The world is coming out stronger in digital marketing after the pandemic. Search engine optimization (SEO) for eCommerce is one of the most significant initiatives for all marketing companies due to people staying home and shopping online. These days, shopping from the comfort of our homes and screens is a way of life. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of the latest trends to entice visitors to shop for your products. Learn five tips and tricks on being successful with SEO for eCommerce.
1. Write Thoughtful Product Descriptions
Your product pages need to contain more than just prices, photos, and titles – they also need to feature detailed descriptions that “sell” the items you’re advertising to shoppers and search engines.
Think about the information your audience will find most helpful. Depending on the type of products you sell, you might want to include measurements, ingredients, age ranges, or instructions.
Use your words to create descriptive, detailed stories about your products, and convey how these items will enhance your future customers’ lives. Be sure to use applicable keywords on each product page, too. Be mindful, however, that you don’t want to just stuff keywords into your content for keywords’ sake. Instead, you want to use them in the most natural way possible to enhance the words you’re already producing. To have a successful SEO strategy, you first need to focus on your site visitors’ experiences.
2. Optimize Your Site and Listings for Keywords
Speaking of keywords, let’s talk about those for a minute. Before you get too technical with the buildout of your eCommerce website, it’s important to ensure your product pages are optimized for keywords your target audience will actually be searching for. As you strategize your keyword plan, here are some things to consider:
- Competition. Some keywords are more competitive than others. Often, shorter keywords get a lot of monthly searches, but they also tend to cost more from a bid perspective and are usually harder to rank for. Alternatively, longer keywords typically have lower monthly searches, but they may provide you with more accessible opportunities to rank higher for them. A savvy digital marketing agency will use tools and data to understand the intricacies of proper keyword usage about your company’s products, then strategize your content accordingly.
- Searchers’ needs. Put yourself into the shoes of your customers and work backward. Plan keywords that help you better understand how your audience is discovering you. If you were your own customer, what kinds of words or phrases would you use to find the products you sell? Use this insight to optimize your descriptions’ keywords.
- Keyword intent. Your searchers’ intentions are important, but there are other types of keyword intents. Are your customers looking for informational content, such as how-tos, or are they searching for navigational direction, using phrases that directly point towards the top of the sales funnel?
3. Fix Usability Issues
Huge eCommerce giants like Amazon and Zappos have altered consumers’ expectations of shopping online. Because these sites are so easy to navigate and offer a nearly flawless shopping experience, people have come to expect the same from every eCommerce site they visit. If you have user experience (UX) issues, such as confusing elements or a complex shopping process, your potential customers are likely to leave you for your competitors.
Plus, not only do your customers care about the usability of your website – the search engines do, too. Google considers UX a ranking factor when determining if it will show your eCommerce site on the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone searches for brands like yours.
Need help? Begin by tracking your visitors’ behaviors. Here are some places to look to get you started:
- Session recording tools. These record a random number of people who come to your website and tell you everything they did once they arrived at your store.
- Quantitative analytics tools. These will tell you the pages your visitors leave most often (your highest exit pages).
- Qualitative analytics tools. Try offering your visitors online feedback forms so you can learn firsthand what they thought of their experiences on your eCommerce site.
Once you have a little more information, you can diagnose potential usability issues and strategize corrective solutions.
4. Construct Navigation with Intention
Always offer category-level navigation on your eCommerce store. For instance, Amazon has various categories to help make users’ shopping processes more seamless, such as:
- Electronics, Computers, & Office
- Sports & Outdoors
- Toys, Kids, & Baby
Specific subcategories are broken down even further within these categories, helping shoppers browse the site easily. Just by these category examples, people who need a baby shower gift can quickly hop to a section that offers them an array of options without forcing them to wade through tedious content and products that don’t apply to the parents-to-be.
Additionally, there are tools out there that can create heat maps of your users’ experiences so you can optimize your current and future pages around visitors’ behaviors. This work should, in turn, optimize sales, as well, because it ensures your site is as easy to navigate as possible.
5. Improve Your Site Speed
When most people think of SEO, they think of keywords, which we mentioned here for a good reason. With that said, you don’t want to overlook the technical side of things – this is important from a user-friendliness perspective and an SEO viewpoint.
If your eCommerce site is slow, it doesn’t matter how high-quality your content is because people will close the tab if they feel like they’ve been waiting too long. The problem here is that “too long” is a short amount of time. If your pages take more than two or three seconds to load, you can bet that you’re missing out on many potential customers. On the other hand, if you have a fast, well-designed eCommerce site, you’re signaling to Google that you’re worthy of visitors, and the search engine will factor this into your overall rankings. As a result, you should convert more of your organic search traffic.
Pay attention to page load speed with the available tools, such as Google Analytics (Site Speed Overview) dashboard. Here, you’ll see information such as:
- Average page load time
- Page load time per device
- Bounce rates
- Pageviews
Remember that it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get to your site if people aren’t converting into paying customers. SEO for eCommerce is an ever-evolving endeavor, but you’ll be off to the races if you follow these tips and tricks!
