April 18, 2023
Need your products to start showing up when a customer heads to a search engine like Google? We’ve got you covered.
If you’re wanting to increase your search visibility and drive more organic traffic to your e-commerce website then some very specific SEO tactics are going to help you.
SEO for e-commerce, whilst being informed by more commercially-based research, still has the same aim as typical SEO: to improve a site’s visibility on the SERPs (search engine results pages). Whether your brand sells solely online or does so alongside a brick-and-mortar store, your e-commerce site sits as an extension of your brand.
This means accessible content, a positive user experience and simply being able to be found answering all the right, relevant questions will show users and, ultimately, buyers, that your brand is worth trusting when it comes to spending money.
E-commerce SEO helps acquire new customers in the earlier stage of the buyer journey who may not currently know of your brand and the products/services you offer. What’s more, SEO tactics ensure the users you reach are relevant because they are the ones searching queries related to your brand.
So, what are the top priorities to consider when it comes to optimising an e-commerce site?
As with all SEO, keyword research is an integral part of e-commerce SEO. With the intent to navigate, find products and buy services, e-commerce websites will be built on commercial keyword research. These should help inform the category titles, URL structure and product groupings to ensure that the site architecture is matched with user search intent.
Whilst long-tail keywords are still important to e-commerce sites, getting these short tail, transactional keywords nailed down early in a site’s creation is a winning step to establishing the site is built in the right way to reach the relevant users.
For an e-commerce site, you need to ensure your category pages and product pages are optimised to reach the people intending to make a purchase. Whilst some consider more conversion rate optimisation (CRO) tactics, you can optimise product pages to try and ensure they reach the top of the SERPs, too.
Ways to optimise product pages on an e-commerce site include:
1) Product image optimisation
Google is getting more and more clever, meaning that optimised imagery can even help product pages rank better on the results page. When shopping online, imagery is an integral part of a buyer’s decision-making. Ensuring the images you use are high quality, have detailed alt tags for accessibility, are a manageable size for page loading, and are relevant to your product will bring you a step closer to improving your rankings.
2) Product description optimisation
Product descriptions are small snippets of content that can be well-optimised to target users via keywords with commercial intent. By including well-selected keywords, effective calls to action and making your descriptions, well, as descriptive as possible without waffling on – you’re onto a winner.
Content clusters are a huge part of SEO, ensuring sites and brands build depth to topics relevant to them, their products and their services. Creating product-based content can be a good way to promote your products in a more organic, less advertorial way.
Good examples of product-based content include:
We’ve all been there, added things to our basket but a site took so long to load, glitched too many times or sent you that far down a rabbit hole you gave up and saved your pennies.
It doesn’t matter what your content or your images are like if users don’t even make it that far into the site.
User experience is crucial for all SEO but especially e-commerce, when done wrong it can be the biggest obstacle between a user making a purchase or not. For a positive user experience, e-commerce sites need to ensure the site is accessible to all users, that the pages load swiftly, that signposting to content is clear and any visible mess is minimised as much as possible.
Digital PR is a great way for e-commerce sites to build authority to their site and show Google and users they’re the experts in their industry. A huge part of getting users to part with their money, especially at the minute, is trust. Building links from credible, relevant sites will help your website build trust with Google encouraging it to rank the site high on the SERPs and, in turn, will improve trust with your consumer.
Digital PR and SEO has to consider users at every stage of the journey, not just those ready to purchase, as you want to ensure it’s your brand they consider when they’re ready to buy – whether that’s imminent or several weeks down the line.
E-commerce SEO, then, doesn’t look too different to SEO for all sites, you just have to remember you’re aiming to build trust with users so that when they’re ready to spend it’s your brand and your products that they choose.
Make the buyer journey swift from the research phase to buying, having a positive user experience through the checkout and providing the right signals to the user that you’ve got them covered from all angles and you’re ready to get your products and services taking the top spot of the SERPs.
If you need more support with your SEO, get in touch with us today. Keen to see some examples of our work? Take a look at our SEO case studies to see how the tactics we implement attract visitors and maximise online performance.