Perfect Ecommerce SEO Checklist for Online Stores

If your business growth has stagnated and sales are not skyrocketing, check your eCommerce SEO strategy. Since SEO for retail businesses can be incredibly complex, checking all your marketing techniques and strategies will help ensure you are moving in the right direction. Maybe you need a team of SEO specialists to identify and fix issues.

An eCommerce SEO checklist is a list of proven methods to optimize your website and let it perform better on the search engine results page. The goal is to skip any missteps and add important elements to help Google reward your site in the rankings.

Here’s the best eCommerce SEO checklist for your online store.

Set Up Online Tools

The checklist for eCommerce SEO should begin with a basic setup of must-use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and more.

Check Google Analytics

One of the top, most powerful tools, Google Analytics, helps you monitor and analyze traffic on your website. Make sure you have set up a Google Analytics account. It will give you a lot of information about:

• Who is visiting your site?
• What they are looking for?
• How they are getting to your site?

Check Google Search Console

Search Console allows you to monitor easily and sometimes resolve server errors, site load issues, and security issues. It provides you with valuable insights into your site’s performance. Use this tool to maintain diverse data to grow your site’s organic visibility and traffic.

Check Bing Webmaster Tools

Google may dominate the search market, but Bing still shares a fair portion. Setup: Bring Webmaster tools to upload and submit your sitemap, view your biweekly SEO Report, and use the SEO Analyzer tool to check your site.

SEMRush

User Experience (UX)

Great UX raises the possibility of successful accomplishment of tasks by searchers. Here’s what you need to check to ensure a great user experience.

• Check Mobile-Friendliness: Check the mobile-friendliness of your site with Google’s test to ensure how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device.
• Check HTTPS and Security Seals: Review your SSL certificate yearly to ensure your store’s checkout process is secure. This builds trust with users and is good for SEO purposes.
• Check Reviews & Ratings: Encourage shoppers to write reviews about your products and give ratings. Show off these reviews and ratings on your site. Google adds more weight to more insightful reviews.
• Check Search Functionality: Don’t let users spend more time than needed when browsing through your product pages. Make their experience infinitely better with a user-friendly website and easy-to-navigate design. Also, analyze their search terms to improve your eCommerce SEO keyword strategy.
• Check Information Pages: The information page contains shipping times or returns policy information. Users will likely see additional information related to your products.
• Check Payment Options: Check if you have integrated any payment gateways into your site. Popular payment gateways are Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, and Amazon Payment. Also, consider payment methods such as credit or debit cards, online payments, cash, etc.
• Check an HTML Sitemap: Your eCommerce site contains vast content that can be confusing. So, create a user-facing HTML sitemap to help visitors quickly find what they want. Ensure your pages have a maximum of three navigation clicks.
• Check Breadcrumbs: The breadcrumb is another great asset for improving site navigation and user experience. Ensure you have added Breadcrumb Markup to see the page’s position in the site hierarchy and help users understand and explore your site effectively.

Website Speed

Test your website speed using tools like Google’s Page Speed Tool. Or, use the Test Your Mobile Speed Tool to get a broader look at the website speed on mobile devices.

• Check GZip Compression: Check if you have enabled GZip compression to reduce the size of the files being transferred and make your page load faster.
• Check HTML, CSS, and Javascript: Minify unused or even white space within your HTML, CSS, or Javascript to speed up the website.
• Check third-party resources: Keep them to a minimum as they add many unnecessary scripts to the user’s browser. Useless scripts lead to slowing down your page speed.
• Check image size: Check the size of product images. Resize and compress them. Optimize them for your website to improve page load time and user satisfaction.
• Check ALT Tags: Use ALT tags to add a description to images. This helps search engines understand what these images are about.

Crawling and Indexing

Take a look at the checklists for crawling and indexing.

• Check Product Variations: The structure of color and size variations of your products can be critical to the best eCommerce SEO service. You need to get this right as well as prevent duplicate content.
• Check Robots.txt File: Have the robots.txt file in place. To check this.

You can find your site’s robots.txt file at https://www.example.com/robots.txt.

• Check Discontinued Products: Check whether your online store has discontinued products. If any, redirect their URL to a relevant product URL. The best bet is to redirect to the relevant category page.

Category Pages

Category pages are among the most powerful assets of your online store website. Find out what you need to check to improve category page performance.

• Check Priority Keywords: Check if keywords are available on your category page. These pages need higher-volume keywords as they require more chances of ranking.
• Check Introductory Content: Treat ecommerce category pages like the landing pages and create supporting content. Ensure the content highlights specific sales or links to specific informational content.
• Check Filters: Colors, sizes, ages, price ranges, and more should be ‘filters’ on your category pages or your main shopping page.

E-commerce Product Pages

Product pages are essential to an optimized eCommerce site.

• Check Related Products: Check products or items related to your users’ search. Display them on the site until your user converts. It’s excellent for UX and helps to get people browsing around your site.
• Check Videos: Use product videos on your site to keep users longer on the page and get the vital message across faster. This also demonstrates value to search engines.
• Check Product Images: Check product images to ensure they are of high resolution and have accurate color. Improve the quality of your product photos. It highlights your products and packaging as well as helps spotlight your brand.
• Check Product Descriptions: Check product descriptions and ensure they are unique and meaningful. Avoid copying and pasting product information from the manufacturer’s website.

Click here to learn about Effective Strategies For E-commerce Product Page SEO.

On-Page Optimization

• Check Page Titles: Check the uniqueness of page titles and their target keyword. Search engines will fail to understand which page to rank if it’s not unique.
• Check Meta Descriptions: Create unique, informative, and appealing meta descriptions by using the main keywords in them. The character limit ranges between 155 and 160. It will be great for eCommerce SEO.
• Check Internal Linking: Ideally, add links from your home page to your category pages. Then, from your category pages to your product pages. This will give your poor-performing pages an SEO boost.
• Check Permalinks/URLs: Be descriptive and use your target keyword while adding your slug. Keep it short and unique, and avoid using underscores and words like “and,” ‘if,’ ‘to,’ etc.

Wrap-Up

SEO is a continual process. Since organic search drives 53.3% of all web traffic, getting your online store as high up in search engine results is very important.

While satisfactory SEO service in USA results for your online store may be challenging and take some time, it’s very important to keep optimizing your pages to hit page one of Google and avoid penalties.

Now that you have a complete checklist to optimize your site for ranking, it’s your turn to take the perfect eCommerce SEO checklist for your online store. This will help you get your site on top of the result pages soon, but sure.