Ecommerce SEO: How To Get More Traffic & Sales To Your Online Store

Key Takeaways

do you want to massively increase the traffic and sales on your e-commerce website well by implementing a strong e-commerce seo strategy you can do just that in this video i'll tell you how to optimize your ecommerce website not only for your users but for search engines too hey it's emily here from fat joe where we provide seo services designed for agencies and marketing teams so before i start i want to explain exactly what i mean by seo seo stands for search engine optimization and is the process of optimizing your website for the search results the aim here is to improve the visibility of your website by increasing your position within the search results for relevant keywords the keyword here is visibility you want to be the most visible website in the search results so what's the difference between ecommerce seo and normal seo well in theory they're pretty much the same thing the only difference is that in ecommerce seo you focus more on optimizing the product related pages ecommerce seo is a box of tools and strategies that you can use to optimize any product related page on your website product pages need to tell your customer about your brand describe the product accurately and make it easier for them to convert there are three main types of e-commerce seo on-site technical and off-site on-site seo refers to any actions you can take on your actual website to improve your ranking this includes optimizing title tags meta descriptions the page content images and more title tags tell the search engines exactly what to call your page within the search results they also tell the user exactly what your page is about be specific and try to include some long tail keywords that are relevant to the content also play around with the vocabulary that you use around these keywords but make sure that they're clear and concise you can even measure the results by doing some a b testing next make sure that you have detailed product descriptions on every single product page i know this seems like a pretty basic tip but you'd be surprised at how many websites include nothing but the product name as always include relevant keywords throughout the content but avoid keyword stuffing try to create lengthy content of around a thousand words that clearly communicates the features benefits and attributes of the product images are key for every e-commerce website and although it's tempting to put in heavy high-res images because they look great unfortunately they can really slow down the page loading speed of your website remember that google is adding page experience to their ranking factors and if you're watching this past may 2021 they already have slow loading speeds massively impacts the user experience which is not good news for those looking to dominate the search results we go into even more detail on how to optimize for on-site seo on our blog technical seo is about optimizing the inner workings of the website the aim here is to make it as easy as possible for your users to navigate whilst also making it as easy as possible for the search engine spiders to crawl i'm going to take you through how to fix two of the most common technical seo issues for e-commerce websites first of all i want to talk about slow loading speed because your users won't wait i know i've already touched upon this but it's actually one of the most common issues that can be easily solved you can check your website's page speed by using google page speed insights this free tool will not only give you a load speed score but it'll also tell you what you can do to improve the load speed of your website this includes removing any unnecessary elements of your pages and any random plugins that you no longer use next we have 404 redirect your users will be faced with the 404 redirect when you've removed the content of a page or removed the page altogether but the url still exists for them to access best thing to do is to set up a 301 redirect this will take your users to a similar page or at least to the home page that way you can retain around 90 of the seo that you built up for that url and you will not harm the user experience however if this can't be done for whatever reason make sure that your 404 error page is at least interesting or provide some sort of information or link back to another page finally we have off-site seo off-site seo refers to all the actions you can take outside of your website to boost your ranking including link building there are a variety of link building types which you can check out on our website but i just want to give you my top tips for ecommerce websites tip number one is to focus on building links to your category pages rather than your product pages but i'm trying to sell specific products shouldn't i be building links to these pages well the answer is yes and no although it's tempting to plough straight into building links to the most popular or margin-rich products unless these products are never going to be removed or changed the most effective long-term strategy is to build links to category pages doing this allows you the flexibility to add and remove products as you wish without negatively impacting your link building efforts this could mean creating a top selling category building links to this page and displaying all your top selling products here now let's talk about content marketing content marketing is the practice of creating blogs videos social posts and other media to generate interest in your products no matter which of the three types of e-commerce seo you choose to do content is always king when you produce quality product related content users have more of a reason to visit your site and it gives external websites an incentive to link back to you as far as ecommerce seo tips go maintaining a good quality blog is one of the most important there aren't many things more effective at providing your users with in-depth information that helps them overcome their pain points if for instance you find that your users are asking google specific questions around your product you could use these as blog titles and provide all the answers examples include buying guides product reviews ebooks and product setup guides always remember that the content you create should provide value and keywords should be included naturally choosing a tone of voice that resonates with your target audience is also vital for attracting and retaining your customers attention but how do you do that first of all take note of where your users spend most of their time whether this is facebook instagram youtube reddit or any other platform now research the kind of language that they're using across these platforms looking out for specific words or phrases make a note of these and make sure to use them throughout your content including your product descriptions and finally don't forget videos videos are so engaging and can help you show off your products and services videos are ranked in google and of course you've got youtube so this can massively increase your visibility now let's talk about targeting rich snippets rich snippets are the small nuggets of information that appear within the search results learning how to target these is particularly important for e-commerce seo because google won't automatically display them although it sounds complicated setting this up is actually pretty simple google offers a tool called the structured data markup helper once you publish your content you use this free tool to tell google exactly what exists within that piece of content you'll choose this based on the rich snippets that you see appearing already for your target keywords in the case of e-commerce seo you'll want to make heavy use of the products category as this will tell google that you're selling online best practices for qualifying for rich snippets include answering questions within your content concisely and in a way that your users and search engines can understand you could also provide unique or novel statistics around a particular point this will help to make your content unique and stand out to google you could also provide list-based articles or listicles which will help google create a quick rundown of the contents the final point i want to talk about is local e-commerce seo local seo is the process of optimizing your website for users within a specific geographic area this type of seo is specifically relevant to those who own a physical store or offer local delivery many e-commerce companies don't target local keywords so there's plenty of opportunity here to attract nearby customers and corner the market google my business is arguably the top ranking factor for local seo this platform allows you to tell google critical information about your business the more you can optimize it the more likely you are to rank highly for local search queries simply set up your listing add your details including the area that you operate in add images and then publish your listing don't forget to monitor your google my business listing i say this because google offers a service called insights which will tell you exactly how your customers found your listing whether this be from google search or google maps and it will tell you what they did once they found it you can use this information to support your e-commerce seo by better optimizing for local searches ultimately ecommerce seo is a strategy you can use to boost conversions gain more clicks and improve the visibility of your products and services within the search results as well as this having a strong content marketing strategy could make and break a user's decision to buy from you which is the ultimate goal if you would like even more detail on how to optimize your e-commerce site you can check out our e-commerce seo guide on our website i've included the link in the description below and don't forget to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe for even more seo tips