

When you optimise your e-commerce website, there are many things to consider – content on a large number of pages, duplicates, backlinks, page display etc.

SEO for e-commerce sites – recommendations

Keywords:

Choose your keywords carefully – stay away from single words where the competition is very high if you want to get on top. If you want to sell fitness watches for women for example, you’d better use this as your keyword rather than just watch. Don’t worry so much about the search volume, the success consists of 3 elements, not just one: competition, traffic and trend.

Include the keyword in your URL – benefits from having your keyword inside the URL rather than having an URL made of an anonymous, automatically generated ID are obvious: people like to know what they will find after they click on a link and seeing the name of the product in the URL will increase your click through rate. I recommend to also include the keyword in the page title, product description, image file names, meta title and meta description.

Study your competition – if your competitors have a higher Page Rank and a better Domain Authority I would advise you to check their keywords and find yourself other keywords to rank for because competing against them would be really hard and most probably useless.

Prioritize optimization

Things will not shine for you if you waste too much time optimising products and pages that barely anyone ever looks at or searches for. See what keywords people are searching for the most and optimize those pages first. Use the keywords that generate most of the traffic to your site in the title of the pages, headlines and products description.

Use the most popular name for products

If you use the technical term, very few people will find your product page. See what terms people are looking for when they search for the product you sell and use that both in the product name/title and in description.

Product description

Put yourself in your customers shoes. Too much text might have a negative impact on their purchase decision, and the same thing goes for too little or no text. If your customers have to put too much effort into reading a long description, this might overwhelm them and they might decide to leave the page. No text in the description will be reflected in the product’s page position in search and will leave your customers with doubts concerning the product features. If you only provide a nice image, then there’s a good chance that he/she will prefer to buy from the website which provided the necessary information about the product while you might get nothing but a high bounce rate. The bottom line is that the one who manages to get the highest rank and the highest conversion rates are those who have short, yet convincing and clear descriptions.

I also advise not to copy any descriptions from other websites because Google will penalize you for it and recovering from a penalty is a difficult process that will cost you time and money.

Images:

– display high-quality pictures to make your product easy to analyze

– try A/B-testing to compare pictures one against the other and keep the one that brings higher conversion rates.

– optimize your images to make sure that search engines understand what the image is about. Make sure that your keyword is included in the image file name, alt text and captions.

Customers reviews

Allowing customers to express their opinions on the products will bring great benefits to your website:

a better SEO by having your pages updated often

by having your pages updated often a higher quality , given the fact that you get free feedback from users.

, given the fact that you get free feedback from users. more conversions, knowing that most users look for reviews to a product before buying it.

If you want more reviews from your customers you can give rewards to those who contribute or send them an email a few days after they got the product, in which you ask them to make a review.

Avoid duplicate title tags

We all know that handling a large number of products is not easy, but you should always avoid duplicate title tags by having a fix structure that could include for example the brand, the item type and the model.

Don’t try to rank for the same keywords for different pages

even though you may have multiple products of the same kind with the model being the only difference between them, I recommend using unique key phrases so that the pages of your website could be promoted more efficiently. Using identical keywords for multiple pages will confuse the search engines and your pages will compete against each other, forcing the search engine to choose the best one between them and rank it.

Backlinks

If you want more backlinks, but you have no idea how or from where to get them then look at your competition. Make a list with all their inbound links sources, filter the ones with a low Domain Authority and see how you could put your link there too.

Don’t forget to get rid of the bad backlinks from penalized sites or link farms that can negatively affect your ranks rather than increase it. Having all the links eliminated from those websites would be a long and difficult process. That is why Google said that you can simply disavow them so they become irrelevant when the search engine is calculating your website rank. You can manually filter out the bad backlinks by using this free Backlink Disavow Tool.

Site architecture

It’s perfectly normal to have doubts about your website architecture. If you are afraid that having a deep navigational architecture will make some pages hard to reach, then look at the big brands with very high ranks and do what they do, just a little better.

Test your website

Identify all the errors that your site has and fix them. We can offer you a quick and free look at what pages you should optimize. If you want a more extensive website review, you can opt for a third party like us to have an outsider fresh view on what you are doing wrong and how to fix the issues that you found.

Page speed

Test your page speed and do what you need to do to to keep it under 3s. If you can’t do that, people will leave your site.

Rich Snippets

Write convincing snippets to increase the click through rate. Don’t forget to insert your keyword here too because people tend to click more often on the results which contain an exact match of the term they search for.

Internal linking

Link your pages one to another as a natural process. Do not place too many links if they aren’t needed because Google is good at reading these structures and it might have a negative impact on your SEO efforts.

Usability

Make your site easy to navigate, be sure that the search within the website is accurate and that the links work fine. If you have a lot of products, you can also add tags to them to enhance product discovery on your e-commerce site, increasing at the same time both time spent on site and conversions.

As a tip, I would recommend adding a live chat tool so that customers can ask you for help as they need it rather than leaving your website and look for the items they need somewhere else.

Social signals

If your customers share your content on facebook, twitter and other social networks, Google will consider your site to be valuable. I recommend though putting more effort in promoting your business on Google+ since the results are more visible.

Blogging

A very good opportunity to target keywords that you didn’t manage to target in the main pages of your site. If you sell shoes, for example, you could hire someone with basic SEO knowledge to write some interesting posts on “how to choose the perfect shoes” or “the most comfortable shoes”.

Analysis

Use Google Analytics to see things like where most traffic is coming from, the best keywords that you rank for, numbers of conversions and much more data that will allow you to make a longterm strategy for your e-commerce site in regard to SEO.

Mobile

A responsive design is now a must in e-commerce. Most people have a smartphone and buying with their mobile should be an extremely smooth and fast process if you don’t want to miss out conversions.

SEO for e-commerce websites is a continuous effort. This domain still gets updated very often and search engines constantly improve their algorithm to offer a better user experience and reward the high quality websites with the top positions in search. Subscribe(link? am observat că oamenii nu pot da subscribe prin rss feed) to get more updated recommendations from us.

Did we miss anything? Please let us know in the comments.

