Creating an e-commerce website is something that every retailer needs. You need to optimize your e-commerce site to make it user-friendly and easy for people to purchase your product. Successful e-commerce website owners use the tools provided by their website to collect information about their customers.
Through tracking, you can analyze the behavior of your customers. You will then know which traffic sources don’t work and which offers don’t appeal. Additionally, you should find out what causes customers to abandon their carts.
Good search engine optimization for e-commerce sites helps your business reach more prospects, bring in more revenue, and grow. More people are buying online, and if your site isn’t showing up when they search, those potential customers are going to choose someone else. How do you increase your visibility? By investing in SEO.
Understanding SEO For E-Commerce
Are you an e-commerce company? Then SEO is a strategy that helps you rank higher in search engine results. An optimized website will increase traffic to your store. If your website is not optimized with high-quality content, Google will not rank it well in search results, thus preventing customers from finding you.
Now, SEO for e-commerce is different than SEO for content-focused websites, like blogs. You need to understand how search engines work and what they reward. That means having a working knowledge of SEO for e-commerce, considering Google’s guidelines.
Below, we give you a list of e-commerce best practices that improve your site’s SEO.
1. Update Your Site To Become User Friendly
UX is the way the human interacts with your product. Making the interactions more smooth makes their experiences better. In addition, the importance of UX (user experience) extends far beyond just making a website look good; it is about creating a website that is easy to use and one which helps users achieve their desired outcomes without a hustle.
User experience and search engine optimization are both important factors in getting more traffic to your site. It’s important to consider how a website’s UX can influence SEO, as well as vice-versa. Although the interaction between UX and SEO began sometime back, and UX is now a critical component of discoverability.
Some examples of how to improve UX include:
- Your ads should be placed on a website that is easy to navigate and loaded with ads that don’t interfere with the user’s view of the content.
- For easy navigation, a website should be clutter-free and a responsive design can help with page load time.
- When you are using formatting to make certain portions of your copy more conspicuous, it’s important that you use consistent styling throughout.
2. Steer From Copying Other Pages And Content
If a website is using duplicate catalogs and images, it is also likely that they are duplicating descriptions as well. It’s important to use unique content and images when you’re creating product descriptions. While it’s understandable why sellers republish the same descriptions, there is a good chance that their product pages will lose out to those of more diligent competitors.
There are several strategies you can use, for example:
- This can be done through installing Google Analytics.
- You can also try adding a suffix to your URL and using unique product images and settings on other pages.
3. Integrate a Sitemap
This is a visual representation of your website or digital product. It allows visitors to explore the different pages as they wish.
A well-designed sitemap is crucial to any site’s success. For starters, it helps you understand how deep your content goes, so you can take advantage of different ways to expand your site. Before creating a sitemap, you should have a thorough understanding of your site’s content and architecture. Make a list that details all of the content on your site, including both static and dynamic pages.
If you want to generate a sitemap manually, you can do so with either an XML or HTML Sitemap. HTML Sitemaps are the most helpful to visitors.
4. Simplify Social Media Sharing
Many people believe social sharing doesn’t impact SEO for two reasons. The first is that many companies have been downplaying the role of social media for years. The second is that there isn’t enough data to support using it. However, there are many experts who would disagree with the same.
Although social media doesn’t directly affect SEO, it’s important to use it whenever possible to increase your brand exposure and make more people familiar with your business. Sharing your content on social media serves to leverage your brand, and will increase the SEO of your website.
Increasing the reach of your content can be done by improving your local SEO, which also improves your brand recognition. Backlinks are often acquired by publishing high-quality content. If you want to automatically share your content on social media, consider using a tool like Buffer.
5. Improve Your Page Speed
Page load time is defined as the time taken for a web page to be completely loaded by the browser. Measure how long it takes for an internet user to open your web page. If your website is taking too long to load, then your visitors will become impatient and leave the site.
The faster a page loads, the more likely it is to get better rankings in search engine results. It’s a good idea to try to speed up the page speed of your site. First, you need to find and fix the reason for your slow sites. This could either be as a result of a large amount of content, the scripts don’t load as fast as you would like. Images might be taking a long time to load thereby affecting your load times. Additionally, your host may be having an issue.
To solve the issues, one can:
- having fewer images on the pages
- compressing files
- using fewer social media widgets
- optimizing your images
- Improving Your Server Response Time.
In Conclusion, E-commerce websites often have a very simple architecture and the selection of the main keywords is usually limited. Consequently, SEO for e-commerce can be quite efficient. Like any business strategy, SEO for e-commerce involves an ongoing strategy that requires updating as you go to get the best results.
