3 Steps to Optimize Your Ecommerce SEO

3 Steps to Optimize Your Ecommerce SEO

 

Getting higher search engine rankings to gain more traffic for your site – for free – is the goal of all business owners. We know this can be achieved through SEO (search engine optimization); but this is a tricky game in which Google is constantly changing the rules.

Keeping up with the latest dos and don’ts can be mind-boggling, and sometimes you end up a few steps behind without even knowing. At the blink of an eye your ranking has dropped. How can this be prevented?

In this guide we share some evergreen SEO tips especially for ecommerce that will stand the test of time and never fall out of Google’s favor. Keep reading to find out the quick steps to beating your competitors to the top of the ranks.

 

1. Effective Keyword Research

This may seem obvious, but many people fail to do this correctly and end up missing droves of traffic due to only targeting obvious or highly competitive keywords.

Get free keyword ideas in the following ways:

  • Google and Amazon use an ‘auto suggest’ feature when you begin to type in the search bar. Take note of their suggestions – they’re literally telling you what their users popularly search for.

For instance: you sell colorful rucksacks. Typing in ‘red rucksack’ shows autocompleted terms like ‘red rucksack US’, ‘red rucksack kids’, ‘red rucksacks for women’. Voila – easy, free keyword research in two minutes flat.

  • Don’t shy away from longtail keywords (ones 4 words or more in length). These are less competitive.
  • Amazon suggested searches also show product category ideas – ensure you’re categorizing your products where searchers can find them.

 

2. Intuitive Indexing

If your site contains a lot of pages, it can leave you scratching your head as to how it’s all best indexed. You know you should aim for every page to be at most only 5 clicks away from your homepage, right? Well, now you do: and if they aren’t, you’ve got some strategizing to do.

Here’s some quick ways to bring your back pages up to the front:

  • Firstly, remember your site should be mapped to make sense to humans before search engine crawlers.
  • Use categories and subcategories that adhere to your identified keywords.
  • Use platforms like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider which crawls your website’s URLs and onsite elements to give you an analysis and evaluation of indexing – a simple way out of the maze if you’re feeling lost. (And if you’re lost in your own site, your customers definitely are!)

 

3. Build Links

Link building and creating an online network directing traffic to your site’s pages skyrockets your authority. Internet link building is the equivalent of real-life word of mouth – and we all know how important this is to business.

Remember these rules for building links:

  • With ecommerce, individual product pages need to command more authority than your homepage. Focus on creating links for these rather than homepages.
  • Your job is to create pages that people want to link to – therefore on-page SEO optimization is key. Detailed product descriptions, excellent layout and design, and of course offering high-quality products mean that you’ll have no problem getting other relevant sites to link out to your services.
  • Identify relevant authority sites that would benefit from linking to you and drop them a friendly email. What have you got to lose?