When you have an e-Commerce site, one of the many challenges you face is just getting your site the necessary traffic to turn a profit. Optimizing your site’s SEO is a great way to garner more views, so here’s 18 tips to make your e-commerce website SEO friendly.
1. Avoid product descriptions from manufacturers
Google eliminates duplicate content from searches. Make sure your product descriptions are original content.
2. Add product reviews from customers
Likewise, customer reviews are a great way to add custom content to your site. Reviews are also very Google-friendly, as reviews tend to make their way to the top of most searches.
3. Check your redirects
Many e-commerce sites make the mistake of using incorrect redirects or creating redirect loops. Use the Link Research Tools Redirect Trace chrome extension to make sure you are not losing SEO power by using redirects inappropriately.
If you have time, use it also on your inbound links. If you find sites linking to yours that use improper redirects, let them know to earn some brownie points with them as well as increase your link power.
4. Use simple URLs
Direct, clean URLs can basically be seen as another place for keywords. Having these be searchable can boost your traffic a great deal.
5. Build relationships with other sites
External links on other company sites can help you network your site. Like-minded sites with their own audience can help funnel more traffic to your site. Sometimes, it will just take a kindly worded email to get your link on someone else’s site.
6. Add photos and videos to product pages
Photos and videos stimulate interest in the products you’re trying to sell. Posting original pictures and using videos to showcase a product can not only help your customer’s website experience, but it will also get your page to show up on Google Image and Google Video searches.
7. Optimize For mobile users
Shopping on mobile devices has become more and more popular recently. Make sure that navigating your website on a mobile device is as easy to do as it is on your main site.
8. Keep out of stock product pages live
Rather than removing links, update the page with a simple “out of stock” message on the page. This will keep your site from having broken links and will make your life easier.
9. Check Amazon’s suggested searches
You may not be able to beat Amazon, but you can definitely use them as a good tool. Go to Amazon and type in a search relevant to what you sell, then take a look at the suggested search terms that come up. These can give you a good list of some helpful keywords to use.
10. Re-optimize periodically based on trends
Relevant keywords can change from time to time, based on trends. Every six months or so, check in on how your keywords are trending and re-optimize based on your findings.
11. Specify categories
Broad categories are helpful for your customers, but they won’t help your SEO standing. Having subcategories that get more specific and are unique will help you attract more natural views.
12. Don’t rely on generic keywords
Likewise, generic keywords are nice to have, but unique keywords will help you gain traffic. Look for “long tail” keywords that have high volume and low competition.
Make sure you look at the sites ranking in the top 10 for each of the long tail keywords you pick – if the top spots are held by incredibly authoritative domains, the chances of your site ranking are slim to none. Be conscientious of picking keywords that you can actually rank for.
13. Use category “breadcrumbs”
Breadcrumbs help your customers navigate the hierarchy of your categories and your customers will love the extra navigability.
14. Add internal links to your homepage
You may not realize it, but internal links are just as effective to your SEO as external links. Linking to other pages on your homepage can boost the overall performance of your site.
15. Add related products to product pages
Much like links on your homepage, related products on your product pages are internal links that help the efficacy of your e-Commerce SEO.
16. Optimize your load speed
An underrated component of overall website interaction is the speed at which each page loads. Keeping media small by choosing JPEG photos over PNG photos is just one way to keep your speed optimized.
17. Minimise clicking
You don’t want your customers to get lost in the proverbial woods. Make sure that everything is easy to get through with just a few clicks of the mouse.
18. Add alt text to pictures
Alt text is another way to get the most out of keyword opportunities. The more descriptions you can get, the more visible your site becomes.
There’s no discounting the importance of creating great content in order to garner organic traffic. Using these tips in order to optimize your content’s SEO visibility can go along way to up those visitor numbers.
This post was written by Nick Rojas. Nick is a business consultant and writer who lives in Los Angeles and Chicago. He has consulted small and medium-sized enterprises for over twenty years. You can follow him on Twitter @NickARojas.
1 comment
Good points. I’d add that you should NOT use any low quality SEO services, as they can do you a lot more harm than good . . . I got an entire website de-indexed some years ago by following “expert” advice I’d paid for on back-linking, and it would be an even worse idea in 2016.
In SEO it can be as important to know what NOT to do, as what TO do !
I’ll add one little-known SEO boost . . . celebrity endorsements. There are services which offer this, at a range of prices, and it can be a huge boost to your social-media following, as well as being able to say “endorsed by *** ” in all your marketing material for ever!
Thanks for an informative post.
Chris
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