How to do effective SEO for an E-commerce online business

 
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Where do you go when you have to make an online search? A search engine of course. So, whether you use Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engine, almost all your searches for any sort of information including a product or a service begins by typing out your keywords in the search bar of a search engine of your choice. To put what we’ve just mentioned in a numbers perspective, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine and Google currently holds 90.1% of the total search engine market share, followed by YouTube, Yahoo!, Bing, and Amazon.

As an E-commerce online store owner, the one most important thing in your mind at all times is the desire to drive more and newer traffic to your website. This is possibly the only way to scale a mom-and-pop store which may have started and even sustained through the word-of-mouth method into a global behemoth attracting and catering to end consumers from all over the globe. The internet as we know it, is not confined by geographical boundaries and borders and has made the world a much smaller and closer-knit place to live in. This is why being able to sell your products and services in the information technology age should not be just restricted to areas and individuals who live around you and who may know you through a personal connection.

SEO and why you need it

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of generating more organic traffic to your web page from searches made on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Amazon apart from the other less popular ones. To make sure that your webpage, product and service is known adequately and on a larger scale, they need to show up on search engine pages when searched for. To ensure that they are coming up closer to the top three or four searches in whichever search engine that they are being searched for, the online store owner needs to undertake a process known in the industry as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is a common joke that if you need to hide something, the most ideal place is the second page of any online search. This is true to the point that very rarely does any individual ever have to go to the second page of his or her search when trying to find something online. The key is to be featured with your online store on the first page and towards the sharper end of things so that you are one of the first few to be noticed and have the best chance of being clicked on.

A lot of nascent E-commerce entrepreneurs tend to ask if SEO is actually needed. To put things in further context, a staggering 57% of B2B marketers swear that the SEO process generates more leads than any other marketing initiative. The size of your online store does not really matter. You could be just starting off or you could already be an established store either online or offline, good SEO will make or break the fortunes of your E-commerce business in the short and longer terms.

Effective SEO Techniques

Now that you have been updated on the meaning and importance of good SEO, here are a few tips and tricks that will help you to conduct good and effective SEO for your online store.

The Key are the Keywords

The most crucial part about doing quality SEO is being able to identify the correct keywords with which people are trying to search either for your product or service or then products and services that relate to what you are also selling on your online store. Being able to correctly and consistently identify high-value search terms that your potential customers might be using leaves you at a distinct advantage as compared to other online stores who may not be able to do so with the same efficiency. Be aware of long-tail keywords, which are usually three to four words in length or more. Do keep in mind that the longer the keyword, the more specific it becomes. That means lower competition and, often, higher conversion rates by nature, if you have managed to understand your target audience correctly. Advancing technology means that the use of online tools to automate this process is also a possibility today. For example, KTD automates this process for both Google and Amazon saving you loads of manual labor time, especially for those online stores and E-commerce businesses with a huge product catalog.

Picking Keywords

It is very easy to get a little excited and make a huge list of keywords which you want to optimize to get maximum reach. However, it is important to remember that each keyword also comes as a cost which is why it is essential to be able to pick the best few over the others and optimize your search on them rather than having too many duds in your catalog. The higher the search volume, the more potential traffic that can be drawn to your site. There are paid tools like SEMRush that will give you volume data for keywords and also free tools like Google Keyword Planner with different levels of efficacy. However, high volume keywords often come with a lot of competition as well. The lower the competition, the more likely you are to rank for the keyword because essentially it means that no one is really searching for that particular key word anyway.

It is also important to note that the relevance of your keywords is significant. There is no fooling Google or the other search engines. If the keyword is not relevant to your webpage, product or service, it loses its importance and its efficiency as well. Look to target keywords that show more commercial intent because these are the kind of words that general consumers are searching for to potentially get to your products and services online.

Site Structure

SEO is not only about choosing and optimizing your keywords. The actual structure of your E-commerce website also has a lot to do with being able to rank higher in search results on search engines online. How the pages on your site are organized and structured has a large effect on your search engine rankings. It also directly affects your User Interface (UI) as well as the overall User Experience (UX). The basic and most simplified idea is that you need to make it very easy and accessible for both users and search engines to access particular products and services on your online store. However, like almost everything else, this is easier said than done. An E-commerce website is typically never complete, as constant additions to products and services could lead to frequent changes of the overall website structure.

Ensuring that the overall site structure has been designed to remain simple and easy to access with multiple avenues to reach desired navigation is always very important and one of the more basic factors of any website design. However, it is also important that the structure is fluid and can be altered to retain its simplicity when you are ready to scale the E-commerce feature on your webpage. Every page on the online store should be easy to navigate to from your homepage in as few clicks as possible.

If your consumers are constantly relying on the back button to get around your site, running in circles trying to find what they’re looking for, then the structure needs to be revisited immediately as this leads to the maximum bounce rate of people visiting the site but not actually transacting and making a sale. You also don’t want to have to reorganize and rearrange your site structure every time you add a new product category or more products in an existing category.

Avoid Thin Content and Content Duplication

Two of the most common issues that gravely impacts SEO for E-commerce sites are either thin content or significant content duplication issues. More often than not, both these likely scenarios take place because there are many internal levels of the website structure, such as filters and attribute-focused pages that have very few products, which are also included in other pages. The most common method to deal with both, thin content and content duplication issues, is to just noindex or canonicalize these types of pages, since doing this is easier than to create specifically relevant and useful content for them to become relevant and competitive. Canonicalizing a page is described best as a way of telling Google that that particular URL is the master version you would like to display in search results. This is helpful in duplicate content situations because Google certainly picks up on them. While this is an easy and common way to deal with either issue, it is not the most straightforward way to handle this situation or the best way either.

On-Page SEO

If your website isn’t visible when people are searching for the products you sell, you’re losing out on potential customers and profits. On-page SEO will help your E-commerce website rank higher, engage more users, drive more traffic, and convert more leads. To improve your on-page SEO ranking one of the key steps is to remove unavailable products from your index. When left in indexing for an extended period of time, these kinds of pages will almost always eventually bring your ranking down. E-commerce websites often show maximum attention to product pages, landing pages, and the homepage of their websites. They tend to forget that category pages in their catalog should also look and read great because they directly influence conversions and search rankings. If the potential consumer does not like the appearance of the category page, they may not even open the following product pages, and all your efforts would have been for nothing.

Meta Titles & Descriptions

The meta titles on your web pages and their descriptions are short but meaningful elements to improve SEO as well. They give you favorable exposure in search engines because web users see them when choosing from several other potentially competitive and similar sources. The ideal meta title and description should briefly summarize the subject of the page clearly and succinctly in a way that it makes people want to visit and further explore those same web pages.

H [Header] tags

Header tags of H tags are divided into categories like H1, H2, H3, and so on and are extremely important, since they make up the structure of your articles. When visiting blogs and product pages, the first thing that a potential customer will look at is the headers. The most concerning part is that the potential customer takes only a few seconds to decide whether he or she wants to consume the material or if it’s worth the time to spend on it. Headers also are valuable from an SEO point of view because Google pays a lot more attention to header tags as compared to the body text that the page may contain.

Soundly conducted SEO on your online store or E-commerce website has the potential to help your business grow exponentially, as well as boost your brand image on the internet. However, as you may have realized, conducting proper SEO is a specialized profession and needs to be conducted by an expert.

AmareSol Global is a digital business consultancy creating innovative change through a team of talented designers, developers, and strategists creating digital experiences for brands and companies around the world. We are continuously fueling growth across constantly changing and advancing digital landscapes, by seeking and formulating newer and better ways to service clientele on a global scale across industries. Look up more about us at www.amaresolglobal.com

 
 
 
AmareSol GlobalSEO, Social Media, Digital Marketing, Web Design