Ecommerce SEO Best Practices for Online Stores (11 Tips)

Ecommerce SEO Best Practices for Online Stores

eCommerce SEO

Are you excited about selling products online? Do you want to get more traffic and sales to your eCommerce website? If so, make sure people can find you when they search for similar items like yours.

There’s no point in having a website with the best products and offers if people cannot find them while searching. And this isn’t possible until or unless your site ranks in search engines.

The higher you rank, the better you get traffic and further ROI. Ecommerce SEO is one of the best ways to improve your customer base and boost sales. You must follow the ecommerce SEO best practices to achieve higher rankings on SERP.

Related:8 AI-Powered eCommerce SEO Strategies to Boost Sales

What is eCommerce SEO?

Ecommerce SEO

eCommerce SEO services is the method to optimize a website as per search engine guidelines. You must follow their guidelines to rank higher and appear more frequently in search results like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This involves tactics like:

  • Creating keyword-rich content
  • Designing a user-friendly website
  • Optimizing page titles and URLs

It’s important because online competition is fierce, and many eCommerce stores grow daily.

11 eCommerce SEO Best Practices

Use Effective Keywords

Make the product information on your site friendly to buyers and search engines. Check that the measurements, sizes, colors, prices, and other information can be easily found, read, and understood.

Effective Keywords

Providing standard, metric, or both measurements for websites with visitors from other regions is important. And make sure products are accurate in color and size. It is good to display the product pricing on the site.

If you don’t, shoppers may like to leave the site right away. Though it does not directly impact SEO, this will cause higher bounce rates. The bounce rate is the percentage of single-engagement visits to your site. Google Analytics tracks the number of people who visit your page and leave without viewing other pages on your site.

As a rule of thumb,

  • A bounce rate of between 26% and 40% is excellent.
  • 41% to 55% is roughly average.
  • 56% to 70% is higher than average.

The bounce rate may not cause an alarm, depending on the website. It is good to keep product information up-to-date.

Also Read: How To Do Keyword Research For An ECommerce Website?

Design for Consumers

While designing your site, keep consumers in mind. Despite your desired products and coolest offers, a shopper will leave your site if navigation or searching for products is complex. This will increase the bounce rate. And if search engines detect your site to have a very high bounce rate, it will drop your ranking.

So, your website design is a crucial element. Make sure the site is easy to navigate. It is good to add sensible navigation options or sensible menus that tell visitors what they will see after clicking a link.

Use images sparingly because a long load time affects SEO, as a more intolerant person may hit the back button. So, ensure your images are optimized and the site loads fast.

If your e-commerce website is designed well, you can reduce bounce rates and encourage users to browse a few more products, even if they do not immediately find what they want.

Keep URL Structure Clean

Good URLs give users and search engines an equally good user experience. In fact, they provide site visitors and search engines with a preview of what the page is about.

URLs can have information like product name, category name, and actions like oblique (/) or dash (-).

URL Structure

Best Practices for SEO-friendly URL Structure.

  • Short
  • Simple
  • Readable
  • Cluttered-free
  • Understandable
  • Easy to remember

Which of the below URLs is easier and more readable?

  • https://www.ecommerce.com/women/clothes
  • https://www.ecommerce.com/women{34}ands#@

Apparently, the first one.

Also, avoid using ‘Stop Words’ like “a,” “and,” “the,” and “of.”

Before creating a URL structure, find keywords to add because Google scans the URL to ensure where that page should rank in SERPs. It is good for user experience as well as eCommerce SEO.

Use Alt Text in Images

Also known as alt descriptions, alt tags, or alternative texts, alt text is a written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen due to broken links or other reasons. One of the eCommerce SEO best practices, alt text, is a way to use primary keywords on your site.

Image Alt Tag

It is also important because when search engines crawl a website, it is unaware of images or cannot figure out why images are on a specific page. The alt text allows search engines to understand what a particular image is about and why it appears on this page.

Alt text also helps you describe your image in a way that an individual who can’t see it at all will understand. Why? Because alt text is also used by screen readers to “read” images for those who are visually impaired.

No need to add alt text on images that cannot be displayed. For example, displaying a product image in Flash.

Display Customer Reviews

Do you know customer reviews can boost conversions on your product pages? In today’s digital world, consumers constantly look for insights into which brands they can trust before they buy anything.

Around 95% of customers read reviews before purchasing, whereas 8% of consumers use reviews to uncover new local businesses. So, display customer reviews on your eCommerce site and let customers speak their minds. This is among SEO Best Practices.

The good thing is that customers naturally use important keywords or their synonyms or long-tail keywords in their reviews. This helps search engine ranking or sends the right signal to search engines.

Fix Broken Links

Broken links are confusing for both your audiences as well as search engines. Needless to say, links enable Google to understand your site structure and trust that you’re conveying valid information. So, avoid broken links on the site.

broken-links

However, manually monitoring all links on thousands of pages can be difficult and time-consuming. So, use tools such as Broken Link Checker, Ahrefs, or Screaming Frog. If you make any changes to the URL of a page, set up a 301 redirect to tell search engines that the link has been updated.

Focus On humans rather than Search Engines.

You may likely find that the SEO Checklist here all possess one thing in common: they focus on real people.  Search engines aim to provide the best possible results for searchers. Therefore, if you invest time in understanding your potential customers and focusing on their requirements to offer a great experience, you’ll be on your way to excellent eCommerce SEO practices.

In a nutshell, to rank higher, get more traffic and sales to your eCommerce website:

  • Find and use effective keywords
  • Write sharp product descriptions
  • Avoid duplicate content
  • Use keywords in the anchor text
  • Make your URL structure easy for search engines to crawl
  • Use alt text for your images
  • Avoid broken links
  • Allow customer reviews

We hope you liked our article on eCommerce SEO best practices.

Also Read: 

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