5 Essential SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Sites

As an online retailer, growing your organic traffic can make a significant difference in sales. Although you won’t have to pay for traffic like you do for PPC (pay-per-click) and social ads, SEO efforts will take time. With every effective digital marketing strategy, however, it is important for you to leverage both paid and organic strategies.

Here are 5 essential SEO strategies to adopt for your e-commerce site.

Use the Right Keywords

Yes, keywords still matter, and it is your first SEO strategy for e-commerce sites. While you don’t want to overload your product descriptions and titles with keywords, they do need to be present in the copy. If you fail to do proper keyword research, either you will rank for keywords that don’t get a lot of traffic, or you will target keywords that are too difficult to rank for.

Mention your primary keyword in your product description, product title sub-headings, image alternate attributes, and meta description. On the other hand, sprinkle LSI (latent semantic index) keywords throughout the product listing. LSI keywords are the related keywords that help search engines understand your page in context.

For example, if you sell “women’s fashion magazines,” this may be your keyword. LSI keywords would be words related to it like, “trending,” “editorial,” “fashion designer,” or “fashion week.”

There are three practical ways to do proper keyword research. They include:

• SEO tools — like Google’s Keyword Planner
• Researching competitors — to see what keywords they’re using
• Amazon — to find high buyer intent keywords, type the word you would want to rank for in the search box and Amazon will provide you with autofill suggestions (high buyer intent keywords)

Perform Competitor Research

You can learn a lot from smart competitor research. Besides seeing what keywords may be viable, you can also see how keywords are being used. Using keywords to optimize your website content is called on-page SEO optimization.

Your competitors, especially the experienced ones, may have already put in the hard work of optimizing their websites. By going through their websites, you can learn some of the best practices being applied. Pay attention to keywords on their homepages along with their top product pages.

What is the best way to tell whether an e-commerce website is optimizing for a specific keyword? There are plenty of online tools available that you can use such as the Moz browser extension, it can determine the SEO description and title a competitor uses in their title tags.

Simplify Your Site Architecture

Once you have determined the right keywords, you need to place them accordingly in your e-commerce site. Site architecture is how you set up your product pages, category pages, and navigation. This strategy revolves around getting relevant content in front of your target audience and decreasing the number of times they have to click to find that content. In order to get excellent site architecture use the following SEO strategies for your e-commerce site:

• The content shouldn’t take more than three clicks to get to
• The site should be scalable and straightforward with room for improvement
• Relevant keywords must be used in page URLs and subdirectories

Optimize Product Pages

The product pages on your e-commerce site are vital to online retail business. Hence, you need to focus a lot on optimizing them so search engines can find you. The specific areas to consider when trying to improve SEO include:

• Product name
• Image optimization
• Video
• Customer reviews
• FAQ content

Reduce Page Load Speed

Reducing how long it takes your page to load is another on-page SEO optimization strategy for e-commerce sites. The page load speed is a ranking signal for both mobile and desktop. The faster your page loads, the better Google or any other search engine will rank you. Decreasing the page load speed primarily depends on eliminating any unnecessary elements from your page. Large background images, any add-ons, plug-ins, and more don’t contribute to your site’s bottom line.

Bonus! Influencer Backlink

We discussed a few on-page SEO optimizations, such as reducing your page load speed and using keywords. Off-page SEO optimization is what you can do to signal to Google that other people think your e-commerce website is awesome too.

If there are influencers or bloggers that are talking about your product, ask them to drop your website link on that specific page. If they’re talking about that product, give them that product and if not, then your home page. This way, you begin to build a collection of sources Google will use to consider you a good choice.

Final Words

There are multiple ways to get traffic to your e-commerce website. From paid ads to email marketing, social media, and more. There are also plenty of ways to get traffic organically as well, with SEO. Contact us today and see how we can leverage SEO campaigns and increase organic traffic to your e-commerce site.