The success of your eCommerce website depends on a number of factors. You need to ensure you’ve got a strong website, a robust marketing campaign, and plenty of lead generation tools.
However, one aspect that many eCommerce website owners overlook is the SEO ranking of their website. If you haven’t heard the term, SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It refers to the practice of tailoring the content on your website to perform as well as possible in search results.
A strong SEO score will see that you rank higher in relevant searches, driving more organic (free) traffic to your website. This will ultimately lead to a higher volume of sales and save you money on your other marketing activity – for example, you won’t need to spend as much money on PPC ads if you’re getting high levels of organic traffic.
So, how can you optimize your eCommerce website’s performance in search?
Here are our top six tips to improve your website’s SEO.
Gone are the days when you could simply cram your website full of the right keywords and get results, regardless of how your content actually sounded. You need to strike the right balance between natural speech and a reasonable level of primary keywords.
Your keywords should be relevant to the search terms that you’d like your website to rank in when someone uses a search engine. Unless you’ve stumbled across a brand new product that no one else is selling, you will be competing against others for rankings.
This is why you need to be selective of the words you choose to target. Your website will have a domain authority score, and you should target words that have a similar difficulty score. This is will help you to get the best results.
Tools such as Google Keyword Planner can be very helpful in this respect.
Search engines aim to give people unique and useful information, and this is determined by a number of factors. One of the key factors is how often your eCommerce site is getting updated.
To do this, you can refresh any images or videos on a regular basis or start a blog. A blog will allow you to give more value to your customers, promote your products, and boost your SEO score.
The more valuable and informative that your website is seen to be, the better it will perform in search.
When your website becomes SSL certified, you will go from an http:// site to an https:// site, and receive the small lock icon in the search bar of a browser. This indicates to visitors and search engines that your site is both secure and protected.
A search engine will prioritise certain websites based on a number of factors, including how trustworthy they are. So, getting this certification will add further credibility in the eyes of search engines.
Furthermore, consumers won’t part with their money on a website they don’t trust. Having this certification will give your customers peace of mind to make a purchase from you.
Search engines, like your boss, reward performance. Websites with high traffic are perceived as useful and trustworthy in the eyes of search engines, which causes them to achieve better SEO.
There are a number of factors that play into this, such as your website’s loading time. If your eCommerce site takes a while to load, this will deter visitors and decrease your performance in search.
Having a poorly designed website that isn’t easy to navigate will have a similar effect.
Another factor is whether your eCommerce site has been optimised for various devices, mainly mobile. Despite manufacturers best efforts to make our phones as large as possible, you still need to ensure that your site performs as well on a mobile device as it does on a computer.
Your eCommerce store is the same as a brick and mortar store in the sense that it too requires regular maintenance. You may not be fixing leaks or changing light bulbs, but you need to check that everything is working as it should be.
One of the most common issues on a website is broken links, which can harm your SEO ranking. They also make for a poor user experience, which can cause people to leave your website, which leads to further impact on your SEO ranking.
So, perform regular checks to find, and fix, broken links on your website to maintain your SEO score.
On eCommerce sites, the majority of content will be product related. As a result, special care needs to be taken to ensure this content and these pages are performing at their best.
This includes choosing the right keywords, ensuring the pages are clean and fast, all images and videos are of high quality, and that you don’t have any duplicate content.
Outside of SEO, these are the pages that sell your products – you should be giving them as much time and attention as possible.
A healthy SEO ranking isn’t something that’s achieved, it’s something that’s maintained. So, start by following these tips and you’ll be heading in the right direction to get the SEO performance that you’re looking for. Reach out to the search engine optimisation experts at Zudu for support.
