E-commerce SEO audit can assist companies to recognize the do’s & don’ts to ameliorate search performance.
By the year 2022, it is expected that the e-commerce revenue will touch $638 million.
While there are still a lot of sales taking place offline, it is predicted that by the year 2023, about 58% of the sales will get influenced by online efforts.
Thus, even if your final buy takes place in brick & mortar, the maximum of the research & influence will happen online.
As an outcome, SEO or search engine optimization is getting even more crucial.
Well executed and informed SEO services assist customers at finding out the site & social media profiles, creating long-term positive impact, driving sales on your organization.
However, before you begin rewriting the content on your site, your organization must audit your site SEO to know opportunities for amelioration.
Four do’s of e-commerce SEO
There are numerous actions you can undertake to ameliorate your e-commerce SEO.
But we are concentrating on the most crucial & effective measures you can take up to start in the correct direction.
Category descriptions and unique product
It is crucial to have completely separate product pages, which must be organized into the product category section.
Search engines like Bing or Google, take up crawlers to simply understand what the site is all about – which are nothing but just similar to consumers when they approach a website.
Dividing the products into categories assists your visitors to learn more regarding the products that you are providing while revealing to Google what your web page is exactly about.
If there is no text content on the page, having a search engine crawler will not be able to make most of the valuable information. Customers even might not.
Get helpful written content on the webpage by simply creating unique category descriptions and product pages.
Avoid falling into the trap of copying any product description from any other manufacturer’s site.
A direct-to-consumer company dealing in furniture named Burrow organizes their furniture pieces based on their type.
For instance, a few of the categories may be storage, seating & lighting. Also, each of their product pages consists of numerous sections of info like product dimension, description & key features.
There are few things you must note when creating the category content & the product pages. Here are the things you should remember:
- Involve target keywords in the description
- Use long tail variations of the keywords with their synonyms
- Ensure to make all of them useful and readable for the consumers
- Keep all your messaging precise
Ensure to make every product and category page focused and with unique detail for making it useful. Follow the listed guidelines concerning the customer in relation to search engines:
Optimize URLs
Most e-commerce site builders automatically generate URL slugs for your business to make them completely unique from the rest of the weblinks under the company’s domain.
Though convenient, it mostly results in the URLs having random numbers, letters mixed in, or dates.
To avoid all of it, ensure to take additional measures and ensure your URLs look as clear & readable as possible
Here are a few of the additional SEO measures for writing the e-commerce URLs:
- Keep them precise and short
- Create a clear hierarchy for the page
- Use your primary keyword
- Use hyphens for separating words in place of underscoring other symbols
- Avoid the URL parameters wherever is possible
Utilizing your keyword in URL while also ensuring to keep them tidy and neat, sends out a clear message to the search engines, which tells them what you should expect on the webpage.
Also, this kind of naming system is beneficial for customers as they can revisit their browsing history & recall what they were searching for.
Add the schema markup
Schema markup caters to additional info regarding every page in SERP or search engine result page.
Not just does this look appealing but it can even enhance your CTR (Click Through Rate) by nearly 30%.
More and more visitors that click to your website, the more traffic you get on your site, and the more you will drive sales.
Schema markup provides the search engine with a piece of data/info that will assist them to understand what your website & products are about
Remove the duplicate content
For one or the other reason, you might have duplicate content on your site. It means that the same content gets housed in distinct places, under distinct URLs.
Having the same content in more than just one place is very confusing for the search engines as they cannot judge which page to actually serve up.
Moreover, many of the search engines like Google actually penalize your website for having duplicate content if it feels that it is done maliciously.
To stop it from happening, performing a content audit is crucial if there are pages or huge blocks of text, which are similar.
In case you see any duplicacy in the content, the initial thing is to write the content again to make it 100% original.
If this is not the option for you then you can use 301 redirects for removing the webpage having duplicate content & direct search engines to correct pages.
Moreover, you can utilize canonical links that reveal search engines which webpage you should index.
Also, you can use no index, follow tag, which actually communicates to search engines that you are not looking for any specific page to get indexed.
Four don’ts of SEO e-commerce
It is easy to take incorrect turns with eCommerce SEO. Avoid the below listed 4 mistakes linked with SEO for maintaining your website’s search health.
Keyword stuffing
When forming a content marketing strategy for your site, one of the goals is to put a lot of keywords on the website.
However, note that content requires being relevant too, which means it has to make some sense.
When search engines got created, many of the webmasters utilized a method named keyword stuffing for tricking the search crawlers to think that the website was highly relevant due to the presence of the keywords on its web pages.
Keyword stuffing refers to a technique that companies still utilize, which overloads their web pages with similarly targeted phases in the hopes of ranking higher in the search engines. It may sound clever, however, it is a big mistake.
Few of the keyword stuffing involves:
- Repeating phrases or words unnecessarily
- Adding in keywords, which are out of context
- Creating huge blocks of similar keywords
- Utilizing keywords that do not fit topically on the webpage
Keyword stuffing can result in penalties from search engines and may even negatively impact your rankings for an extended time period.
Also, the technique can be highly confusing for the users if those terms do not organically fit in the content on your webpage.
Additionally, it makes websites appear untrustworthy & which is not a good way of driving in sales.
Instead of using keywords unnecessarily, form content that is helpful for those visiting your website.
Using images that are oversized
Having a website full of large images slows down the loading time of your website. Note that Google factors in your website loading time for setting search rankings.
Also, visitors do not like sites that are slow at loading.
As many as about 47% of the consumers consider your webpage to load within 2 seconds or even less while about 40% of the individuals leave your site if it takes over 3 seconds to load.
There are numerous tools that you can access online that will state what your average loading speed is and you will also know a list of various things to do for increasing the speed of your site.
Not setting up your site for mobile device
A survey from Statista in the year 2019, actually revealed that about 46% of the respondents said that they used a mobile retail application to look for info about service or product.
If you do not take apt measures to optimize your website for mobile, you are sure to miss out on a huge section of consumers.
Websites that are not fit for mobile viewing even turn off the search engines. Yahoo and Google are not going to recommend any site that will not appear well on the device.
Avoiding product pages
SEO changes daily. In the year 2018, Google had updated a search algorithm over 3200 times.
Thus, even though you have completed a complete content audit, you require making SEO a normal part of your company’s routine.
Moreover, when your metrics begin to ameliorate, utilize that as motivation to keep revising your company’s site to make it better.
The manner people use their search engines is even prone to changes.
For instance, there was a time when no one had phones & we all utilized specific words & symbols to avail relevant search results.
Today the maximum number of individuals search using their phones and a particular section of people even use voice assistants.
As per Statista, about 42% of worldwide online individuals had opted for the voice search option through the device in the year 2019.
Thus staying updated with the changing SEO trends is crucial. And following them is even more crucial.
Ensure to conduct keyword research to know if people are really talking about your brand. And also keep a look at your competitors and the other ways they are incorporating to attract customers.
Sanjay Dey