E-Commerce Mastery: eCommerce SEO Strategies for 2022
Why SEO is among the most important things you should consider for a successful E-Commerce platform? Today we’ll be building up from an earlier article and giving you a list of best eCommerce SEO Strategies.
So, last time we compared SEO and PPC when it comes to a successful eCommerce platform. We’re not ashamed to admit that we might have been just a tad bit biased towards one of them. Yet we regret nothing.
With that said, we promised to give you a set of tips when optimizing your own SEO strategy and eCommerce platform.
What if you’re so short on budget, you have to do it manually and can’t afford hiring an agency? As we’ve mentioned, the process of fully and successfully optimizing your platform takes a lot of time, and even longer to start showing results.
So how do you achieve a successful eCommerce strategy?
Essential eCommerce SEO strategies in 2022
Following is a lit of practices and tips we’ve gathered, that we consider paramount if you want to see tangible results and high SERP rankings.
List of best practices and strategies:
Mobile Friendly!
Right of the bat, understand that the list is formed in no particular order of importance, we would still argue that making your platform mobile friendly is by far the most beneficial improvement you can make bar none.
Disregarding the astounding number of 3.8 billion smartphone users today, and thus the increasing importance of making your web-app as mobile friendly as possible. When it comes to eCommerce, two out of three people admit that they use primarily mobile phones for their online purchases.
Also, ever since 2016 google has been putting an increasing amount of importance on this factor.
You might have a very optimized desktop web-app, but if it ranks a 10 out of 100 on page speed insights for mobile, you can bet that google will never prioritize your platform for the first SERP. Speaking of speed.
Increase the page speed
Many algorithms even besides the Google’s one, put a good amount of importance on the overall productivity and speed response of your platform. Aside from bots, page speed has strong correlation to user enjoyment and engagement.
If it runs poorly, it ranks poorly.
Though Google’s Page-speed-insights has all the necessary documentation to help you solve each issue it finds and makes it rank accordingly.
HTTPS instead of HTTP
Next on our list is the simple notion of data security and encryption. Make absolutely sure that your platform is run on HTTPS not HTTP. This not only improves customer perception but also is a massive factor for Google crawlers. Speaking of crawlers.
URL optimization – Size matters! Keep it short
Google web crawlers are special bots that index the content of all websites across the whole web. This is essentially what allows search engines to know that the information is there!
And they like short URLs with correct and appropriate keywords.
Rich Snippets and Structured Data
eCommerce platforms benefit immensely from SEO by granting rich snippet functionality for the various things like product information, star ratings, reviews, availability, price etc. All this information must not only be readable to the users, bot also the aforementioned Web crawlers, that is achieved with rich snippets.
Out of the four links, only one uses their Rich Snippets correctly, and thus attracts attention, guess which is it?
For more information on this topic we suggest the fine people at Moz and their concise article on the subject – a must read before mendling with eCommerce SEO Strategies!
Only one title tag [H1] per page
Continuing with our Web crawlers, make sure you set up only one title tag per page. This makes the bots instantly understand what the URL of the product in question has and is relevant to.
If you have multiple [H1] tags it makes it harder for the bots to figure out your platform.
Internal linking
Make sure that all your relevant links are crawlable by introducing the <a href=” https://example.com”> tag.
Then create an intuitive hierarchy of internal links to your other products or pages.
This is achieved by introducing side panel categories, and subcategories. It allows web crawlers as well as users to better understand your website and its core aspect.
Unique product descriptions
Avoid using manufacturers’ product information and hire someone to create unique, keyword targeted product descriptions. While writing the content, perform proper keyword research.
It might take extra time and effort, but it improves your SEO ranking due to how google treats plagiarism. Speaking of…
Cut duplicate content
Google penalizes plagiarism and duplicate content considering it spamming. This usually happens when eCommerce platforms use tables to display their products.
Use Google webmaster tools to find these pages and try to remove them.
Long-tail-Keywords
When it comes to keywords the one-word competition is fierce and almost impossible to reliably rank for. However, long-tail-keywords see much less competition. Ranking for one word is far more of a challenging than a longer string of keywords. All it takes is correctly anticipating what your potential target audience will write in their search box – an essential practice for any eCommerce SEO Strategies
After all, 70% of all search engine queries are long sentences, not a single or two word query.
Product reviews
Google absolutely loves unique user generated content (UGC), so make sure your platform incentivizes your customers to leave some sort of a comment or review on the product they purchase or interact with.
We’ve mentioned before how Google values engagement and content. And it “measures” it accordingly and though previously we were talking about blogs, the principle still stands.
Pictured user-engagement
Meta description
Create short and easy to read/understand meta descriptions for your products. Meta descriptions allow search engines to provide a short text below the link explaining where the page will end you.
This is doubly important for both users and web crawlers as they compare and compile all the information supplied to get a finer picture.
Better overall picture for a Google bot = Better rankings.
Image alt text and tags
Alt text are descriptive short texts of the image for the people who cannot see images either due to low bandwidth, use screen readers or other reasons.
Google also uses this text for their bots alongside computer vision algorithms to better understand the overall subject of the page its indexing.
Image size optimization
Formatting and using proper image sizes and file formats is expedient for good and responsive web page speeds that we’ve discussed earlier (valid for eCommerce SEO Strategies as well).
When it comes to speed, the best file format would be JPEGs however, recently we are experiencing a growing trend of using PNG’s which do have a set of advantages.
But talking SEO, JPEG is the clear winner. – at least, until you muster the courage to implement WebP. The latter, is a method of lossy and lossless image compression that achieves an average of 30% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000, without loss of image quality. It essentially aims at creating smaller, better looking images. As a result, you get a couple of bonus points to your Google Page Speed Insights score.
When overhauling use 301 not 404
If and when you decide to make some grandeur changes or complete overhauls to your platform, make sure that the unavailable URLs send out a HTTP 301 code rather than a 404.
It will help web crawlers to understand the transition and know where exactly to re-focus their query. This avoids you losing whatever site authority you had accumulated previously.
A good example, however, 404 should still be avoided.
Google bots hate 404, and so do users. Avoid it!
Brand nametag everything!
Closing off our list is something not really related to google algorithms but overall SEO success and brand awareness. Make sure to plaster your brand’s logo on everything. Videos, photos, emails, meta tags, etc.
The more you engrain your logo/name into the minds of your customers, the higher probability they will remember your platform when need arises for a new product in the future.
Remember, returning customers are far more likely to perform a repeat purchase than a new customer.
Conclusion and Farewell
There are many things that involve good eCommerce SEO Strategies. Far too many to list in a single article. Though important to note that doing these things are the bare minimum if you’re going to praise the Google’s crawler bots and aim for that number 1 page of SERPs.
We’ve discussed the overwhelming advantage SEO has over its opposite PPC, with higher conversion rates and better ROI long-term. We’ve also spent quite a bit of time discussing why SEO will keep growing in importance and eventually the word “digital marketer” will be indistinguishable from “SEO Specialist/Content writer”.
But anyway, this list is in-complete you can help us expand it. In the comment section below!
As always, stay classy business and tech nerds!
