Sales from Ecommerce websites now total in the hundreds of billions of dollars range, and it's only growing each year. Websites like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, and Etsy have made it necessary for all ecommerce stores to step up their game in every possible area. That includes improving your ecommerce company's search engine optimization (SEO). Ecommerce SEO is essential because there is growing competition from around the world for every product and industry. If customers can't find your products and ecommerce store on major search engines like Google, then you'll be leaving a lot of money on the table. Improving your SEO could be the difference maker between a successful ecommerce business and being out of business.
Here are some SEO strategies to boost your ecommerce store:
Need For Speed
Attention span and patience are at an all-time low, so your pages and images need to load fast. Visitors (and Google) expect the pages to load within seconds or even microseconds, so if your page fails to do so you may lose a customer (and search rank). Even worse, visitors may pogo-stick away from your page and visit your competitors' websites instead. That's a double-whammy of SEO damage.
Remove excessive ads, install helpful plugins, and compress media to help keep your website lightning fast. You probably want high resolution images and maybe even video content, but you'll have to determine if it will be worth the reduced site speed.
Mobile Friendly
Aside from being fast, all websites need to be responsive to all desktop, mobile, and tablet devices and browsers. The desktop version of the website isn't ideal on a mobile device and vice versa. Mobile has accounted for over 50% of all searches for the past several years if not longer, and your website ranking will fall if it isn't mobile friendly. If your website isn't "mobile first" then you'll lose out with Google and customer sales.
Also keep in mind that voice search is rapidly growing thanks to the increased popularity of Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and similar products. Your website should be optimized for mobile and voice!
Keyword Research & Planning
Using proper keywords with research and planning can help in generating higher traffic to your ecommerce website. The keywords should ideally be high-ranking and in-demand. Place these keywords strategically in your website’s content like in page titles, headers, image alternate text, and content without saturating the page on a spammy level. Keep in mind that long tail keywords may be easier to match to the phrases that a user is searching for.
Secure Website
An SSL certificate is a ranking criteria of Google for ecommerce sites and all other websites. SSL certified websites are more secure to use and can reduce your liability for stolen customer data. Now Google Chrome also notifies users if the page that they're on is not secure and it could cause customers to lose faith in your business if you don't have HTTPS. Secure your site or let your sales slip away.
Blogging for your ecommerce business is a great way to generate leads and sales while improving your search rank. You can provide value to prospective customers, build your brand, and produce content that Google considers valuable.
You can also work to provide guest blog posts for websites with high domain authority and include a dofollow link to your website within them. White hat backlink building takes time but it will pay off big with more organic traffic. If you try to go "black hat" and get links from low-quality websites, you could actually be penalized by Google and earning less organic traffic. Slow and steady is better than fast and reckless. Internal links to your other related content can benefit you as well, along with externally linking to sites with very high authority.
Social Media Marketing
We all know that social media marketing helps to build up your brand, engage with prospective or current customers, increase website traffic, and drive sales. While shares and likes on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube aren't primary ranking factors for your ecommerce business, they will definitely improve your SEO indirectly. The increased website traffic from social selling platforms will help your search rank and the boosted brand awareness will increase organic search inquiries related to your products and company. Social media marketing is one of the most underestimated factors for ecommerce SEO.
If you don't have the expertise or resources in all of these areas then it would be wise to invest in some professional SEO services to get your website where it needs to be. It's sure to be an investment that will pay major dividends down the road.
I hope you enjoyed this article about how to utilize search engine optimization for ecommerce sales growth.
Interested in more articles about E-Commerce & SEO?
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