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8 Ecommerce SEO Best Practices

Online businesses rely on ecommerce stores to generate revenue. A poorly optimized ecommerce store will not rank in search engines, and customers may be hard to come by. Fortunately, we compiled a list of best practices to help you make your ecommerce website rank highly on search engines. Follow our guidelines to give your website the best chance at ranking organically in search engines. You can contact our ecommerce company if you need help implementing these best practices for your site.

What is ecommerce SEO?

Lots of people don’t know what SEO is and why it’s important, so I wanted to share a brief overview! If you own an ecommerce store, you need to know about SEO. It’s the process of optimizing your site for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The goal is for your site to come up more often in search results and rank higher. And, if you already do some things to improve your SEO, fantastic! That means SEO isn’t all that hard to do. But with so much competition online, now is the time when you should really get your site as high in the SERPS as possible. SEO can be tricky because there are lots of little things to keep track of (like creating keyword-rich content and designing a user-friendly website). But, most importantly, you want to optimize your technical elements on the site like page titles and URLs. You may not be doing these things without even realizing it, but it’s important that you do. Who is this article really for? Newbies in the ecommerce space!

About our list of ecommerce SEO best practices

We recommend the following best practices for SEO to increase your rankings and conversions. By implementing our best SEO practices for ecommerce sites, you can learn about how to create a better ecommerce site, without getting penalized in search results.

8 best practices for ecommerce SEO

  1. Use important keywords
    In order to craft your product information for both shoppers and search engines, make sure your sizes, measurements, colors, prices, and other details are easy to find and understandable. If your website visitors are from different regions, think about whether or not you should include measurements in metric system or the imperial system. Confirm that photos of the products against physical items are accurate to color and size. Before I continue on with this paragraph, let me just remind you that we’ve talked a lot about SEO. What I mean by this is that it’s very important that we take into account website visitors who use tools like Google Image Search. If a retailer doesn’t show their prices up front, it may not have a direct impact on SEO, but people really don’t like leaving a page without any Google-esque “social proof” of pricing. That ends in high bounce rates which we’ll talk about next, so try to keep your product information as up to date as possible. It’s not only valuable for shoppers but it can also help you rank better.
  2. Design with shoppers in mind
    Your ecommerce website should be easy to navigate and loaded with images, since that will make the site more appealing to shoppers. Even if you sell the coolest and most desirable products or offer the best prices available, visitors will leave your website quickly if it’s not easy to use. You should also simplify the search features so visitors can look for products easily. Your website should also be fast and rank in the search results. The design is also a part of SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization. An important part of that is reducing bounce rates, since that shows search engines that visitors are finding what they want on your site immediately. If a website goes back to a search engine and says that a whole bunch of people are bouncing out of their website quickly, it could start affecting your rankings. A beautifully designed website might get people to stay for more than a few pages, to explore more content and find what they need. It could even encourage searchers to keep looking, even if they don’t find what they want right away on the first page. Your ecommerce website should be fast and easy-to-navigate with clearly labeled menus or navigation options. This is so people can find what they want easily. You should also minimize the amount of images you use, because having a long load time could also lead people to exit your website immediately because they’re getting impatient. And bounce rates affect your rankings on a search engine as well.
  3. Avoid cluttered, complicated URLs
    People can get to your website by entering a address, called a URL, into their browser’s address bar. The URL can contain a variety of information in a small space: category names, product names, file types, or things to do with the page. SEO standards are clear that URLs should be as clear as possible and include relevant keywords that appear on the resulting page. Avoid URLs like this one: http://www.websiteurl.com/cat?=328/product?=237828/main.html Search engines won’t be able to pick up any kind of information from that URL! Instead, lean toward URLs like this one: http://www.websiteurl.com/lawnmowers/green-gas-powered-lawnmower.html The first example URL may lead to just about anything – but the visitor knows right away what they will find if they go to the second URL.
  4. Use alt text in images
    The alt attribute is a line of alternate text which can help you to rank better in search engines. Search engine crawls along the links on the site, but has no way of understanding what images are there, or what they might be about. The alt attribute is a good way to give those images extra context – so if your site has an image of a lawnmower, the alt attribute should say “lawnmower”. Doing this will help you rank higher when people search for that keyword in Google images. Even if you have that keyword on your product page, having the alt attribute on your images can also help you rank better on Google Image searches.
  5. Allow customer reviews
    Reviews are a great way to boost conversions on your product pages. Studies show that around 90% of customers say they are more likely to buy products with reviews, even if the reviews are not entirely positive. As such, it’s in your best interest to let your customers review products for free! Interestingly, allowing reviews may also help you with SEO. As customers write their reviews, they may use important keywords on your site. Even though you can’t get a ranking just by duplicating the same words that already exist on your page, keeping an eye out for synonyms and long tail keywords can definitely help.
  6. Avoid duplicate content
    If you’re a retailer and not a manufacturer, it is best to avoid duplicating any copy that has been provided to you. It can become difficult to rank well if you are duplicating your product descriptions and duplicate content (when spread out over many pages) definitely won’t help your rankings with search engines. Instead of doing this, focus on creating new, unique descriptions for each item you carry. This is difficult and time-consuming but it can really help set you apart from the competition. Readers love good quality product descriptions. And humor is always great and anything that you do to make your subject seem less boring will be appreciated.
  7. Create unique content
    One of the toughest things about an ecommerce website is trying to rank for keywords/phrases and attracting customers. One way to attract more customers is to create unique, interesting content on your site. A lot of retailers post news, trends, or developments in their industry on their company blog. This will give your search engine a reason to rank you higher because you are providing new and interesting information. One strategy that people use is content marketing. From guides to whitepapers to long-form blog posts or articles, there is a multitude of ways that you can attract visitors and optimize your website with this “meaty” content.
  8. Write for humans – not for search engines
    To optimize your ecommerce store for search engines, you should always be thinking of your shoppers. Your customers are not robots — it doesn’t matter how many keywords you stuff into a paragraph of nonsensical text, its conversion rate will be lousy. To keep the attention of both search engines and humans, you should try to hire a copywriter. That’s not easy though — good copywriters are expensive. If you can’t afford one, I would recommend searching for resources online for learning about copywriting strategies.

Need help using these ecommerce SEO tips?

We have helped a number of ecommerce businesses with their online store to create a great user experience and high conversions. If you’re building a new website or need help improving your current one, we know all about ecommerce SEO, and we want to share with you these ecommerce SEO tips to grow your business.

Ecommerce SEO Services from Proximate Solutions

Looking for an affordable way to improve your ecommerce website’s SEO? Look no further than Proximate Solutions. We offer a variety of ecommerce SEO services that are designed to help you improve your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), increase traffic to your site, and boost sales. Our team of SEO experts will work with you to identify your goals and create a customized ecommerce SEO plan that meets your needs and budget. Contact us today to learn more about our ecommerce SEO services and how we can help you take your business to the next level.

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