SEO Tips and Tricks For your E-Commerce Website
Introduction
It is a no-brainer that in order for you to increase traffic to your sites on Google, optimizing your SEO is a must, especially in this modern era where digital marketing plays a large role in the world of marketing. Regardless of which industry your business falls in, making it to the first page of Google search is not enough — getting to the number one place is where transactions and sales will be on the high.
Especially with eCommerce, sites, proper digital marketing tactics, and ecommerce reporting can go a long way in ensuring your success. According to certain studies, data has shown that websites that were ranked number one had an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4, while the second trailed behind significantly at a CTR of 12.5, and the third receiving a CTR of 9.5. This goes to show how the rankings truly matter and being satisfied with being number one is no longer enough. Thus, our article gives you the ultimate guide to upping your SEO game, making sure that your website is able to enjoy the highest CTR possible.
1. Research
Before you start on your SEO, you first have to conduct intensive research on keywords and on your competitors, in order to gain a batter understanding of the industry.
Keyword Research
For starters, when you are optimizing the more significant pages of your website, you should factor in relevancy, search volume, and ranking difficulty into it. When you are selecting keywords, be sure not to include broad or vague words that could inhibit users from finding your page, resulting in a high bounce rate alongside a low conversion rate. You should also find keywords with an SEO difficulty of 50 or below since going for keywords with high competition will hinder you from achieving high rankings.
Additionally, to ramp up your traffic, you can capitalize on long-tail keywords for your website. These words are usually made of more than one word and are unique searches that people use to navigate for relevant content online, apart from the keywords that are prone to high competition. Though long-tail keyword searches are usually the “last resort” that people seek out in order to find content online, these searches make up the majority of the world’s demand for information on search engines. Therefore, taking advantage of long-tail keywords can also boost your website’s traffic.
Competitor Research
After you have settled on a list of keywords for your own website, it is a good idea to do some research on your competitors in the industry. Look out for a list of keywords that your competitors use as their SEO strategy. There are certain websites that help you to analyze their Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authorities (PA), in order to discern for yourself whether or not it is worth competing over the same keywords. If their DAs or PAs are significantly higher than yours, shifting your focus on other keywords will definitely be a better bet for you.
Aside from that, you should also pay attention to the places that they are getting their inbound links from. Certain websites online allow you to extensively search a comprehensive list for your own inbound links, as well as other useful data like your domain scores, page scores, link types, anchor texts, and other incredibly relevant information. This will greatly help you see how your website is faring alongside your competitors, and allow you to easily make some changes to increase sales. You can delete any sites that have a low DA score, as it may potentially hurt your Google rankings, enabling your website to remain competitive.
2. Identify problems
Next, you have to start identifying problems on your website and fix these issues. Some common problems that can greatly affect your site traffic are site errors and website speed, which can easily deter potential customers away from your site.
Site Errors
There are a host of websites online that offer free troubleshoot services to help you identify website errors, redirects, duplicate pages, missing headings and many more, by doing a thorough check on your links, images, script, apps, and CSS from an SEO perspective. Some of the more detrimental problems that you’d want to fix are redirecting any 404 to legitimate content, switching 302 redirects to 301 redirects, and getting rid of duplicate content pages, as well as meta titles and descriptions. Ensuring that your website is free of bugs and errors will definitely increase viewerships, and reduce the number of click-aways.
Website Speed
The speed of your website is another significant problem that you’d want to address right away, as a mere two seconds of loading time may leave potential customers feeling impatient and frustrated, resulting in them closing the browser and clicking onto a possible competitor’s website instantly. As such, there are numerous websites at your disposal that offer tools for you to test the speed of your site, thereby enabling you to increase your site speed as soon as possible.
On-Page Optimization
While off-page SEO is essential, on-page optimization is just as important as it contains the actual content that you want your customers to consume. It includes the different actions that you can take on your website to help improve your site ranking and the overall customer experience. Some of the more important aspects of this are keyword optimization and site structure that we will cover, though there are other equally important components like internal linking, usability, customer reviews, and many more.
Keyword Optimization
In order to ensure that your keywords are optimized, it is wise to include the relevant keywords in certain strategic locations, like the page title, headers, subheaders, paragraphs, product descriptions, image file names, image alt tags, meta titles, meta descriptions and even in the URLs. These strategic spots will help your customers navigate through your website easily, and boost your viewership in terms of SEO. One of the underrated tips is to keep your URLs comprehensive and easily readable. It should not contain a bunch of numerics and words that sound gibberish to the readers.
Site Structure
The structure of your site is important, as it helps your readers to be able to comprehend the content better and navigate the information easily. Making a poorly-designed website that has content all over the place and a non-user-friendly interface will indeed cause a fall in CTR. As such, proper and thorough planning of your site will help increase the usability of the site, and also enable future product expansions to be so much easier.
Therefore, we recommend creating a “flat architecture” for your website, which allows the minimum number of clicks for your customers to reach the home page to your product page. After this, you should use the consolidated keyword list that you did at the beginning and base your architecture on certain target words, so that it allows them to take a logical path from your home page to the product page. Doing this will help dramatically increase your conversion rates since they are not expected to go through a chunk of irrelevant links in order to reach the check out page.
Conclusion
Though these are some simple tricks and hacks to improve your SEO, there are many other things that you can do to further improve it. Search engine optimization is not just a simple one-time obligation that you do before calling it a day — it always requires you to continue to update your website and the optimization behind it, ensuring that your customers are able to navigate through your website easily and hassle-free. Constantly doing this will not only increase viewership ratings, but it will also result in higher conversion and sales rates, pushing you nearer to your sales target.