In the uber-competitive world of e-commerce, search engine optimization is often the difference between building a thriving store and getting lost in the digital crowd. Data from Statista.com reveals that about 33% of e-commerce traffic comes from organic search. To effectively navigate this landscape, many businesses turn to professional services that specialize in search engine optimization strategies.
Invariably, if your site remains buried on the latter pages of search engine result pages (SERPs), you’re losing one-third of your potential customers. However, how do you ensure your website is optimized to rank high on SERPs? In this article, I’ll share 5 fool-proof strategies that can boost the performance and SEO rankings of your e-commerce website.
Table of Contents
1. Publish High-Quality Content and Product Descriptions
It’s virtually impossible to achieve high organic rankings if you do not have informative, engaging, and unique content on your website. As an e-commerce merchant, your content would naturally comprise more of product descriptions.
However, you can improve your ranking by publishing blog posts, user guides, FAQs, video demonstrations, and any other form of content that’s relevant to your niche. Whatever you do, make sure you conduct proper keyword research and ensure you’re publishing keyword-rich product descriptions. You can also stay ahead of the competition by ranking for long-tail keywords instead of focusing only on the highly competitive short-tail ones.
2. Optimize Website Speed
Slow websites attract high bounce rates, which would ultimately affect their placement on search engine result pages. According to a Digital.com survey, 19% of visitors would not wait for a page that takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load. If you’re looking to optimize your website speed, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is always a good place to start. This tool lets you know how fast your web pages are on various devices. Once you know where you stand, you can investigate the cause of the problem and then adopt the necessary strategies to address the issue.
3. Adopt a Mobile-Friendly Design
With an estimated 50% of all website traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s imperative to have a responsive and mobile-friendly website to cater to this teeming category of shoppers. Beyond ensuring your users have a smooth navigation experience, having a mobile-friendly website is also a vital part of search engine optimization.
Currently, Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of your website for ranking and indexing. Thus, if you wish to beat the competition, you have to optimize your website for different screen sizes and ensure quick load times on mobile devices.
Sometimes, optimizing for mobile devices can seem like a daunting task, and it's often better to turn to professionals. Experts like Elogic Commerce can significantly simplify the optimization process for you."
4. Do Not Neglect On-Page SEO
On-page SEO elements like product descriptions, meta descriptions, heading tags, and site structure are also key to growing search traffic. Ultimately, the specific on-page elements you’ll optimize will depend on your niche. However, there are some general guides that may help. Some of them include:
- Adding high-quality images to your product description pages.
- Including customer reviews in the product pages.
- Adding alt tags to image captions.
- Including a Call to Action on each product page.
5. Pay Attention to User Experience
Often, website owners think UX is all about great design and visually appealing aesthetics. While these are critical elements of user experience, you need to understand that UX goes beyond making your website look good. The functional aspect of the user experience is just as important, if not more.
Your website should be designed such that visitors can navigate with ease and find what they’re looking for without any unnecessary hurdles. Google will measure your UX based on elements like page usefulness, ease of navigation, response time, etc. When you improve these core web vitals, you’ll have a better chance of beating your competitors on SERPs.
7. Utilize User Generated Content
Utilizing User-Generated Content (UGC) can significantly boost an ecommerce site. Showcasing customer reviews, photos, and experiences with your products builds trust and enhances credibility. Encouraging customers to share their product experiences and photos through contests with rewards can further increase engagement. Additionally, featuring customer reviews in search engine results not only increases visibility but also drives more clicks.
8. Use Exit Pop-ups to Your Advantage
Another impactful strategy is creating personalized exit-intent popups. These popups, triggered by user behavior, can be displayed when a user is about to leave your site, offering a more tailored experience based on their browsing history or cart items. Providing time-limited discounts or special offers for items the user has shown interest in can encourage immediate conversion. And if a user decides to leave without making a purchase, asking for feedback gives valuable insights to improve your site and understand customer behavior.
9. Bonus Point: Remain Curious and Adaptable
The e-commerce SEO landscape is as dynamic as it gets, with SEO techniques continually evolving based on search engine updates and consumer trends. As a website owner, you should be flexible enough to modify existing strategies or adopt new ones whenever necessary. So, stay agile, continuously monitor your site’s performance, and stay updated with SEO trends as you journey towards e-commerce success.
Conclusion
Whether you’re just starting your e-commerce journey or you’ve been around for a while, you can generate immense organic traffic for your store by implementing the strategies highlighted above. However, keep in mind that SEO is a long-term game. Hence, even if it appears the results aren’t showing immediately, do not deviate from these basic principles as you strive to stay ahead of your competitors and offer your customers the best possible shopping experience.