. Now you know where your competitors are getting the backlinks from!
In a nutshell, we would like to conclude by emphasizing the fact that “Ecommerce SEO each day keeps you at pay.” So, if you wish to get millions and millions of visitors and buyers to your e-commerce website, you will have to start today! Consult an e-commerce SEO consultant or follow our guide, and if you wish to learn about each of the steps in detail, then drop us a comment!