Online shopping has taken the world by storm – there is not a single person who has not bought something or the other through online shopping platforms. This development has brought about a revolution in the way we view eCommerce businesses and how they operate. This digital shift in shopping has led to higher competition in the market, where every brand is toiling to be seen.
In such a scenario, businesses need to implement expert SEO services for eCommerce that can make their brand stand out and earn credibility. Employing effective strategies for search engine optimization can help you improve the visibility of your brand online, navigate more online traffic to your website, and ultimately drive more revenue.
After all, studies have shown that websites ranked number one receive an average click-through rate of 27.6%, which is more than double the rate for the number two spot and 10x for the number ten spot.
In this blog, we will discuss the importance of SEO for eCommerce businesses and how it can drive more sales, making it the ultimate breakthrough for your brand in a crowded market.
Why is SEO Important for an eCommerce Business?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO services in India make the roadmap to follow to ensure your brand’s visibility across the search engines. It focuses on improving your content’s quality to garner better visibility on the SERPs, in turn enabling your brand to fetch more organic traffic and thus, more sales.
SEO is not a new concept – it has been around for ages. A number of businesses have already implemented it to get more traffic and revenue. Even so, many brands are still facing barriers to its implementation in the right manner. This makes the need for SEO all the more necessary – in a saturated market where eCommerce companies are struggling to make their mark, effective SEO strategies can make your brand outshine the rest.
To do so, it is critical to efficiently leverage the power of SEO. In a growing market such as eCommerce, it becomes crucial to navigate all challenges to rise above the market overload. This is because SEO is not just building a website – it is the optimization of a number of components of your website to ensure it reaches your audience, prompting them to purchase your products and get your business revenue. You can employ the services of an eCommerce SEO company to drive more sales through SEO.
How Can SEO Drive More Sales?
Let’s discuss in depth how employing the right and effective search engine optimization services can help your business earn better revenue.
1. Start with the Right Platform
If you’re running your site from an eCommerce platform, whether it’s self-hosted or fully hosted, know that it will make a huge difference in how well your site performs with search engines. Not all eCommerce sites are SEO friendly, and some don’t have the features search engines love, such as good performance, mobile-friendliness, good link structure, etc. That’s why the first thing you should do is check eCommerce platform reviews and see how they rank for SEO before you pick one.
A good eCommerce platform should allow you to optimize your navigation menu, page titles, and page URLs, for instance. It should also allow you to create your own meta descriptions as well. While meta descriptions won’t affect your rankings, they will have a direct influence on how many people will actually click through to your page once they see your results.
Other things you should be looking out for are custom image alt tags, canonical URLs, custom H1 headings and title tags, a good blogging platform, and automatic XML sitemaps just to name a few.
2. Comprehensive and User-friendly Website
Whether you are using a WordPress eCommerce theme or others, it is crucial that you have a website that is eye-pleasing, attractive, and comprehensive. The first impression does work in the online world and you need to ensure that you win the first impression by a huge margin. Ensure that the website is well-designed and does not have any errors or bugs. Also, update the products at regular intervals and notify the customers about them to increase traffic.
3. Go for Optimization of Product Pages
It is not a point of disagreement that the main aspect of any eCommerce website is its product page – this is where all your products are displayed, and potential customers can browse through these and make a decision based on them whether or not to go for a purchase. Product pages are, in simple words, an opportunity for an eCommerce business to interest potential buyers into making a purchase.
For this very reason, going for SEO services for eCommerce becomes pivotal to compel visitors into becoming customers. This can be done by optimizing the product pages with relevant keywords, descriptions that provide accurate and detailed information, and high-quality product pictures and videos. This can help ensure that every product page of your eCommerce website ranks on the result pages, thus enabling customers to find your products without hassle.
4. Create Snazzy Product Descriptions
If you are planning to simply add product descriptions distributed by manufacturers, you are headed straight for doom and will most likely be banned from every search engine. Google is getting increasingly more talented at kicking websites to the curb that are scraping content in its original form from other sources. To keep your eCommerce SEO in good standing and avoid scaring away customers with spam-like content, it is essential that you write unique, catchy descriptions for each of your products.
One of the best ways to enhance your search engine optimization is to compose original high-quality descriptive content that not only helps your customers choose their purchases wisely but also garners attention from Google. It is also smart to count the number of words that are used on a blank product page to estimate how much unique content you will need.
“Don’t make the description a vehicle for your keywords; let it flow naturally.”Alex Chapman, the Founder & SEO Director of SEO Partners.
5. Focus on Technical SEO
ECommerce websites are not like other straightforward websites – these have complex structures for product pages and categories. For such structures, technical SEO is fundamental in ensuring that search engines are able to crawl and index all these pages. This can directly affect the user experience.
The services of an eCommerce SEO company also include other important aspects of technical SEO such as improving the speed of your website. This is important because Google prioritizes websites that are faster and add to the user experience. In turn, the bounce rates of such websites also reduce and it positively impacts the performance of your eCommerce business, as users would spend more time browsing through your products.
Another important aspect of technical SEO is mobile responsiveness – as more and more people are using smartphones to browse and make purchases online, having a mobile-friendly website leads to higher conversion rates. Search engines also index the websites that are mobile-friendly first, ensuring better ranking for such websites.
Other than this, technical SEO ensures that your eCommerce website is well-structured and organized, ensuring ease for search engines in indexing the pages of your website. This increases visibility, ensures easy navigation, and can drive more sales. It also involves using structured data to ensure that your products are highlighted in the SERPs and have snippets that add value to your result. This can increase the CTR and thereby, sales.
An SEO company in India also fixes all broken links and errors in crawling, ensuring that all pages on your eCommerce website are functional. This adds to the user experience, improves your visibility online, and potentially drives sales. Along with this, such SEO companies also ensure that your URL structure is clean and descriptive, making it easier for the user to look for your products or services. All the factors in technical SEO add to the user experience and visibility of your website, thus indirectly generating revenue.
6. Ensure Personalization
It is no shocker that the audience likes personalization done for them. In fact, it is one of the most sure-shot ways to drive sales to your eCommerce business – you can send out personalized offers, give incentives, and more. This can ensure that potential customers are not annoyed by irrelevant pages time and again. Such personalization also keeps their interest sustained in your eCommerce business.
Getting SEO services for eCommerce can ensure prolonged attention as well as time spent on the website of the audience who has the potential to become a paying customer. As an eCommerce business, you can show them relevant product suggestions to urge their buying decision by helping them choose the right product for themselves. You can also show them SEO-optimized content that is specific to their queries, thus saving them time and making navigation easy for them. This can be done through on-page SEO for better rankings as well as conversion rates.
7. Go for On-page SEO
On-page SEO is another important aspect of SEO as a whole, and it can help you generate more revenue for your eCommerce business. This type of SEO includes the optimization of certain key components of your website such as the title tags, meta descriptions, URL structures, internal linking, as well as product images.
When it comes to title tags, an eCommerce SEO company ensures that every page has a relevant, unique, and self-explanatory title tag that consists of the primary keyword. Such clarity can be a catalyst in nudging the audience towards making a purchase. Similarly, having compelling meta-descriptions can influence the decision of the user to buy your product or not.
More such factors that can drive the user to take desired actions are internally linking the website in a way that makes navigation easier for the user, optimizing the product pictures by making use of alt text so that the search engines can interpret the context and content of your images, and using short, clear URLs that include the primary keyword.
8. Take Off-page SEO Efforts
Another powerful SEO technique in eCommerce businesses to get more sales is off-page SEO. This involves improving the authority and visibility of your website online. For the same, you can go for building good-quality backlinks from reputable websites, thus adding to the efforts of getting a better ranking on the result pages. This increases the probability of users coming across your website.
Other than that, under SEO services in India, you can also work on getting social media engagement by sharing relevant content with your audience that can drive them to your eCommerce website. Because everyone uses social media these days, it is the easiest avenue to get a loyal audience.
Along with this, you can also go for writing blogs in your niche that address the concerns and queries of your audience and also provide the reader with relevant information. Include links to your products and you can get a substantial amount of customers who are genuinely interested in your products. You can also try to get more positive reviews on Google Business that can urge customers to trust you and buy your products.
All these off-page SEO efforts can help boost the traffic on your eCommerce website, improve its visibility significantly, and contribute to driving more and more sales to your business with the help of an eCommerce SEO company.
Nethority Technologies is a cutting-edge digital marketing company offering expert services in eCommerce, search engine optimization, social media, paid ads, branding, and more. With a result-oriented approach and quality services, we set out to help our clients achieve their business goals.
9. Research the Most Effective Keywords
As with everything else in life, investing time in doing your homework and researching the most effective keywords for your web pages will greatly enhance your chance for success. When it comes to optimizing your website for eCommerce SEO, it is essential that you do some in-depth keyword research in Google’s free AdWords tool to discover the key phrases that will heighten your site’s visibility in search results.
For having the highest conversion rate possible, be sure to choose specific long-tail keywords that aren’t too general so that you can effectively compete for them in Google. Look for words or phrases with high local monthly searches that are directly related to your company. As a general rule of thumb, it is wise to consider relevancy, search volume, and ranking difficulty when choosing your keywords to ensure they are neither too broad nor too competitive.
10. Include Keywords Strategically in Anchor Text
Naturally incorporating relevant keywords in a variety of anchor text on links leading to specific products or services on your website can tremendously boost your eCommerce SEO for improved visibility in Google search results. Instead of falling back on the ever-popular “click here” or “check this out,” focus on including keyword-rich anchor text that will appeal to the search engines as well as your potential customers.
That being said, it is important that you avoid using the same anchor text throughout your website and committing keyword cannibalism. When you use the same keywords on multiple pages of your site, you will confuse Google, compete for rankings with yourself, and be penalized with weaker traffic. To make certain you are not doubling exact keywords, you may want to create a spreadsheet with all relevant keywords and up your variety.
11. Make Proper Use of Product Images
eCommerce websites rely heavily on images and not optimizing your images for image searches is a huge mistake that could cause you tons of organic traffic. Google image searches are much more powerful than many people might think, so make sure that the alt tags on your images are not only descriptive but contain the product’s main keywords as well.
Humans are naturally visual creatures, so prospective customers will want to see pictures of what they are considering forking over their hard-earned money for. It is particularly critical for eCommerce companies to utilize the highest quality images to persuade consumers to take a leap of faith and make a purchase. Further, properly optimizing these photographs can also bring about a valuable opportunity for you to boost your site’s ranking in Google.
Since the search engine spiders crawling through your website don’t have the brainpower to instantly recognize images like the human eye, you will need to optimize them using alt text with keywords. Make sure that each tag you create for each image is as relevant as possible so that the alt text associated with each image is unique. Another helpful hint is to make the image file size as small as possible without sacrificing quality to guarantee fast page load times.
12. Build Strong URL Structures
For an eCommerce website with a large number of products and descriptions, you should never underestimate the power of having a good URL structure. When your site is well-organized with proper URL structures, Google will have a much easier time crawling through your content and understanding your web pages to get indexed properly in search results. All of your website’s URLs should be unique and use the name of the product right in the address with keywords.
Another equally important benefit of building strong URL structures is enhancing the overall usability of your website so that customers have a more pleasant experience searching through your products or services. Whenever customers are able to easily find what they are looking for in your well-designed website architecture, you will have the highest chance of converting clicks into sales and boosting your site’s ranking.
13. Keep Track of Your Website’s Traffic
All business owners have the goal of seeing a dramatic climb in the amount of foot traffic making its way onto their websites, but many remain unaware of the actual numbers. It is highly recommended that you make good use of Google Analytics to keep track of your website’s traffic frequently to find out where your customers are coming from and how your SEO marketing efforts are working.
Also, it is important that you look beyond the traffic statistics to actually identify how many of your site’s visitors are actually opening their wallets to make a purchase. When you are more aware of your profit increases, you will have the best chances of identifying exactly where your site is going wrong, improving your overall eCommerce SEO strategy, and generating more paying customers.
14. Ask for Honest Customer Reviews
Did you know that around 89% of online buyers look through product reviews before making a decision on their purchase? This means that you can easily enhance your company’s eCommerce conversion rate by adding real customer reviews for each of your products. To ask for more customer reviews for your online store, you can use a reward-based system for discounts or send a quick email to customers after they receive the product.
In addition to enhancing your sales, honest customer reviews also positively impact your search engine optimization. Since reviews create fresh content and keep the website active frequently, it will be easier for your website to reach the top of Google’s search results. Simple tricks like this are what really help to improve your overall eCommerce SEO!
As a matter of fact, it has been estimated that customer reviews could increase sales by as much as 18%, so make sure that you make it easy for your customers to leave reviews if you want to increase shopper trust.
15. Deal with Out-of-stock Items Properly
It is not a good sign that your customers are visiting your website and returning empty hands as they don’t find what they are looking for. What to do when you have some products that are not available or simply are out-of-stock.
If products are not available for a short period, you don’t need to do anything. If you redirect the user, there are chances that he will lose interest. Instead of it, you can offer some alternative items that he might be interested in.
Showing identical items with different brands can be a solution too. Also, you can inform the users upfront and you can maintain loyalty.
16. Expired/Obsolete Items
If you don’t address these expired or obsolete items in a good manner, your website’s SERP rank will go down rapidly as a user who visited the website and found nothing, will never come back to your website. Furthermore, it will also increase your bounce rate too.
One best alternative is to go for a 301 redirect with the new items. It will also help Google to understand which pages to rank and which do not. Also, by redirecting the parent category, users may get a chance to look for products identical to what they are looking for. Deleting the page is not a good solution as it will be bad for the SEO point of view.
17. Assist Your Customers Immediately
Research shows that if a user gets answers to their queries or questions, they will surely return to you in the future. There are many ways you can do that. One of the most impressive ways you can do so is to add the live chat facility on the website. It will surely help customers to make superior buying decisions.
18. Affiliate Sale
Although at first, it sounds crazy that joining an affiliate program can help to rank high on SERP. But it always helps. Your affiliate partners actually can create massive buzz on your products. They also share your products on their website and social profiles. This can help you to increase the brand authority of your site. An increase in your website authority will surely help your Google ranking.
“As an eCommerce store owner, you just can’t ignore the importance of social media and influencer marketing. It’s all about creating awareness of your products. Your affiliate partners are your real friend who helps you to promote your product to a large audience. This not only can help you to get new customers but also will increase the authenticity of your brand.”Mr. Vikram Rathod, the digital marketing manager at Couponobox.com.
19. Get to Blogging
Your blog will be another great way to add fresh content to your website. It’s also a great way to increase conversion rates by building trust with your customers. You could write blogs related to your products, announce product launches, give tips on how to use your products, or just general articles on current trends for instance. The more content you publish, the better, so make sure that you keep your blog fresh and filled with relevant content.
Concluding Thoughts
ECommerce business is booming and with ethical and excellent SEO campaigns, you can unquestionably become the market leader in the business you conduct.
To put it all in a nutshell, search engine optimization is a long-term effort that is guaranteed to get substantial traffic to your eCommerce website, ensure that the relevant audience comes across it and visits your website, and more importantly, drive sales to generate revenue that helps sustain your business.
To do so, you must employ the best SEO services for your eCommerce business that curate strategies for your success, attract relevant users to your site, and ultimately convert them into paying, loyal customers.
All these tips will allow you to improve your site’s performance with search engines, increase organic traffic coming to your site, and eventually convert this traffic into happy, buying customers.
Author Bio
We have written this article in association with Iliana D’souza, Veselina Dzhingarova, and Shane Barker.
Iliana D’souza works as an SEO and Content Marketing expert at Nethority Technologies. She is fond of reading and ensures to stay up-to-date with all tech trends. In her free time, she loves learning languages and spending time with her pets.
Veselina Dzhingarova has long experience in internet marketing and SEO. She is passionate about blogging to share her expertise. Veselina is a regular contributor to many online publishers. She is the co-founder of Blogforweb.com and others. You can get in touch with her on LinkedIn.
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant, named the #1 social media consultant in the nation by PROskore Power Rankings. He has expertise in business development, and online marketing and is an SEO specialist who has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and a number of A-list celebrities.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".