5 SEO Best Practices to Boost Your Ecommerce Business

Ecommerce businesses are in their best season as the drive for companies to have an online store gets stronger by the day.

But it’s not enough to simply exist on the internet. You also want your company to be visible online and make it easy for customers to find you through basic internet searches.

However, it’s likely that many out there offer a similar product or service as you, so how will you stand out above the rest? That’s where SEO comes in.

SEO boosts your website traffic based on your site’s content. You can improve your ecommerce SEO by focusing on your product pages and product descriptions, or even by running a blog.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and get lost in Wonderland without first understanding exactly what SEO is, how it can help your ecommerce business, and the steps you can take to become an SEO superstar. So, like Alice down the rabbit hole, let’s dive in.

How SEO Can Help Your Ecommerce Business

Search engine optimisation is a marketing technique that, when implemented well, will drive traffic to your website above all the others. It uses a scoring system to determine the quality of your SEO. The higher your score, the higher you’ll feature on Google, Bing, and other search engine results when a potential customer makes an inquiry.

SEO examines phrases and keywords to determine what your target audience is looking for and the specific words that they are using to find it.

To use SEO to support your ecommerce business, you’ll want to create an SEO strategy that focuses on content, your website’s technical setup, its user experience, and building links. And we’ll show you how to maximise each of those for SEO a little later in this article.

Improving SEO for Your Online Store

Now that you know what SEO is and how it can help your ecommerce business, it’s time to take a look at how you can improve your SEO score and maximise your content for optimum results.

Do Research on Keywords

Any fan of a particular niche will perform online searches using keywords related to that topic. What you’ll need to know is which keywords your potential customers are using to find what they want and what their intent is behind the use of those specific keywords.

Some words may be searched to gather information, while others will be used with the intent of making a purchase. Understanding this information will give you key insight into your customer behaviour, and you’ll also be able to adjust your website content to make certain keywords more prevalent.

Keyword Research Tools

You don’t have to research keywords all by yourself. There are a few tools that will give you all the answers you are looking for at the touch of a button. Here are some of the best keyword research tools that are currently on the market:

Ubersuggest - Paid, 7-day free trial
AnswerThePublic - Paid, 7-day free trial
Semrush - Free & Paid
Google Trends - Free
Ahrefs - Paid

Optimise Your Product Pages for a Higher SEO Ranking

The first thing you’ll need to do is an analysis of your current content to figure out how it performs online and where it can be improved.

Product pages are vital in ecommerce as they provide all the information that a customer needs to make a decision on a purchase. Not only do they encourage buyers to purchase from you, but Google also uses this information to rank your website.

So, great product pages with well-researched product descriptions and keywords will help your website level up on search results while bringing you paying customers.

When it comes to optimising your product pages, you need to first identify the most important aspects of the page. The next step is to see how you can increase the impact and effectiveness of the elements that you’ve highlighted as vital. Using detailed, keyword-rich descriptions is a great starting point for product page optimisation.

Images also play their role in SEO as much as they help you to flesh out your products and story. You can optimise your images by giving them captions, using keywords in image titles, and using smaller images (still of high quality) wherever possible.

Zone In On Your Content

For SEO, content is king. The only way for your website to rank higher on search results is by having engaging content that is laid out in the right way.

Enhance your content by doing the following:

Optimise your title tags by including keywords, removing duplicates, and making sure that they are short and sweet (and make sure that every section of your site is titled).
Beef up the meta descriptions that help improve search visibility.
Pay attention to your H1, H2, and H3 tags.
Include Alt text in images to increase image visibility in searches.
Build internal links that connect pieces of information to other parts of your website.
Make sure your keywords differ in intent and focus across your website. Having many pages with the same keywords and intent may lower your SEO ranking.
Make sure that your content is up to date - updating your content is one of the easiest ways to improve your SEO score.
Be sure to have links to external sites.
Use Media Monitoring to track your mentions and turn unlinked mentions into links.
Type shorter sentences, use smaller paragraphs, and use common/simple words.

Not sure if your website is ready? Here’s The 25-Step Website Launch Checklist Every Business Owner Needs.

Getting Technical

The technical aspects of your website make it easier for your site to be crawled and indexed. You need to make sure that your site is working well at a high speed, is user-friendly, mobile friendly, using the correct URLs and has the right XML sitemap (a list of your website’s URLs), redirects, and error messages in place.

You can use Site Auditto scan your website for technical problems and SEO-related issues.

Off-page SEO

The final thing to consider for improving your website’s SEO is how everything away from your site affects your ranking. Apart from increasing your social media activity and encouraging brand searchers, building high-quality backlinks is the true hero of off-page SEO.

You can create backlinks by adding them directly to your website, build backlinks by reaching out to other site owners for a partnership of mutual exchange, or earn backlinks by having irresistible content that people feel compelled to link on their sites.

More help is on the way! These are The Best WordPress Plugins and Tools for Your Ecommerce Website.

A Better Future with SEO

Paying attention to SEO will do wonders for generating organic traffic to your website, and will ultimately bring the customers that you seek straight to your front door. It’s all about focussing on the little things in the interest of achieving the big picture. SEO is one ranking system that is worth climbing all the way to the top!