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Many young entrepreneurs get eCommerce SEO completely wrong. Some of them still focus on ranking for high-volume and uber-competitive terms while they should be ranking category pages and individual products for less competitive terms. This fact that most online shops are established with almost no consideration to search engines becomes even more puzzling when you consider that SEO still has the highest ROI in any eCommerce marketing campaign. Business owners again go through the constant effort of paid ads and social media while a good eCommerce SEO strategy requires effort only up front. Why is that? Because approaching the eCommerce SEO can be overwhelming, especially if your knowledge is outdated.
If you have a large eCommerce website with more pages than you can count it’s easy to get lost among expired products, complex filtering systems, and product variants. If you want your eCommerce business to survive 2019, you need to go a step further and implement a different kind of SEO strategy by the end of 2018. In other words, it’s time for an update.
1. Word, Words, Words
Hamlet is not the only one who has a problem with words. Somehow most people think that keywords are the end of SEO, so we’ll deal with them right at the beginning, where they belong. Think about it as laying a steady foundation. If you don’t want your eCommerce SEO to crumble you need to know how to find your keywords and where are you going to use them.
Long tail keywords have many advantages – they provide a better conversion rate since they’re usually easier to rank. The searchers are becoming lazier every day and the time when voice queries will take over typing is just around the corner. Now, search engines have adapted to understand queries in many languages, but they’re still not perfect at it, and this is where long tail keywords come pretty handy. On the other hand, there is always a trap of stuffing keywords so be careful how and when you use them.
But before you decide on the exact phrase, there is a lot of manual labour. The first thing you need to do is to list all the pages on your website, and then you should locate and map appropriate keywords to each page. And when it comes to eCommerce sites, you’ll need to optimise two main types of pages – the product and the category ones.
To choose the best keywords possible, you mustn’t forget about buyer intent. This means that you need to be able to recognise how far along the searchers are in their intention to buy. This is not so difficult – a searcher who’s typing? Best laptop’ is not that ready to buy as the one who types in the precise model – but still many people overlook this factor. You don’t have to play any guessing game – the conversion rate increases by the number of people who are determined to spend advertising a keyword, so buyer intent often correlates with the average CPC.
After you’ve completed all the steps mentioned above, you can push your keyword research even further by using trending topics. So, the first thing is your website, the second buyer’s mind.
2. Creating the sentences
You’re not done with words yet. Now that you’ve found the ones that each page should be optimised around it’s time to put these findings to use by creating meta titles, descriptions and H1’s.
Many eCommerce stores have hundreds of pages, and that’s why the owners tend to use a templated approach when it comes to the meta tags. It stands that writing a unique meta description for each page is quite daunting and boring, but there’s no way you can truly optimise individual pages using templates. The solution lies in the hybrid approach – identify the most important pages and write well-optimised tags for most of them and use templates for the rest. Just make sure you don’t use the same template for every page – make unique ones for each brand, category, subcategory, etc.
When it comes to H1’s things are much simpler. All you have to do is to use the product title for product pages and category title for the category ones. If you’ve paid attention to the previous section, they should also be keyword-focused. The important thing is that each page contains only one H1.
Your eCommerce SEO can get pretty messy when you reach your URL slugs. You want them to be as readable and as clear as possible. To optimise your URLs right, you’ll want to keep them sweet and short. Don’t forget to include your head/primary keyword and make sure that the context and the hierarchy of the page are clear. When you need to separate words don’t use spaces, underscores or any other characters – stick to the hyphens. Try to avoid URL parameters wherever is possible.
If you look at any big eCommerce retailer, you’ll see that they have unique descriptions on both – their product and category pages. If the page doesn’t have the written content Google’s algorithms will have a hard time and so will your ranking. But besides the fact that this helps Google to understand what your page is about the textual descriptions are also important determinants of consumer choice. That why it’s mandatory to add these descriptions to the product and category pages and the most important thing is to make them truly unique. You can’t just go to the manufacturer’s websites and copy/paste the descriptions, you need to write them yourself. Don’t forget to include head target keyword and sprinkle in some synonyms and long-tail variations. We don’t need to mention they need to be well-written and short, but they also have to be readable and able to tell the visitors the things they actually want to know.
The last thing to do is to add the schema markup – if you want to improve the appearance of your website in the SERPs, this is absolutely crucial since enhanced results will provide greater click-throughs. Keep in mind there are two types of the schema you’ll need – the product and the review one. We’ve already said that you should create same unique templates for each product page so they’ll have a consistent layout allowing you to add the schema markup which will be generated for every new product page.
3. Spread the web
Now that you’ve found your words and created the sentences it’s time to put them together in the site architecture. Although it sounds like the last and fairly easy step, this process can be quite tricky. The most important thing is to set up seamless internal navigation which is essential for both – Google that crawls and indexes your site and user experience.
The problem lies in the fact that every eCommerce business owner wants to grow as soon as possible so many of them use various hybrid platforms that will boost them with more features, modules, and capabilities. Most of them don’t want to keep the products in stock, but they forget to consider the fact that a good drop shipping platform needs to be SEO friendly. If it’s not, it can make a pretty big mess in your local navigation. You need to be sure that all the products are linked to category pages and that all categories are linked to the homepage or browsing your website will be like walking through a labyrinth.
Of course, before you build your links, you need to filter and sort the content based on size, colour, brand, price range, etc. because that will create additional multiple versions. Don’t forget to include links to products in your blog content because this is the way you’ll lead the users towards making a purchase. The last important thing is the breadcrumbs that will make sure that every step of the user’s journey is clickable. Besides the fact they’ll help the users to navigate easily and quickly back to parent categories they’ll also give them an immediate overview of the website structure since they also appear in Google’s search results.
Conclusion
Don’t forget to spread your web across mobile devices, too. With more and more people using tablets and smartphones for research and shopping being mobile-friendly is one of the most important conditions for the functionality of your eCommerce SEO strategy.
Although there are? Just’ three tips you’ve seen that each of them has quite a few steps you need to take care of and there’s no other way around it. You need to find precise words and build them into comprehensible sentences with a perfect SEO structure as your ultimate goal. These tips are not meant to be shortcuts but a step by step guide that will prevent you from getting lost along the way.
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