Ecommerce SEO
Ecommerce SEO is the name of optimising a website to ensure it ranks higher on Search Engines and get the maximum targeted organic traffic. Since the traffic coming from search engines is Free, companies tend to spend quite a lot of money into performing in-depth SEO of their website to get the maximum benefits from this free traffic for long term. Almost all online businesses, including services websites, membership websites or E-Commerce websites tend to perform heavy SEO on their websites to rank higher in SERPs.
The ROI that SEO gives is better than any other marketing medium; hence it is apparently the best possible solution for any online business that doesn’t want to spend a fortune to get the sales. Unlike, paid Search Marketing, SEO takes time and results are shown after several weeks, hence while doing SEO, both the SEOs and business owners should have passions.
An E-Commerce website is very different in nature. They are based primarily on product images rather than on long content of a web page. The basic reason of this is that a potential customer is most likely to buy a product if he/he likes the images of the product and they are least interested in reading the description of the products. Some websites use Videos as well to describe the product, which is by far better than the text based content on a product page. This actually contradicts with basic SEO concepts, as they tend to incline more towards text-based content than any other thing. Therefore you have to perform some key SEO tweaks in an E-Commerce website to ensure that it ranks high like any other content-based website even with lack of content.
Here we are listing some of the key Optimisation steps required for an E-Commerce Portal to get the maximum sales and highly targeted traffic from Search Engine.
Few Key Onsite SEO Steps for an E-Commerce Website:
- Meta Title: The title is the key if you are looking to rank your product page higher in search results, having the main keyword in the product/page title can do wonders to your website rankings. Avoid using generic words like “Product 1” or “Option 1” in the title of a product page.
- Meta Description: Meta descriptions were initially understood as the snippet that is used to describe your website on Search results page, to entice the potential customer to click your link. But recently it is found out that having keywords within Meta Description can help increasing your rankings as well. So add your main keywords in Meta Description of your pages as well.
- Canonical Tags: The biggest downfall of having a large E-commerce portal is the duplicate content that is auto-generated within the website. It is critical to define canonical URLs on every page to minimise the chances of receiving a duplicate content penalty from Google. I would set up a proper “rel canonical” tags across your product pages.
- Unique Description: Instead of copying the product description from manufacturer`s website, you should be using unique content for each product page and home page of the site.
- Breadcrumb: Most SEOs tend to forget about this, but you should be using breadcrumbs on the entire site`s pages to ensure strong internal linking structure.
- Sitemap: A standard XML sitemap is created to help search crawlers find and crawl all the pages on your website.
This list is not complete but gives you a brief overview of how I can optimize an E-Commerce portal for better search engine rankings. Keep in mind that ranking high on Search Engines takes time hence the SEO strategy should always be long term.