Best SEO Practices That Ecommerce Websites Should Not Ignore

SEO for an eCommerce brand is not a simple task.

Understanding the fundamentals of SEO is very important if you wish to get your website ranking and it is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy.

Furthermore, SEO doesn’t give instant results but requires patience to generate long-term results.

Here, we will discuss what SEO looks like for eCommerce and the best practices for you to drive traffic to your website and generate conversions!

Ecommerce for SEO, what is it?

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Ecommerce for SEO is there to improve your search visibility, by increasing your rankings for a wide range of different keywords, mainly targeting category pages. For example, if you are a brand that works with women’s fashion & clothing, you will likely be focused on main categories like dresses and tops.

However, there is much more to SEO than just targeting “dresses” on your page as a keyword and ranking, which is very unrealistic for most businesses. You will be competing with some of the largest brands out there, so carefully selecting your keywords and then effectively optimising your title on each page, metadata and overall content is key to success.

There are simple methods of driving traffic to your site and generating more revenue such as PPC. However, for a more cost-effective and efficient long-term strategy, SEO is your solution. Although, PPC is a good tool to use whilst you build your organic visibility over time.

Now we’ve given a brief introduction to SEO for ecommerce, let’s look at why SEO is important and how you can create your strategy.

Why Is SEO So Important?

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SEO is more important than ever, as it continues to be proven as the most consistent form of digital marketing. With constant changes to other digital marketing platforms like Ads Manager and PPC, SEO is the constant you need for your business.

If you optimise your pages for certain keywords that people will be searching, you will attract new users to your website, who are then likely to revisit if they have found what they are looking for. SEO is a useful method for you to reach a new audience without paying extortionate prices for advertising.

How To Create The SEO Strategy For Your E-commerce Website?

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There are many things that you need to do to make your SEO strategy a success. Firstly, you are going to need to prioritise certain pages, especially when you are just starting out. For example, think of your most successful products and begin SEO work on them, then once you have found a formula that works well, you can expand it across the website for better SEO. Create a spreadsheet with each of your pages and work through them gradually, making notes of what you have optimised and how rankings have increased.

Another important thing you can do the help inform your SEO strategy is to evaluate the competition you will be competing against for those rankings. Look at what they are doing on their main pages to take inspiration which is on-site SEO, and then also look at their backlinking profiles which are off-site SEO. This is the best way to understand why they are ranking above you and what you need to do to make improvements.

Whilst category pages are very important for your SEO, you have got to remember other key pages such as the homepage, about us page, contact page, blogs (if you have one), and even individual products. Going back through and optimising every product page can be difficult, especially if you have lots of products.

But, if you just focus on best practices moving forward by creating clear product descriptions, you can help your website naturally rank for keywords with lower searches without having to monitor it carefully. All of these are important, and you need to ensure that they are optimised as it gives more opportunity for traffic to your site.

Where Do You Start?

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There are many areas to start your SEO journey for your site. The first place to start is your meta titles and descriptions. Make them short but snappy and include your keywords for those pages. Before you include your keywords, you need to conduct thorough keyword research and look for a search number that is realistic for the size of your business.

Targeting keywords with lower searches that are more specific is a great place to start, as you are more likely to rank well and the users coming to your website will be more likely to make a purchase.

Once you have uploaded your meta, you need to write content for these pages. Google loves reader-friendly content and the more, the better in many cases. For an eCommerce website, you want to ensure that you haven’t got too much content on your page, as it must be user-friendly, or it could put potential customers off from buying your product.

Once you have written your content, include internal links as it improves user experience and suggests other products to them. It also improves SEO by showing how each page is related to other category pages.

To Conclude

There are many things that you need to remember with a website and the SEO fundamentals. If you get the basics right, you have every chance of creating a successful campaign.