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eCommerce SEO: Best Practices in 2021

The first step to boosting your eCommerce site's performance is investing your time and effort in on-page SEO by an expert agency like Bliss Drive. However, by now, your competitors probably know that they have a solid eCommerce website SEO strategy as well. What can you do to stay on top?

Go the extra mile to drive your eCommerce sales up by making sure you apply the right SEO strategies by result driven agency like Bliss Drive for your website. This way, you can rest assured that you'll reap the fruits of your investment and bring your business to greater heights.

To start, let’s take a look at nine of the eCommerce search best practices and how you can apply them to your eCommerce business:

  • Track Your Chosen Keywords   
  • Update Your Competitor Research     
  • Invest in Homepage SEO    
  • Reinforce Site Architecture    
  • Grow Your Backlinks      
  • Create Responsive Design   
  • Engage In Conversion Rate Optimization   
  • Add FAQs and Customer Reviews   
  • Improve Page Loading Speeds  

Ready to take a deeper look? Let’s start!

Track Your Chosen Keywords 

A huge part of SEO success relies on content, and to improve your content, you should use the right keywords. Keywords are valuable in bringing the right people in, so they must be an essential part of your eCommerce SEO checklist.

Keyword tracking means monitoring your website’s position on specific keywords. The goal is to be at the first position, but ranks fluctuate every once in a while, and tracking will help you take action so you can stay at the top spot.

For this process, you can utilize tools like the following:

  • Ahrefs - Ahrefs offers a user-friendly tool that allows you a complete view of keyword movements, gives you keyword alerts, and shows competitive intelligence.
  • Google Search Console (GSC) - GSC is a free-to-use tool that offers true and accurate rankings, click-through rates, and average positions.
  • SEMrush - SEMrush is a famous tool for keyword research, but its features extend to tracking, including average traffic, visibility, rankings, and similar factors.

Update Your Competitor Research

If you’re improving your eCommerce website SEO and you feel at a loss on where to start, looking at your competitors can give you a grasp of what has been working for your target audience.

After all, if your leading competitors are ranking high and performing well, you know they have done their jobs to achieve such success. For instance, you can use SEMrush to take a peek at what keywords are ranking high for both organic and paid searches.

You can also visit their site for yourself and see how their landing pages, location pages, or service pages are presented.

If you’ve done this before, make it a point to do it every once in a while, perhaps, once in a quarter. After all, the digital landscape moves so quickly, so you have to know which competitors are entering, staying, and excelling in the game.

Invest in Homepage SEO

Once a person clicks on your site, the first thing they’ll be sent to is your homepage. In these few crucial seconds, you have to make an impact that won’t lead them to click out. Therefore, a significant chunk of your marketing time and budget must follow the eCommerce homepage best practices.

In particular, you should focus on these parts:

  • Title Tag - Write your Title tag within 70 characters, including your business name and the main keyword. Still, make sure that it will appeal to site visitors and won’t be too awkward.
  • Meta Description - Though it is not as important as keywords, the meta description is something people will readily see when they search for your website. Within 160 characters, you’ll describe what your business is about and encourage your target audience to visit.
  • Content - Finally, you must invest in having high-quality content for your homepage. Your site visitors must get to know you, but they must not feel an information overload. Focus on being clear and concise while highlighting your unique selling point.

Reinforce Site Architecture 

If you want an optimized website, make sure you reinforce a solid site architecture. You must connect all of your pages with each other, and you have to make sure that the hierarchy of navigation for all your web pages is distinct and done right.

As search engines crawl through your site, they will see how easy it is to follow through with different content and how deep getting to answers will be. Generally, the rule is that you should reach a product or service within three clicks. Anything beyond that is detrimental to your eCommerce SEO performance.

Additionally, internal linking can also help you show which pages relate to one another. If done right, the value you provide your customers will encourage them to explore more and stay longer on your site.

Grow Your Backlinks

Do you want to organically boost traffic and improve your rankings on Google? Consider eCommerce website SEO. Backlinks play an essential role in doing so, as having other websites link back to your site shows that you provide value.

One thing you can do as an eCommerce SEO strategy is to look at the referral sources of your website and review the type of content they prefer. With this in mind, you can create opportunities and design content that will get you a backlink.

Another thing you can do is create high-quality content that will provide value even to knowledgeable people and experts in the industry. For instance, you can design skyscraper content, which are extensive guides that cover all possible aspects of a topic.

For best results, partner it with valuable infographics. Images with data, charts, and graphics that usually break concepts into simple and easy-to-understand lines can attract hundreds of backlinks.

Create Responsive Design 

These days, everyone does everything on their mobile phones, especially shopping for products, booking services, and consumer research. Because of it, Google is also favoring websites that invest in a mobile responsive design as an eCommerce website SEO strategy.

Responsive design is an approach where your pages have flexibility and function well, whether you view them through your desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. This method uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which means that the different style properties like colors, resolution, orientation and screen size will work on any device.

If you take time on responsive design for eCommerce search engine optimization, you ensure that only one thing will be seen by all of your site visitors, avoiding the possibility of losing a sale just because your customers cannot access parts or pages.

Engage In Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of understanding what drives, stops, and persuades your site users to do favorable actions. It looks at different percentages and averages, but the overall goal is to deliver the best user experience for your customers.

There are numerous ways you can work on improving your conversion rates, but some of the  best practices are:

  • Using fewer fields on your forms
  • Using urgency, like limited time only promos, to drive sales
  • Using solid colors for Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons
  • Displaying customer testimonials
  • Including text-based CTA aside from using banners
  • Adding lead flow pop-ups on your blog posts
  • Using live chat software to offer real-time support

Add FAQs and Customer Reviews

Another essential eCommerce SEO best practice is making sure your product pages are optimized. Though there are many things you can do, here are two main things to start with: FAQs and customer reviews.

While they’re deciding whether to make a purchase, your customers may have questions in their minds. If you don’t have it on the page, they might look for it elsewhere and find another seller that offers the same product. Eliminate the need for thinking and debating by adding a Frequently Asked Questions section.

Aside from having this in product pages, consider adding a general FAQ page on your site. In here, place your answers about shipping, return policies, data privacy, and site security. Doing so will increase the confidence of your buyer towards doing business with you.

Additionally, you should highlight the reviews of past customers on your product page. Though they can be pretty simple, seeing actual experiences of other people can boost customer confidence. Don’t be afraid of bad reviews; you can’t please everyone. Take it instead as an opportunity to improve.

Improve Page Loading Speeds  

Finally, you should improve your site’s page loading speeds, both for desktop and mobile usage. Simply put, Google will give you a higher rank if your page loads faster. Plus, prospect customers can quickly click out if it takes them more than five seconds before seeing all the elements on your site.

For optimization, you should review all the unnecessary elements placed on your site. For instance, make sure you compress site images, as large images can take longer to load. You should also remove add-ons and plug-ins that you don’t really use for your eCommerce site.

Frequently Asked Questions About eCommerce SEO

Is SEO important for eCommerce? 

eCommerce businesses of every size need SEO. This is because a successful SEO strategy can increase your site’s organic search traffic while also increasing your ranking within search engines. SEO is also about anticipating new search trends and staying agile, which will help your business stay competitive. 

What is SEO in digital marketing?

SEO is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. Digital marketing focuses on a gamut of issues such as content creation and online advertising, while SEO focuses specifically on increasing your website’s search rankings.    

Is SEO hard to learn? 

Learning SEO is not particularly difficult, given the number of available guides and resources you have online. At the end of the day, SEO is about understanding how search engine results can best cater to human readers; if anything, the difficult part is keeping up with search algorithm updates and all the different SEO tools. 

Can I pay Google to rank higher?  

No, you cannot pay Google to rank higher on their search results.  

How can I make my backlinks stronger? 

Getting high-quality backlinks is essential in improving your site’s authority. To do so, you’ll want to publish thorough industry guides, build authority research pages, and rely on content strategies that are known to generate links. 

Final Thoughts

Every eCommerce business owner wants to increase their traffic and improve their conversions. That’s valuable for the business, but it’s better to start with a solid foundation. Growing your eCommerce site with SEO will lead to success, especially if you follow through with these best practices. 

If you need support on choosing which eCommerce website best practices to try, book a discovery call with Bliss Drive today!

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