eCommerce SEO tips: Drive Better Organic Traffic

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What is the best way to promote your online shop and boost sales? How can you increase organic traffic to your eCommerce store without relying solely on PPC and paid advertising?

The answer is through SEO for eCommerce.

Every site’s success depends on these three letters: SEO. Whether you have an eCommerce store or a basic informational blog, SEO is the driving force that lets everyone know you exist. The term “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)” is simply the process of optimizing your website around specific keywords in order to rank higher in search engines, such as Google.

🚀Read: Omnichannel Guide for Digitally Advanced Brands🚀 

For an eCommerce site, SEO involves a set of rules to apply in order to make it search engine friendly. SEO for eCommerce sites are all about having specific product pages that rank highly on search engines. Resulting in more organic traffic to your online store. This means that you shouldn’t focus on ranking for uber-competitive high-volume terms. Rather, you should apply several eCommerce SEO tips to give your site visitors comparisons of your product to your competitors, so they don’t need to leave to do more research. The best eCommerce SEO ensures that your products get discovered online. 

Benefits of Investing In SEO for Ecommerce Store 

There’s no question that ranking higher than your competitors on Google is a must if you want to succeed. But, what if you don’t know the best eCommerce SEO tips and tricks that will get your eCommerce site to the top? If you’re missing out on clicks, you’re probably also missing out on sales. Whether you’re just getting started with a new website or improving an existing site, you need to know and implement useful tips and eCommerce SEO best practices needed to step up your SEO game. 

As an eCommerce website that needs to make sales, profit and grow over time. Reaching the first page isn’t enough. You just have to rank #1. That being said, search engine optimization provides a powerful boost in terms of organic search visibility. And general traffic simply due to the fact that it offers sustainable and enduring improvements to general page ranking in a way that running paid ads cannot offer.

Picture 1. Seo strategy

Getting traffic from search engines is the first step but it’s not enough. What you need is targeted traffic. Targeted organic traffic is coming from users who know exactly what they want. These users have a clear intent and they express this intent when they type a query in the search box. With the right SEO for eCommerce sites, the best eCommerce platform suitable for your business and eCommerce SEO strategy, you will be able to identify and optimize the right long-tail keywords. Moreover, you will get your site higher rankings and make a difference in your business.

Ecommerce SEO Tips for Driving More Traffic to Your Website

As a general rule: without SEO, you can expect no sustainable improvements to your organic search traffic. Although search engine optimization requires a significantly larger investment of time in order to yield results, the gains from such strategies are all but guaranteed to create long-lasting improvements to your search traffic. In exchange for your patience, search engine optimization will provide you with an expanded stream of potential clients for the foreseeable future. Ultimately exceeding the visibility of your ad spend at a fraction of the cost. 

First, you have to ensure your website is well structured. This requires you to construct your website in a way easy for visitors to purchase by making the buttons big enough, keeping your site responsive and glitch-free, and showing social proof of your best products. Once you complete your technical website structuring, the next step is to dive into another less “technical” process. But that process is equally important – In-depth keyword research. 

Picture 2. Big buttons as a part of well-structured websites

This phase of your eCommerce SEO is critical because it will impact all optimizations moving forward. Your searchers will tell you what you want and you have to listen to the keyword data. Learn what questions your prospects have about the products you sell. For example, what type of support issues do they search for? Starting with a strong keyword foundation can make or break your SEO efforts. Moreover it could save you a lot of time if done properly from the start.  

Optimize the user experience. Important to realize, SEO is all about optimizing for real people now — not search engines. With this in mind, start building high-quality backlinks before your peak season to boost rankings and traffic as you make your content easily accessible and understandable.

How to Develop an eCommerce SEO Strategy Suitable for Your eCommerce Website

Ecommerce SEO specifically helps online stores increase organic traffic to product pages and listings. A strong eCommerce SEO strategy is critical to driving organic traffic to your online store, but most people are doing it wrong. It’s no secret that a properly implemented search engine optimization strategy can drive an increased number of web visitors to your website. A positive experience lends itself to repeated consumer interactions. Part of a long-term SEO strategy focuses on nurturing a positive experience even after the initial transaction. While eCommerce sites are generally among the most difficult sites to optimize for in terms of SEO, there are simple but effective SEO for eCommerce store tactics to ensure you are giving your Web-Store the best opportunity to appear in online searches. 

Using the Right SEO Keywords for Organic Traffic Generation

Carry out keyword research to find the types of keywords customers are searching for. It is one thing to find keywords. It is another to properly use them. To properly use keywords, you need to have keywords that you would work with. Therefore, you need to research out the right keywords important and useful for your online store. To do this, analyze your competition. 

Keep an Eye on Your Competitors 

If you want to beat the competition, you need to understand what they’re doing. Create a list of your competitors and run their category pages to see what keywords drive most of their site traffic. A tool like Google Keyword Planner will allow you to find your base keyword information. 

Picture 3. Google Keyword Planner

If you sort these by volume, you can then see which of the top keywords could serve as the primary keyword for your page. In addition, since Google has repeatedly recommended content marketing as an effective strategy for building backlinks, a blog is an essential tool in the SEO’s arsenal. With this in mind, look for a platform that offers a full-featured blog. Complete with comment capabilities, social sharing, anti-spam, and RSS feed features.

Consider SEO as a Part of Your Big Marketing Strategy 

Furthermore, to greatly improve organic traffic, PPC and SEO are both short-term and long-term online marketing strategies you should implement. Although such monetary gain from search engine optimization would likely not be possible until months after optimization has been completed, it is absolutely certain that you will receive a significant expansion of your client base as a result of such policies. Especially if you manage to successfully rank for high-value keywords. Of course, potential customers who do successfully convert on your website and become customers could quickly become repeat customers in the near future. 

Choosing the Best SEO Ecommerce Platform Suitable For Your Needs

Improving SEO and growing your website’s organic presence should be your top inbound marketing priority. Considering the importance of SEO, it’s definitely a good idea to spend some time picking an eCommerce platform that does well in that area. When picking an eCommerce platform for your online store, one of the most important factors to take into account is its SEO friendliness. Most of the popular eCommerce platforms have their fair share of SEO friendly features. Those features give them the functionality that they need to rank their store on Google. However, truth is, there is no ‘best’ eCommerce platform. Each has its pros and cons, and different companies will benefit from some more than from others. 

Read: Ecommerce Platforms to Build Your Business: 8 Popular in 2021.

Above all, the best SEO eCommerce platform should give you the right amount of control. Controlling your canonicals, your pagination, and your Robots.txt can have a dramatic impact on your SEO. Also, having more control can result in big SEO mistakes if you don’t know what you are doing. Secondly, the right platform should not automatically generate a sitemap that simply includes every possible URL on the site. If this happens, it might result in a sitemap with the wrong pages. Including non-canonical pages, non-indexable pages or pages that are non-functional (e.g. 404 & 500 errors.). If you are choosing self-hosted software, look for a platform with fast, efficient code. And with the ability to implement Google’s performance eCommerce SEO best practices. If on the other hand, you are choosing a hosted eCommerce platform, you will not be able to look at the server-side code. As such, ensure to test page load speeds and look out for its ability to implement Google’s performance best practices.

eCommerce SEO Is Your Way to Great Conversions 

Finally, eCommerce SEO is a must for all shops. On a very fundamental level, it could be stated with confidence that the more targeted potential consumers visit your website, the greater the odds that one (or several) of them will become paying customers. A well-optimized shop will rank higher in search engines and this translates to more traffic and sales. The difference between normal SEO and shop SEO is that the latter includes specific recommendations that are applicable to eCommerce. Even if you are making sales through AdWords or other PPC platforms, spending a portion of your monthly budget on eCommerce SEO, is the best investment you can make for your business.