To add to this, the Coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the growth of eCommerce during 2020 – a trend that’s here to stay. With more people shopping online each year, there’s never been a better time to invest in eCommerce SEO for your business.
eCommerce SEO is the process of optimising your online store for greater visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). A well-optimised eCommerce site that ranks high in SERPs will win more traffic when potential customers search for products or services to buy.
If you’re looking to get more targeted traffic (and customers) from search, contact us today for a free consultation.
At Robot-TXT we make use of a results-driven, cyclical “flywheel methodology” that is comprises of three phases:
1. Discover – we start off by guiding you through an onboarding process where we look at what we do and don’t know about your business. This could be competitors, keyword performance, content gaps and more. Using these insights, together with the data gathered through an SEO Site Audit, we form an SEO strategy that’s tailored for your eCommerce site.
2. Optimise – we implement the list of tasks defined by the SEO strategy. Our eCommerce SEO specialists make a range of technical and user-orientated updates to your online store to ensure your products can be easily found in organic search results by the people who are most likely to buy them.
3. Analyse – measurement and reporting give us a 360-degree view of your eCommerce site’s SEO performance. We measure improvements and identify areas that still need attention, which takes us back to the Discovery phase.
You might have a beautiful user-friendly online store in which you’ve invested a lot of time and money. But if it doesn’t appear in the SERPs, you lose critical access to qualified and interested eCommerce customers.
If you only optimise your website for visitors, without considering search engines, you are doing your company a disservice. SEO for eCommerce addresses the first hurdle to acquiring new business online: getting potential customers to your site to view your offers.
To put things into perspective, here are some statistics that highlight the importance of eCommerce SEO:
About half (48%) of more than 14,000 online shoppers surveyed by Wunderman Thompson Commerce start their purchase journeys on search engines.
In 2019, eCommerce sales accounted for 14.1% of all retail sales worldwide. This figure is expected to reach 22% in 2023.
Apart from driving more qualified traffic, optimising your online store to be found in organic search results can also save you money in the long run. The best part about organic traffic is that every site visitor is free, and every free session is a potential sale.
Relying only on paid search to get traffic can become hugely expensive over time, which is why including SEO in your online store’s digital marketing strategy is crucial in achieving the best long-term results.
What We Do to Enhance Your eCommerce SEO
Unlike Google Ads, increasing your visibility organically isn’t as simple as increasing your advertising budget. eCommerce SEO is complex with many factors that need to be taken into account: from metadata and internal link- and navigational structure, to writing unique, keyword-rich product descriptions with beautiful, eye-catching photography and having plenty of reviews.
Important elements when optimising your online store for organic search:
- SEO Site Audit
We analyse how well your web presence relates to best practices – this is the first step in creating an SEO plan that will have measurable results in improving your eCommerce rankings in search engines.
The site audit should accomplish three main things:
• Provide an overall picture of the quality and current standing of your site.
• Make it easy to create a list of tasks that need to be done.
• Ensure we’re getting the best SEO results with the least effort. - SEO Keyword Research
This crucial step ensures that your target keywords are fairly easy to rank for, have decent search volume and have high conversion rates. When selecting keywords we also factor in buyer intent (aka “commercial intent”) – this is important for keyword relevance.
Without keyword research you are running the danger of:
• Targeting keywords that are too difficult to rank for, and you won’t make it to page one.
• Ranking for keywords that don’t get enough traffic or don’t lead to conversions. - eCommerce site architecture
This is how your site navigation is set up with regards to category pages and product pages.
There are two “golden rules” to eCommerce site structure:
• Develop a shallow site architecture. No page should take more than three clicks to get to. Limiting architecture depth increases the value that Google assigns to each page.
• Use the right keywords to create highly relevant page URLs and subdirectories. - On-page SEO
Your category pages are arguably the most important pages to rank as they give your visitors access to all your products in that category. To properly optimise these pages, target keywords need to be in the following places:
• URL
• The title tag (H1)
• Body copy
• Image ATL text
• Metadata
On-page SEO for eCommerce sites also involves optimising product pages, which, among other elements, include unique, keyword-rich, long-form content and product reviews. - Technical SEO
This not only covers website and server optimisations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively. Technical SEO also includes things like site speed, Google Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, broken links and making sure only one version of your domain is indexed.
- Schematic markup
This is one of the most effective tools for SEO eCommerce. Schematic markup (or structured data) is little snippets of code that improve the way pages are displayed in search results. This could include rich features such as star ratings or price tags. These visually pleasing additions provide context to potential customers and can increase your click-through rate.
- Local SEO
If you have a physical store as well as an eCommerce presence, creating local pages can drive substantial eCommerce SEO improvements. This is especially powerful when a user geographically near your store searches for products or services that you offer.
Google’s local SEO feature called Google My Business allows you to display information such as your business hours, directions to your location and any offers or events you might have coming up.
eCommerce SEO is complex and it’s impossible for one person to do everything. If you need a team to tackle your online store’s SEO from all angles, we invite you to contact us for a free consultation to discuss your eCommerce SEO opportunities. Our team of specialists will help you drive free, recurring, high-converting traffic.