SEO is vital for any website that wants to be found by search engines. But when you’re building an ecommerce site, there are plenty of specific issues you’ll want to tackle. Let’s dive in.
1: Keyword Research
Here are some tips for getting your ecommerce keyword research done.
First, look at the categories your competitors already use. If there’s something unique about the category, ensure you’re including it in your keywords. You can check Wikipedia to get keywords for product and categories. Search for your keyword and take some information from the results. You’ll also want to use Google Keyword Planner, SEM Rush, and Keyword Tools.
As always, confirm that the search volume of the keywords is there. You won’t want to build your ecommerce site around words that nobody searches for.
Ensure that you have good product-keyword fit. Your keywords have to be related to what you’re selling. The closer to your product, the higher the changes of the searcher converting.
Finally, consider commercial intent in your keywords. We’ll talk more about this, but these are keywords that suggest a searcher is more likely to buy as opposed to searchers just looking for information. The more you’re able to optimize for commercial intent, the higher your conversion rate.
2: Ecommerce Site Architecture
Having a great site architecture means making products and categories visible on your website, in a way that users and search engines can reach them as efficiently as possible.
- Keep the URLs simple
- It should not be 3 clicks away from homepage
- Use short, keyword-rich URLs
- Internal Linking
Don’t overcomplicate things. If you’re selling clothing, go with something like /mens/tshirts/brand-name/. Keep them short, with just the keywords if possible.
And have plenty of internal links. Let people click back to a category from a specific product. Have related products show up. Don’t make it hard to get around.
3: On-Page SEO
This is where you can get going with your commercial intent keywords.
For the Title tag: Add modifiers Like “Buy”, “Cheap” and “Deals” to get more long tail traffic from people actively looking to buy. Try to use following modifiers too:
- Guarantee
- Sale
- Lowest Price
- % Off
- Free Shipping
For the Description Tag: include phrases like “Great Selection”, and “Affordable price” to maximize your page’s CTR by making it clear what you’re offering.
Product and Category Page Content: Include 500-600+ Words of Content and sprinkle your keyword 3 to 4 times. Spell out features, a description of the product, and if you have testimonials: use them. Also sprinkle the LSI keywords that make sense to your products and categories.
Google gives more weight to keywords that appear on the top of webpage, so make sure some of your uses end up at the top.
You can manually set up schema markup.
4. Technical SEO for Ecommerce
For a full look at technical SEO for websites, see my previous post here. But for your ecommerce site, here’s a rundown.
Especially for a site where somebody could be directly entering their personal information, you’ll need to have an SSL certificate. You’ll also need to be able to work on whatever device the person happens to be on, so your site must be responsive — and you should deploy a website speed optimization strategy.
Prevent Losing Ranking Due to Duplicate or Thin Content
One thing that can trip up an ecommerce site are the issues with duplicate and thin content. When you have a large number of pages with very similar content — like different sizes of the same product — many of your pages are going to come up as duplicates in search engine crawls. This can drop your ranking.
But you can noindex pages that don’t bring in search engine traffic to resolve this. For instance, if your category filters or pagination pages generate unique URLs, you can noindex the URLs. Once you’ve noindexed all of the URLs, it’s time to tap into the canonical tag i.e. (“rel=canonical”).
A Few More Technical SEO Tips
Use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to help with your structure, and build an XML sitemap to assist search engines in discovering your important pages.
You can also look into enabling AMP — accelerated mobile pages — to offer super-fast lightweight pages when all you have to display is a bit of content.
And apply product review schema to get rich snippets displayed in Google. There’s no guarantee that Google will present rich snippets, but you might as well try, and proper schema markup does boost your ranking.
5: Content Marketing for Ecommerce sites
Of course, search engines like to see helpful content, which makes content marketing a key part of any ecommerce site. Good content will be rewarded. You can try:
- Interactive content
- Email content
- Creating product or service videos to show your offerings
- Offering information in the forms of case studies and pamphlets
- Sharing customer stories
- Sharing user tips, tricks
- Preparing a detailed checklist for your customer
That’s it. With these five sets of tips, you should be well on your way to creating an ecommerce site that ranks.
Need a hand with that? Flawless Inbound has helped more than 80+ companies with their SEO and marketing needs. We can build that ecommerce site, integrate that ecommerce integration, help you get found, and help your convert visitors. Want to know more? Reach out today.
