If you operate any type of ecommerce business, then you will know the importance of traffic and visitors to your website. The ecommerce industry is one that is worth billions of dollars each year, and this figure is growing all the time.
In an industry that was once perceived as being something that only very large companies could get involved in such as Amazon, eBay and others, it is now something that is open for everyone, regardless of the type or size or your company. You could be a company with just 5 employees, or even one run simply by yourself. E-commerce is something that everyone can get involved in.
The importance of SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization, and is the process that is carried out on a website to properly optimize it for the search engines such as Google and Bing, so that it ranks well for it’s main search phrases and keywords, which in turn, create more traffic to the website.
There are different types of SEO that can be applied to a website, such as local, international or affiliate SEO. A good SEO agency will analyse your website and your desired audience, whether it be local or worldwide, and come up with an SEO campaign for your business.
Introducing Ecommerce SEO
If you are running an ecommerce business, then you will need to use a number of ecommerce SEO aspects to your overall campaign. This can range from something as basic as changing the page meta titles for each product, crafting unique product descriptions and good image optimization, through to more complex factors such as page speed optimization and other things that will affect the user experience on your website.
A study carried out by SEMRush established that over 37% of all traffic to ecommerce websites came from searches at Google, Yahoo and Bing. The top three websites that appeared in the search results for any given term would get about 60% of all traffic. That statistic shows just how important good ecommerce SEO is for your website. Websites such as Preeco, who are one of the most successful ecommerce companies in Finland, know the importance of ecommerce SEO and have done a great job with their website.
Below we will take a look at some of the most important ecommerce SEO practices that you need to be including for your campaign.
Ecommerce Keyword research
Keyword research is one of the fundamentals of any SEO campaign. It determines which search phrases and keywords a website should target. These search terms will then be incorporated onto the website through the page title, meta description for the search engines, page headers and subheaders and the content itself.
It’s a good idea to take a look at what terms your competitors are targeting and weave some of those into your pages as well. Also, consider going after various long-tail keywords, rather than just the generic ones that everyone will try and target. Though long-tail keywords won’t get as much traffic as other terms, they can still be very profitable.
Image optimization
When it comes to ecommerce, one of the most important aspects of any product page are the images that are used. Everyone wants to get a good look at what they are buying, so having a range of high quality images is vital to your estore. However, some images can be very large in terms of file size.
For faster loading webpages, it’s very important that your images are resized and optimized. There is no point uploading an image with a width of 5600 pixels, when the maximum size the image will be displayed on your site is 1200 pixels.
In addition to the optimization of your images, there are a couple of other things that you should be doing. The first is to name your image files with keywords. For example, a file named blue-kids-tshirt.jpg will have a more positive impact in terms of image SEO than a file called dcs-2834.jpg. You should also be adding alt text when adding the images to your pages.
Well-written and unique content
If you are selling a product that many other websites are selling, what is going to make your page better and to stand out against the others? The content of each page is very important, and if you are using the same generic text that everyone else is using, then your pages aren’t really offering anything different.
However, if you can take the time to write a few hundred words of unique content about each product, then your page will be in a much better position to rank above the competition. It’s also a good idea to use bullet points if you want to make some basic information much more readable. Bullet points are much more effective than paragraphs of text, and help the site visitor find the most important information about a certain product.
Make sure your website functions on mobile devices
We are now at a stage where more people are getting online and visiting websites from their mobile phones than they are from using a desktop or laptop computer. It is vital that your website works well on mobile devices, as this is where the majority of your traffic will be coming from.
The speed of your website is also very important, as mentioned earlier, and when it comes to mobile internet access, if a site is too slow, the person will simply exit and go and search for another. You want your pages to be loaded in no more than 2-3 seconds. Any longer, and you are most likely losing a potential customer.
Speed optimization is a very important factor for SEO and is something that Google and other search engines pay close attention to. They want their search results to provide the user with the best possible experience, and aren’t really going to want to recommend a website that takes half a minute to load.
Some final thoughts
There are so many different aspects of SEO that are important for ecommerce business, and we’ve only just scratched the surface in this article of some of the most important ones.
If you are running an ecommerce business, it is vital that your website is functioning properly, is fast to load and offers a smooth user experience. You need your website to be better than your competition, and a solid SEO campaign can take several months before you start seeing results. However, don’t give up and think it’s a waste of time and money. It isn’t, and in the long run, it will be doing your business the world of good.
