If you are responsible for an eCommerce, you are aware of the importance to stand out through SEO and how difficult it is. In fact, standing out in search engines is becoming increasingly difficult. Google strives to offer the best results so big brands like Amazon, are everyday harder to beat.
From Kiwop, experts in SEO and eCommerce development in Magento and Prestashop, we want to help all online shops struggling to be visible (regardless their size), to improve their search results.
These 8 tips will help you improve the SEO of your e-commerce:
Let’s get started.
1- Link your product pages
Adding links on product pages to other products increases the number of pages that Google reaches. There are ways to implement these links:
- Offering complementary products and related products (of similar value or higher) with the one the user is looking at (Up Selling and Cross Selling)
- Showing related products that other users have bought on your store
- Offer related products based on the user’s purchase history
To find out more about Up Selling and Cross Selling, read our article about these two important strategies that every e-commerce should be applying.
This strategies will notably improve your ecommerce SEO.
2- Add text on your categories
Having an original, well-written text on each of your product categories can highly push the SEO of your e-commerce.
When writing the text for your categories, it is important to think about the Search Engines, but don’t forget to think about the users and how you can genuinely help your potential clients.
Additionally, you should strategically add the keywords the category focuses on, but try not to fill the text with them only thinking about serving search engines.
3- Personalised Product descriptions
Add personalised descriptions on your e-commerce product pages according to Google guidelines: original, useful text avoiding to add keywords excessively.
Making your product page different from your competitors will help you boost your rankings and also sell more. Do not just list the products characteristics, indicate as much useful information as possible (for whom the product is suitable and the utilities it may have, etc)
Most online stores use the descriptions of the products provided by the brand or the maker, this means that none of their products stand out from those of the competition.
Personalise your product descriptions and see you ecommerce SEO get everyday better.
4- Do not obsess with Keywords
Adding the keywords for which you want an item to rank on its page can benefit your SEO, but be careful and don’t over do it. Remember that if you add keywords in excess, you can get Google to penalise you.
5- Avoid duplicate content
It is very important not to index all URL parameters.
In eCommerce is very common to use parameters: filters by product color, size, score, and many others. Ordering by price or relevance and by product types. Many of these parameters do not change the content of the page, generating several URLs for the same content.
In order to avoid any duplicate content problem between the different pages created by the parameters:
Add a “rel = canonical” tag to the original page
Additionally, you need to indicate Google which parameters should be ignored when indexing pages on your website:
Google Webmaster Tools> Tracking> URL parameters
This will tell Google which are the most important pages among those found for the same products, avoiding duplicate content issues and enhancing the ranking capacity of that page.
6- Optimise your ecommerce images
Use quality and personalised images to get your potential customers to trust you more.
In addition to using quality images, and if possible, creating your own instead of using images provided by the maker, you need to make sure that all images added to your ecommerce are optimised.
- Name your images descriptively, in plain language and use keywords.
- Optimise your alt attributes carefully.
- Choose your image dimensions and product angles wisely.
- Reduce the file size of your images.
- Choose the right file type.
- Optimise your thumbnails.
- Use image sitemaps.
7- WPO – Web Page Optimisation and Loading Speed
In ecommerce WPO is one of the most important factors to ensure a good usability UX.
40% of users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load
Today’s users expect websites to load in less than 2 seconds, if your ecommerce loading speed is not optimised, your bounce rate will boost and your rankings on Search Engines will never increase.
Loading speed is one of the positioning factors that is gaining more relevance since the less time it takes to load your website, the more time Google will have to go from top to bottom.
8- Don’t forget MOBILE
This might seem really obvious, but you would be surprised at the amount of online stores that are not optimised for mobile:
Buttons are too small, product descriptions are difficult to read and the purchase process is frustrating.
You need to make sure your ecommerce adapts to any type of screen
According to this Forbes Study, a 20% of purchases in online stores are made from mobile devices.
We hope that these 8 tips will help improve your ecommerce SEO and you will boost your rankings. For further assistance on your eCommerce SEO strategy, don’t hesitate in contacting us.
