Simple SEO strategy for E-Commerce Website 2021

"You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you really want to succeed you have to create traffic."~ Joel Anderson, Walmart CEO

What is the need of SEO in E-commerce website?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process by which more organic traffics are been generated from the search engines like google, bing, yahoo. When you search a keyword in googles search engine for example, your search result will be displayed in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). In the SERP, you could see the organic search results and paid ads. Let it be any ecommerce website, the primary focus will be to rank your website at the top page of the search engine. SEO is an unavoidable necessity for the e-commerce websites. A data revealed that 44% of online shoppers begins their search with the search engine. Infact, your products need to be ranked higher than your competitors and need to be indexed in the right way as when searched on the search engine, it should navigate to your website when clicked on in the SERP. Paid search can index you at the top of SERP but for the long run, it won’t be sustainable to move forward on that approach. If you need to attain your websites top presence at the SERP index in an organic manner, then ecommerce SEO can help you to achieve it. When your ecommerce website is optimized and customized at the best of strategies, your page will provide the best of solutions to the users search intent.

1. MAKE YOUR WEBSITE SEO FRIENDLY:

- Choose an SEO friendly E-Commerce platform: Majority of most popular ecommerce platforms are customed to be SEO friendly. At the current scenario; its very important for the retailers to find an SEO friendly platform that ranks them in the SERP and stand out from their competitors. As per the statistics, 9 out of 10 shoppers are not sure of the brand that they want to buy from, when they begin the online search. And here comes the huge opportunity for the retailers. Google stands out as the most popular search engine for the shoppers to find that retailers that fits their requirements. So, by the strategy of SEO friendly ecommerce platform can help to target these customers and their presence.

These are some of the main features to look forward for any ecommerce platform you choose: SEO Friendliness, Mobile friendliness, Security features, Platform Scalability, Product Management System, Order Management System, Return Management System, Multi-channel Integration, Granular Page Title Control, 301 Redirects, Canonicalization, Search-Friendly Navigation Structure, Automated XML Sitemaps, Integrated Blogging Platform, Social Sharing buttons.

Top Ecommerce Platforms at the present market are: Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, 3DCart, BigCommerce, Squarespace, Volusion.

- Prioritize Product-Focused Keywords: In terms of ecommerce keyword research, your strategy must be product-focused keywords, taking into account your homepage, product categories and blog content. This is also to ensure that your focus is to target keywords based on medium to high search volume that are strong relevant to your brand that are not so difficult to rank for.

- Optimize your content for head terms and long-tail keywords: When writing high-quality content for your products and categories, this is the time to use both types of keywords for an effective ecommerce search engine optimization plan, using the chosen keywords you compiled in the research stage. Remember that a long-tail keyword has a conversion rate that is 4.15% higher than a short-tail one.

- Fix technical issues: Fixing the technical issues in your ecommerce website can sometimes be the main differences in ranking between you and your competitors. Therefore it is so necessary to fix the technical issues such as duplicate content, deep pages, speed, broken canonical links, HTTP issues.

2. OPTIMIZE YOUR PRODUCT PAGES:

- Optimize Your Title Tags: Page titles or title tag has huge impact on pages click through rate as they inform the people and the search engines what the page is all about. An ideal title tags should be 55-60 characters long, descriptive and use target keywords.

- Add unique content to each page: Search Engines needs content to understand it and rank it accordingly making it an important factor for SEO. For category and product pages, you should add unique contents of least 250-500 words for each of them.

- Create a silo structure to classify your product pages: A silo structure is a way of categorizing the contents in your website like category level, subcategory level, product level so as it makes the website visitors easy to navigate as well as the search engine to index the content and finds relevant information on your website. For eCommerce sites, this means making the navigation of your site user friendly and search engine friendly. This becomes diluted the further a product page is from your homepage, which is typically the most authoritative for ecommerce sites and concentrated authority is one of the ways you can help your ecommerce pages rank.

- Optimize Your Meta Descriptions: Make each meta description personalized, featuring products and deal perks.

- Implement schema markup: Schema markup is used to helps google to understand your content as well as it helps potential visitors navigate your website. Implement schema markup like product schema, reviews and rating schema, price, product availability, breadcrumbs, FAQs.

3. BUILD YOUR AUTHORITY:

- Create a Google My Business listing and build local citations: Google My Business page gives you huge visibility opportunity for your brand in a local search result. So, its very import to claim your business and ensure that your Google My Business sections are up to date.

- Encourage your customers to review your products and services: For ecommerce sites, online reputation management is very important. Online reviews have a great impact than before as 85% of online shoppers trust them. Therefore, send a follow up message after the customer has received the product requesting them for a review without too much efforts such as signing up.

- Build up your social media presence: Your social media presence, publishing useful unique contents and sharing it across social media helps to create site authority. This will likely have a positive impact on your products and category pages in the SERPs.

- Build high-quality links to your product pages and blog content: High quality links pointing to your ecommerce website are one of the most important search ranking factors. So, if your website needs to gain visibility in the search engine result pages, you should engage and implement the strategy building high quality backlinks for your website. To support your ecommerce site, having a blog is an excellent opportunity to use unique informational long-tail keywords from your keyword research and thus creating high-quality content based on them and the existing product pages.

- Start a blog with relevant engaging content: Each ecommerce business brand has one thing in common-"competition". Hence its so crucial to stand out your brand from your competitors. Blogging allows you to do that and is your voice to the outside world. It shares the general news regarding your industry, highlights your product updates, reviews on your products and much more. A well-planned blogging strategy can help you nurture customer relationship, generate inbound traffic and provides an opportunity to promote new products and services while building your brand.