With consumers starting their shopping journey online, how well you rank on search engines determines if you’ll lose a sale or win it. The higher you rank in results pages, the more traffic and orders you’ll generate. In fact, 35% of shoppers have shopped repeatedly with brands they first discovered online.
But how do you do rank higher in search engine results? Below are 4 e-commerce SEO tips that will help you improve your search ranking.
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1. Helpful Product Pages
Product pages help consumers make informed purchase decisions and provide search engines with content to index. You can’t just slap a text description and expect your product page to turn up on the search engines. Use these tips to write product pages that both customers and search engines will love.
Emphasize Benefits Over Features: Show customers how your products can help them by turning features into benefits.
For instance, this product description from Everlane’s Forever Sneaker is targeted at eco-conscious shoppers and addresses their need for sustainable products.
Find out who your buyer is, their pain points, what they want, and what they need. List all the features of your product and then turn each into a benefit. Ensure your product description is unique and written in the natural language your target customers use. You can pull language from your support team, customer reviews, and questions.
Be Informative: The goal of search engines is to be informative. On your product page, provide site authored FAQs to improve your SEO rankings and help people make educated purchase decisions. Also, consider community-driven Q&As to provide a space for users to ask questions and answer questions you might not have addressed in your product description.
Include Keywords: Optimize your product descriptions with long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are highly focused search queries that tend to convert well. For example, cheap hair growth oil with discounts, running shoes under $50.
Choose keywords that connect with buyer intent and relevant to your product page. Avoid keyword stuffing and optimize your content for synonyms and not just the keyword you’re targeting.
2. Share Relevant Content
Sharing relevant content helps generates more traffic and sales for your business. If you have a blog on your e-commerce website, here’s how to leverage content in a way that drives traffic.
Evergreen Content: Invest in evergreen content that stays fresh such as how-to tutorials, customer success stories, and checklists to boost your SEO.
Find evergreen topics by researching your audience to know what bothers them the most. Keep your evergreen content updated by adding new information and removing outdated parts. Update your publishing date and republish your evergreen content on your blog to prevent it from being buried in your archives.
Give Users What They Want: Deliver value in your content and let your products take a backseat. Online men retail store, Mr. Porter, publishes stylish aspirational and advice content for its readers, without pressuring them to make a purchase.
Create content that entertains, educates, and helps customers solve problems. Use customer data to decide what customers want to read. If you have a diverse customer base, consider creating content that appeals to different segments of your audience.
Optimization: Perform keyword research to find out what information people are searching for. Focus on keywords that match the search intent of your user and include keywords in your content strategically. Use internal links to help search engines determine your content’s value and point users to related content on your website quickly.
3. User Experience
Search engines look at user experience (UX) when ranking. For instance, Google added a variety of user experience criteria as factors for ranking results. Great user experiences enable people to find valuable information on a page and complete their purchase.
Use these tips to improve your UX:
Search: Place your search bar where it can be seen either at the center of the site or the top right section of the page. Design your search interface to spell-correct misspelled search terms, indicate what items shoppers can search for, and make the search bar large enough to accept long strings searches. Include non-product search queries such as return policies, shipping costs, and password changes.
Mobile-Friendliness: Include structured data, images, videos, and metadata you have on your desktop site also on your mobile site. Increase your page speed by minifying code, enabling browser caching, and reducing redirects. Use responsive web design that adapts to the size of a user’s screen automatically.
Navigation: Your navigational depth should present enough choices for website visitors and ensure they find what they want quickly. For instance, Flipkart product categories are neatly arranged in sub-categories and sub-sub categories that are easy to navigate.
Display product categories in the main navigation and have a shallow website structure to intuitively allow shoppers to navigate your website. Remove ads, interstitials, pop-ups, or any other obtrusive elements on your website. Ensure you design your website navigation according to the information needs of your users.
4. Online Reviews
Online reviews enhance your brand’s trustworthiness, help search engines to understand your site better, and position you in search engine result pages.
Leverage your online reviews to boost SEO with these tips:
Generate Reviews: Place review requests on checkout pages and embed reviews and rating systems on your site. Showcase existing reviews to attract more by displaying online reviews in your physical stores. Never give consumers incentives to drop a review. Mark up your reviews with Review schema so search engines can pick them up and show rich results in the search results pages.
Third-Party Reviews: According to Moz, off-site SEO-related factors like third-party reviews carry more than 50% of the ranking factor weight. Generate reviews on multiple platforms to build trust and credibility with consumers. Be active on platforms your customers use the most, respond to feedback, and manage complaints quickly. Monitor reviews on the sites that feed data to other platforms and address negative comments before they spread.
Review Velocity: The more reviews you have, the more credible your business looks. However, getting too many reviews quickly can hurt your brand. Generate reviews at a moderate pace that’s consistent with expectations of searchers. Acquire reviews at a reasonable rate over time, month after month, year after year.
Summing It Up
SEO is always changing, and tweaks will always be needed to help you rank higher in organic search results. In addition to the tips above, look at off-page SEO strategies such as social media, online PR, and influencer marketing to improve your search ranking.
Don’t try to trick search engines into increasing your ranking by buying links from directory sites or doing guest blogging to win links. It will be a waste of money and time in the long run.
Finally – regularly audit your website, delight your customers with personalized experiences, experiment, and adjust your SEO strategy until you’re number 1.