Every successful e-commerce website has got one thing right: it has successfully employed tried-and-tested SEO best practices to boost sales and gain customer retention. Online stores today rely on search engine optimization for traffic, a digital marketing tool without which your potential customers have no way to find you online.
Here are three SEO best practices to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy if you want to see your revenues soaring for good.
Optimize the Category and Product Pages Correctly
The category pages on your e-commerce store should be given more importance than any other web pages. Your SEO team needs to optimize each category page for the products or services listed on that specific page.
Also, loading every product page with generic words or phrases, for instance, “women’s bags,” is a big mistake. Instead, pages should be optimized to respond to specific search queries. Brand names and product models should take precedence over generic category titles when optimizing brand pages and posts. This will ensure that when a user searches for a particular brand, that particular brand’s page will appear in search engine results. And when a user searches for something like “women bags,” the category page should show up.
If you use the same keyword everywhere, you’ll have your own different pages competing against each other. So don’t stuff your e-commerce store with inappropriate keywords that you think should be used. Take the help of a professional SEO expert to do it right.
Give each Product Page its Own Title Tag
One of the problems with e-commerce SEO is that several product pages are often given the same title tag, which makes it difficult for the search engine to differentiate between them based on the specific user query.
For SEO success, give each product page a unique title tag. You can achieve this by using key phrases (set of two or more words) instead of keywords (single words). This gives your site an added advantage as people generally use phrases, not single words, to search for things online. However, make sure that the title tag does not exceed 70 characters.
Another important point to remember when employing title phrases is to begin the title tag with the key phrase to make it more search-engine-friendly. For instance, if your title tag is “leather bags for women and girls at a discount of 50%” and you want to place more emphasis on the discount, write it this way: “50% discounted leather bags for women and girls.”
Focus on making your Website Mobile-friendly
More and more online shoppers worldwide are using their mobile phones to make all kinds of purchases—from long-term assets to high-value luxury items to articles of daily use. This means that, regardless of which products of services you are selling online, your website needs to be mobile-friendly.
As Google and other search engines are including data from mobile sites to determine a website’s search-engine ranking, e-commerce stores can no longer afford to have mobile versions that are slow or inefficient or lacking in good content. This increasing focus on mobile sites is largely user-driven—search engines are reporting that more and more users globally are now using their cell phones and tablets for online search.
Making your website mobile-friendly is easy: Avoid the use of software programs that are not mobile-friendly (a good example is the Flash Player). Use the right text size that is easily legible on both mobiles and tablets. Cellphone users will quickly abandon a web page whose content is too small or too large to read on the mobile screen. If your website’s content is designed to fit a mobile screen without the user having to scroll up and down to view the full page, you have a winner on your hands.
With a few right measures, you can drastically improve the UX of your mobile site, which will, in turn, ensure that Google considers your e-commerce site mobile-friendly and gives it the ranking it deserves.
Conclusion
To conclude, these were some of the major factors that influence ecommerce conversion rates, and your digital marketing team must pay due attention to these factors when optimizing your website.
Incompetent search engine optimization of ecommerce websites is often the outcome of mistakes that can be easily avoided, provided the basic rules of SEO are followed. Some of these rules are pretty basic, but in the hands of a novice digital marketing professional who is not aware of the latest SEO best practices, your website’s SEO ranking can take a big hit.
Especially if yours is an SME establishment that’s working hard to gain a stronghold in the dynamic world of online selling, experts strongly recommend that you consider your digital marketing cost an investment rather than an expense. This attitude will take your e-business places in a short span of time!
