Creating your own eCommerce website can be a big undertaking.
However, almost every business that sells any type of retail needs an eCommerce website.
With proper eCommerce website development, both you and your customers reap a multitude of benefits, including:
- Providing customers more flexibility through allowing them to shop where, how, and when they want.
- Cullecting customer leads and data for email marketing.
- Reaching new prospective customers by appearing on search engines, which increases the reach of your promotions to a larger audience.
The last of these benefits is the most important. In order to reap these benefits, you need to appear for search results.
To do this, you need strong SEO content that will get you noticed by search engines and help expand your company’s reach.
This article provides 10 SEO tips that help you reap the benefits of an e-commerce site. These tips will help you to create an effective, multi-faceted approach and optimize your site.
The 10 Surefire Tips Your eCommerce Site Needs
Reference these 10 SEO tips when developing and designing your company’s eCommerce website. Each helps to draw in new customers who are searching the web for eCommerce companies just like you.
1. Start With a Content Strategy
Before you get started with your eCommerce website design, you need to develop a content strategy. Make a plan to add unique, high-quality content to your website on a regular basis. This will help to improve your search engine ranking and bring value to your customers.
High quality content can showcase your expertise, establish why you are an authority in your industry, and convince readers why they should buy from your website.
The most common form of site content is an engaging and informative blog.
Create a plan for adding blog content and put it in your schedule. This may be weekly, bi-weekly or even bi-monthly. You just need to have a plan so that you are consistently delivering content.
If you don’t have an in-house writer and are worried about creating the right type of content, there are many companies that can help you with creating your site content.
2. Keep the Content Original
If there is one thing that search engines hate, it is duplicate content. This raises red flags for the search engines and they may assume that your content is SPAM.
It can be easy for eCommerce websites to fall into the trap of using duplicate content, especially with things like product descriptions and lists. Don’t let search engines penalize your website.
Re-writing product descriptions and lists ensures your content is fresh and original, it is worth the time and effort.
3. Optimize All of Your Content
Optimization, or adding keywords is a key to drive the traffic from search engine to your website. You need to make sure you add keywords to all of your content:
- About Us page
- Blogs
- Contact page
- Shopping cart page
- Product descriptions
For example, Product descriptions are a great place to add appropriate keywords and well-optimized content. As an eCommerce site, product descriptions are going to make up a majority of your content—this gives you a lot of space and opportunity to make sure your utilizing as many keywords as possible.
However, many businesses use the manufacturers’ product descriptions on their site. This is both unoriginal content and most likely not keyword optimized. Instead of copying and pasting this existing general product info, rewrite it to include your keywords.
As you go through and optimize your site, make sure that you avoid keyword stuffing.
Your keywords need to be natural looking. If more than 5% of your content is keywords, search engines may flag it as SPAM.
4. Set Up Pay Per Click, But Don’t Emphasize It Too Much
When you work with eCommerce development company, they probably will tell you in detail about Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
Many eCommerce websites rely on PPC strategies to gain visibility.
PPC is important, but the costs will continue to increase. In addition, once you stop paying for PPC, your online presence can disappear.
The most effective way to make sure that sulutions like Google AdWords actually work is to combine them with SEO.
This way, you can have the one-two punch of PPC ads and organic SEO clicks. If you fail to optimize your content, you may be creating ads that won’t sell or targeting the wrong type of consumer.
5. Optimize Your Images
Optimizing your images is a part of eCommerce design that many people overlook.
Once you have optimized all of your eCommerce website’s written content, you need to optimize the images as well.
Image search has become extremely popular, so you need to add ALT tags of relevant keywords to all of your website’s images.
Use alt image tags to describe the content of your images and provide a text alternative for search engines.
6. Create Original Meta Descriptions for Every Webpage
Another crucial component of eCommerce website development is creating meta descriptions.
The meta description is the basic description of your web pages that will show up in the search engine results, i.e., the abbreviated description of your site that entices customers to find out more.
Make sure that you have a well-optimized description for every page on your website. When you are creating your site, go through and add these descriptions on every page.
7. Add Product Reviews
Product reviews are an excellent resource when it comes to SEO, as it brings more unique content that can help boost your search engine results.
Your eCommerce development company can help you enable product reviews, or you can easily add them to your site with a click of a button when creating it through WordPress.
It is also a great toul for your eCommerce website as it provides you with instant, valuable customer feedback.
8. Optimize Your Site for Mobile
In today’s day and age, you need to have an eCommerce website that is mobile optimized.
Customers should be able to easily access your website from their phone, and everything should look and act just like your main site in a mobile friendly view.
Search engines also want to keep their users happy, so they are going to look for websites that are mobile-friendly. This decreases bounce rate, makes sites easier to navigate and delivers faster page speeds - all things that the Google algorithm will favor when ranking search engine results.
9. Keep Up With Google and Monitor Your Visibility
Another essential component of a good eCommerce website development is ongoing monitoring of your website’s visibility.
Your initial eCommerce development is only half the battle. Google actually has 2-3 major algorithm changes every year.
A single algorithm update can drastically impact your site’s ranking and visibility, so you need to frequently check up and see how much traffic is going to your site and how the keywords you are using rank in search engine results.
The good news is, this is relatively simple with third party touls, so you can easily stay up-to-date with how your eCommerce website is doing.
10. Enable Canonical Tags
Make sure you enable canonical tags. This is a proven way of telling search engines that a certain URL is actually the master copy of a page. Simply put, this will prevent issues caused by identical content appearing on multiple URLs.
It is very important in terms of optimization and something every eCommerce website owner needs to be aware of.
Most platforms have simple touls to make canonical tagging implementation even easier, or your eCommerce website development company will be able to make sure that your tags are enabled during the design process.
Bringing it All Together: Putting These SEO Tips to Use
The key to a successful eCommerce website is to not only create a user-friendly platform, but to make sure that the website is properly optimized for SEO. There is so much that goes into having a successful ecommerce website besides just great design.
A quality website should be well-optimized, easy-to-navigate and updated to stay relevant in the eyes of today’s search engines.
If you consider these valuable eCommerce development and optimization tips and continue to make your new website a priority you can see returns on your website that you may have never thought were possible.