The Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO: How to Rank Higher on Google
The essential strategies to help you boost your online visibility and unlock your store’s full potential
Written by Athar Ali – April 2023
Welcome to the exciting world of eCommerce SEO, where getting the basics right can mean the difference between your website getting lost in the vast sea of online stores or standing out like a glittery unicorn in a field of grey donkeys. In this guide, we’ll show you how to optimise your online store like a boss, improve your eCommerce SEO strategy, and attract more traffic to your site.
This means that as an eCommerce brand, you need to prioritise your SEO efforts to improve your chances of showing up on the first page of search results and capturing potential customers.
What is eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO is the process of optimising your online store for search engines like Google. The goal is to improve your store’s visibility in search results so that you can attract more visitors and generate more sales.
Why is eCommerce SEO important?
In today’s dynamic digital landscape, the significance of eCommerce SEO cannot be overstated. As the online marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, simply having a visually appealing eCommerce store is not enough. To thrive in the ever-evolving world of eCommerce, you need to harness the power of SEO to drive targeted traffic, generate qualified leads, and boost your sales.
Let’s explore why eCommerce SEO is essential for your online store’s success and how it can propel your business to new heights.
- Enhance Your Website’s Visibility: With millions of websites vying for attention in search engine results, achieving visibility can be a daunting task. However, by optimising your eCommerce store for search engines, you can increase your website’s visibility and attract more organic traffic. By conducting thorough keyword research (Tool), optimising your website’s meta tags, URLs, and headings, and creating high-quality, keyword-rich content, you can improve your website’s search engine rankings and appear on the first page of search results. Increased visibility means more exposure for your brand, more clicks to your website, and ultimately more potential customers.
- Drive High-Quality Traffic: Not all website traffic is created equal. What matters most is attracting highly qualified traffic – visitors who are actively searching for products or services similar to what you have in the box to offer. This is where eCommerce SEO plays a pivotal role. By optimising your eCommerce store for relevant keywords, you can attract highly targeted traffic that is more likely to convert into leads and customers.
- Generate Qualified Leads: Once visitors land on your eCommerce store, the next crucial step is to lead them to a cart and convince them to make a purchase. eCommerce SEO can greatly impact lead generation. By optimising your website’s navigation, creating intuitive and user-friendly product categories, and implementing effective call-to-action (CTA) buttons, you can guide your visitors towards taking desired actions such as signing up for newsletters, creating accounts, or adding products to their carts. By nurturing these leads through targeted email campaigns, personalised offers, and excellent customer service, you can transform them into loyal customers who keep coming back for more.
- Boost Your Sales and Revenue: At the heart of every eCommerce business is the desire to generate sales and revenue. By driving more targeted traffic, generating qualified leads, and optimising your website’s conversion funnel, you can boost your sales and revenue exponentially. Moreover, by constantly monitoring and analysing your website’s performance, tracking key metrics such as conversion rates, cart abandonment, bounce rate, average order value, and customer lifetime value, and making data-driven decisions, you can continually optimise your eCommerce SEO strategy to maximise your ROI and stay ahead of the competition.
How to execute eCommerce SEO
To get your basics right there are a number of things you can do to improve your eCommerce SEO. Here are some of the most important strategies:
Choose the right keywords
The first step to eCommerce SEO is to choose the right keywords. These are the words and phrases that people use when they search for products like yours. You can use a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner to help you find the right keywords.
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, you need to use them throughout your store. This includes your website’s title, meta descriptions, header tags, and product descriptions. You should also use your keywords in your internal links.
Optimise your product pages
Your product pages are some of the most important pages on your website. This is where people will go to learn more about your products and make a purchase. That’s why it’s important to optimise your product pages for search engines.
Here are some tips for optimising your product pages:
- Use relevant keywords throughout your product descriptions.
- Write clear and concise product descriptions.
- Include high-quality images of your products. (Better Images specialised in solving this problem)
- Add videos to your product pages.
- Use social proof, such as customer reviews and ratings
Improve your site’s speed
Page speed is a ranking factor for Google. This means that the faster your website loads, the higher it will rank in search results. There are a number of things you can do to improve your site’s speed, such as optimising your images, minifying your code, and using a caching plugin.
Build backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. They’re a sign that your website is popular and trustworthy. Google uses backlinks as a ranking factor, so the more backlinks you have, the higher your website will rank.
There are a number of ways to build backlinks, such as guest blogging, social media marketing, and directory submission.
Keep your store up-to-date
Google rewards up-to-date websites. This means that you should regularly add new products to your store, update your product descriptions, and fix any broken links.
How Better Images can help eCommerce Businesses Unlock the SEO Potential
Better Images by Frame is a powerful tool that automatically analyses and generates high-quality product images to help e-commerce businesses increase their conversion rates and boost sales. The tool evaluates your current product images and assigns a score based on their potential impact on sales. It then generates improved images that are more visually appealing and informative, resulting in higher conversion rates and increased revenue.
But more importantly Better Images can also help with SEO by ensuring that images have proper naming and alt tags, which can help the website and images to be easily discoverable by search engines.
The Final Word
eCommerce SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. However, by following these basic tips in this guide, you can improve your eCommerce SEO and attract more visitors to your store.
Read our previous blog: Maximising eCommerce Sales
To improve conversion rates on an eCommerce site, businesses should regularly track several key metrics. One of the most crucial metrics to monitor is cart abandonment. In simple terms, cart abandonment occurs when a potential customer visits an eCommerce website, adds a product to their virtual shopping cart, but then leaves the site without completing the payment process. The rate at which this happens is measured as the cart abandonment rate.