SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a digital practice that most online business owners will want to include as part of their inclusive digital strategy. Although, appearing in the top search results when a keyword or phrase is entered is your aim, Google for example can take some time to achieve the impact and increase that it can have on your website traffic but is worth the SEO work.
SEO is often a favourable marketing strategy with business owners because you know the user searching is searching with intent. They’re actively looking for what you have to offer and therefore, would be more likely to make a purchase.
Here we identify some of the top SEO practices that you can implement on your e-commerce website to help drive traffic and secure those all-important sales.
Finding the right keywords to Optimise your E-Commerce website
“How do I know what keywords to use?”, is one of the most common questions our digital experts get asked.
Typically, the Google research tool and keyword planner is the golden favourite for researching what keywords to use on your website. It’s commonly used to support those setting up Pay Per Click campaigns, but as it reveals some great data in terms of monthly search volumes per keyword along with additional suggestions, it’s a great tool to use when carrying out keyword research for your organic strategy.
In addition to this there are certain sites like Answer the Public that will give you an indication of popular searched phrases or keywords. You can use these as your inspiration to inform the content strategy that you can use on your e-commerce website.
Now that you’ve got a good idea of what your customers are searching for, it’s important you tweak these so that they are tailored to the type of intent that a searcher has.
Let us explain user intent in a little more detail. Some people might be carrying out a google search because they are looking to learn about something or would like more information about something. They might start their searches with words like How, why, learn…these people have an informational intent. However, as we are talking about optimising your e-commerce website, we want to be finding those users searching with buyer intent. In this instance, you might want to include the following words as part of your keyword/phrase… Buy, Find, Shop.
Optimising Product Pages on your E-Commerce website.
Ultimately your product pages are going to be the pages that hopefully lead to those all-important sales! Typically, a product page will be made up of a product image, description and often several customer reviews.
Image sizes:
Your images should be uploaded in the right size for your website. If the size of the image is too big it could slow the site down, which in turn leads to a poor user experience and often a higher exit rate.
Image Alt tags:
Your website builder will also have space to input an alt tag, a description that tells search engines what the image is about, this is another opportunity to insert your researched keywords.
Product descriptions:
When it comes to your product description, you want to ensure it’s keyword rich, but be careful not to overstuff the description with keywords, it still needs to make sense to the user.
However, tempting it might be to copy content from one page to another this is something you really want to avoid when it comes to working on your e-commerce website for SEO. Duplicated content is certainly frowned upon when it comes to SEO. If you have similar products, make sure you use unique but relevant keywords on their individual product pages and differentiate the products in the URL.
Call to actions:
You might want to include call to actions, that tell the user what they should do next. It might seem obvious, but sometimes people do need to be told exactly what steps to take, and you want to make the customer journey easy for them.
Reviews:
Often you will see product pages with product reviews included. Reviews can be extremely powerful in helping a user decide if they are going to purchase or not, so it’s a good idea to include review capture as part of your after sales strategy.
User friendly:
As well as the type of content you are creating for your product pages, you want to make sure that your website is user friendly. If it’s too complicated, it’s very likely that the user will exit the site and look for an alternative e-commerce site that is easy to navigate.
Getting Technical – Is your E-Commerce website set up for success?
When it comes to SEO, often people just think about the content they are creating, however, it’s also important that the technical side of things are taken into consideration as this can also have an impact on your organic listings.
Website speed:
As we’ve touched on above, the speed of your website can be crucial as to whether a user remains on your website or goes to look elsewhere, however, it can also be critical for SEO, search engines want to provide their users with the best experience, so if they see that a website is slow loading, it’s not going to be favoured in the rankings.
Submitting a sitemap:
Both users and the search engines will want to know what content is available on your website, so they know how to easily find it. Google Webmasters Tools can help you create your sitemap which you can then submit for the search engines to crawl.
Hopefully you’re feeling confident to get started optimising your e-commerce website, however, if you need support creating or optimising your e-commerce website for sales success, get in touch with our SEO and digital experts at Carrick Creative and we’ll be happy to advise on how we can help you.