The SEO strategy should be on the top of your priority list when you’re selecting the marketing channels for your Ecommerce business.

According to Beanstalk Web Solutions, there are 3.5bn daily searches being performed on Google. This takes the yearly figure to about 1.2 trillion searches. This is a huge market that needs to be plunged into, especially if you’re an ecommerce business owner.

In this article, we will talk about what ecommerce business owners need to know about SEO:

KEYWORD RESEARCH

The first step that involves the SEO process is identifying your Keywords. Keywords are the search terms that users enter on Google to find what they are looking for. Start with the basics but then bring your thesaurus out and expand your keywords.

Ecommerce keywords are different as compared to the other keywords. When the users are looking for a product, the search terms that they enter on Google are very specific. Ecommerce sites should be optimized for the keywords that show user’s shopping intent.

Get your thesaurus out and expand the keywords that you have chosen for your website. You can use Google’s free keyword research tool to find out broader terms for the searches. When you’ve found out the keywords, you can pin-point keywords for the blog topics on your website.

The blogs would help you rank for the long tail keywords. You might be wondering what are the long-tail keywords. They usually consist of the search phrases that users put in for specific products/services.

When you’re choosing the keywords for your website, you have to take four things into account:

The keyword volume; the potential search traffic for the keyword you’re searching. Google Keyword Planner would give you an insight to this data. The higher the volume of searches, the higher the traffic.

The keyword competition; the lower the competition for the keyword, the more likely you are to be ranked for that particular keyword. You would be looking for high-volume low competition keywords to help you rank faster.

The keyword relevancy; how relevant is the webpage that you’re trying to rank with reference to the keyword. As an ecommerce business owner, you need to make sure that you stick to highly relevant pages to rank for the respective keywords.

The keyword intent; you’d want to target keywords with shopping intent. Instead of trying to rank for “dress trends 2018” you’d want to be ranked for “woman’s blue dress”. The latter shows more shopping intent than the earlier mentioned keyword.

OPTIMIZED SITE STRUCTURE

You’d want to optimize your site structure in a way that it is easy for the users as well as the search engines to find your website and the relevant categories.

Let’s explain this with an example. If you open up Sophie and Trey’s homepage, you would see that the categories are neatly organized and structured. This is a good example of having a search engine friendly site structure.

The site should be structured in a way that each page is just a few clicks away from the homepage and the structure should be scalable.

The ecommerce websites are usually thin in content and that makes sense. But be vary of the fact that dozens of pages can be created with the product attributes and filters and these pages would probably only list a few products. You would not want to have those filters on your website.

It is a good practice to use the filters that will be used most often. Not every page of your site structure is worth appearing on the search engine result pages so prioritize accordingly.

ON PAGE OPTIMIZATION

Once you’ve finished your keyword research and your site structure is ready to roll, it is time to move on to on-page optimization.

There are a few things that should be taken care of before you begin with the on-page optimization. Make sure that your site is secure by changing the http:// to https:// protocol. Joules USA for example, have done it with their website.

An ecommerce site consists of two high value pages; product category pages and product pages.

Let’s start with the basics of what needs to be done when optimizing your website for the search engines.

Step 1: Update your site title tags to your store name and link your social media accounts. This is a must-have in the modern day SEO.

You should edit the Meta descriptions to include your keywords. Additionally, you should edit the alt text for your images and include your keywords. When you’re optimizing your title tags and descriptions, please do understand that these are Google facing.

The titles and descriptions should be written in a way that it convinces the user to click through to your website.

Step 2: The step two in optimizing your website is URL related. Your URL should be easy for the visitors to read as the search engines appreciate accessibility. Including keywords in your URLs is still a highly recommended practice so you should do that. Shorter URLs are better than longer ones.

Avoid keyword stuffing, the search engines are not here to be fooled!

As said earlier, the ecommerce websites are thin in content so you would need to optimize your product pages and their descriptions. If the product pages have a well written description, they are more likely to rank than the other pages on your website.

A good example of an optimized product page is by Rent The Runway.

As you can see that the thin content has been replaced by a well written product description.

Writing longer, detailed product descriptions helps the search engines work their magic on your website and help it get ranked higher.

WRAPPING IT UP

There is a lot more to ecommerce SEO than what has been mentioned above but these basic steps should set you on the right path to get your SEO done right.

The above mentioned pints are the basics; once mastered, you can move to technical SEO, Link Building, Content Marketing and the use of voice search and customer behavior in ecommerce for an even more improved sales graph.