SEO Best Practices 2019 That Could Double Your E-Commerce Sales
Search Engine Optimization holds a great deal of significance to the growth or succumbs of a digitally stranded business. For an eCommerce store, where business begins and ends with organic traffic, SEO is nothing but oxygen.
The correct SEO strategies and Conversion rate Optimization can double sales and organic traffic. This goes step by step starting from Generating more organic traffic, boosting conversions thus increasing sales and somehow keeping them engaged and finally turning them into fans so that their visits are repeated. It sounds unrealistic — but isn’t.
Doing an SEO of an eCommerce website for search engine friendliness is more complicated than optimizing a normal website. Product landing pages are numerous, there are so many headings involved, multiple CTAs need to be optimized in each product page, negative keywords need to be monitored and much more.
It is not possible to cover the SEO practices in one article. In this researched article we shall bring forward the most important SEO practices that will help increase your online sales manifold.
The major highlight of your SEO strategy should be the psychology of your visitors more than the technical aspect of your website.
Search Engine Optimisation is a never-ending process
1. SEO Audit:
This is will help us understand where does our website stand right now and what should be done to get going forward. It will help us find the page rank vulnerabilities on the website.
The tools like SEO Auditor, SEOptimer, SEMrushScreaming frog, etc help us check our duplicate content, Highlight missing tags and bring to our notice all other factors which will be pulling the rank of our website down.
2. Keyword Research & Planning:
Keywords play an integral part in generating traffic to your website. Research and Planning will help to make a list of High-quality keywords that can be targeted. Choice of keywords depends on search volume, high ranking & demand.
Placement of such keywords should also be strategic. They can appear in Page titles, Meta Descriptions, Headers, etc. Long-tailed keywords are easy to match search phrases and thus reap higher results.
3. Competitor Analysis:
Watch out for competitors strategies, review them analyze them and spot the keywords they are using for SEO optimization. The focus should be on how the keywords are placed in the product landing pages, the semantics used for keywords and also internal links created within the website.
4. Be Mobile-friendly:
Please take the mobile revolution seriously. More than 50% of the traffic of an Ecom website originates from Mobile devices. The dwell time can only be increased if the website is Mobile friendly. Delays in developing a mobile site can reduce the online business to a large extent.
5. Include Customer Reviews:
Including customer reviews can drastically increase the organic traffic to your website. The reviews will have adequate keyword density which can invite search engines to crawl and optimize for page ranking.
6. Optimize Page Loading Speed:
The page loading speed can hit profitability and ranking severely. around 47% of the customers expect the page to load in 2-3 seconds. Each second of delay in page loading will drop the conversion rate.
7. Include Product Rich Snippets:
Rich Snippets have star ratings and viewer statistics and even prices in certain cases. Snippets are the words which describe the search result.
8. Create a Search Engine Friendly Permalink Structure:
Permalink structure should be self-explanatory to the search keyword. Permalink should mark the relevance of the content to the page and should be unique and page wise.
9. Configure an SSL Certificate:
SSL certified website is more secure and is a key ranking criterion for Google for Ecom websites.
PCI compliance and secured data and improving brand image are other benefits of the SSL certificate.
10. Use Google Webmaster Tools:
The webmaster is a free tool to find and fix SEO related problems. Integration of Google webmaster tool, Google AdWords & Google Analytics is much recommended.
11. Integrate social media on product pages:
Integration of Social media website will help increase traffic. Instagram, Facebook comments, Pinterest Pins can present social proof for your website. Photos of happy customers can boost sales too.
12. Relevant Is No Longer Good Enough:
Google aspires to become the best answer engine so if ur website doesn’t have keywords which are relevant to people’s search. You would not last long on the top spot.
13. Identity Is Important:
Google verifies and understands searchers identities and interests. It also wants the identity of the authors to connect with the kind of stuff that he masters in writing. It also wants to know how trustworthy and authoritative the content is.
14. Sites Must Get Attention By Standing Out Amid The Noise:
The thing which is affecting SERPS is rich snippets and authorship. In the near future, it will become very hard to compete and win attention for your website in comparison to the ones using these tools.
15. The sitemap is a must
You should make sure that u create and submit a sitemap for your websites. Without a sitemap search engine crawlers always have difficulty in crawling your pages.
A sitemap makes it easier for crawlers to crawl your contents whenever you update your websites.
16. Create a Robots.txt file:
This file plays an important role even if it’s empty, don’t forget to have this file on your site.
This file directly tells the search crawlers what NOT to index on your sites so you avoid displaying unwanted pages.
17. Meta description:
The meta description is a small brief just under the title, which needs to be catchy to that the users are compelled to visit your website.
The clicks on your website will increase the beachside of the compelling meta description. The meta description should not be copied from your own articles.its is preferred that you write a fairly embedded, full of keywords meta description. This is the only way you can satisfy bother the user and search engines.
18. Internal Linking:
This is when you link pages of your website to other pages within your website.
Internal linking helps you to establish your own anchor text, this, in turn, might help you with ranking for your keywords.
Don’t pack all your pages with internal links otherwise, google will think you are doing in something suspicious since google is smart it will easily pick up this.
It is suggested that you should place internal links only where it is natural to do so. Anchor text variety is much appreciated by google than similar anchor text.
Our focus should be on building a website which is useful to both your visitor and search engine.
These were a few useful tips which might increase the traffic if done with a focused approach. This was just the tip of the iceberg.
Keep reading our blogs for more inputs.