If you are into an E-commerce industry, you must be pretty aware of the importance of search engine optimization – SEO. Doesn’t this term sounds heavy sometimes! Well, it is very complicated at times but Thanks to Google and the webmasters that the best practices of SEO are excellent in bringing up great rankings and CTRs for your E-commerce store.
You know once upon a time, the e-commerce sites were just restricted to the colossal sites of the ’90s, like Amazon, eBay, but today, there are many build-it-yourself options like BigCommerce, Shopify, and Squarespace, that are dramatically changing the basics of SEO for the e-commerce industry.
In the interim there is a drift seen in the custom-built websites as well, for example, gone are the days when every URL that ended with a long string was acceptable -xyz.com/w89gm79sal;712wi-blah-blah-blah. But it’s no more a relevant factor for boosting an E-commerce site, rather there a whole lot of revolution in building the best SEO tactics for your online store.
So, what does actually SEO do to your E-commerce website?
SEO covers various tactics but the core principle is that you’re actually assisting Google and other search engines to better understand what your E-commerce website is all about and what it sells. This in return augments your prominence and visibility by significantly elevating the chance that search engines will list your site in the search results by putting it right in front of your potential customers. Moreover, today just reaching the first page is not enough, you shall rank #1. According to a study, in 2011 Search Engine Watch reported that Optify discovered “websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent, and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent. Now, it must be a bit clear that the trends in ON-SITE SEO are changing immeasurably.
Do you want to know a step-by-step guide for the on-site SEO to rank your E-commerce site #1? Read this article further, it is insightful…
Keyword Research
The very first step for any on-site SEO campaign is to get those perfect keywords that are needed to optimize your website. In case you miss out the right keyword that is relevant to your online business, you will miss out on all the other efforts and practices to optimize your websites. You won’t get the traffic, you won’t be able to pull the target audience, and you will not gain prominence on the search engines. On the other hand, wisely spend some time to do the keyword research and this will make it easier for you to optimize your website later on. Try to segregate less competitive keywords so that you are in a better situation to calculate how much exertion you need to put in order to rank well. There are some powerful marketing tools for running down your keyword research like – Google Keyword planner, SEO quake and more like these.
Competition Analysis
After you’ve done the keyword research, you’re half way there! Bingo, proceed for the competitor research. This is a very crucial step as it will tell you what are your competitors doing, which are the keywords they are using and are ranking for their business. The larger competitors especially ill have most likely already put their legwork for optimizing their website; still, you can study and dig out some trade secrets from the competition analysis. Particularly, start with analyzing the keywords on your homepage as well as their top product pages. For this start, by using the Moz browser extension to see the SEO title and description your competitors use in their title tags.
SSL Certificate
Lastly, would like to mention one technical aspect of the E-commerce website security. SSL certificate installation is quite important today to build the trust of your customer on your E-commerce website. Implementing EV SSL certificate gives you more secure transactions and data security for all your online payments and communication. Thus, will all the above steps in mind, putting EV SSL certificate authenticates your E-commerce website efficiently.
Technical SEO
Now come to the technical part of on-site SEO which is the core for running out a good SEO for your E-commerce store. Technical SEO is mainly about making sure your site has good uptime; take less time to load, and offers secure browsing to the users and assist good bot and user navigation through all its pages. Here’s a roundup of some things that you need to monitor persistently to ensure a high standard of technical health for your E-commerce website:
The Robots.txt File
This document tells which pages are to be accessed, which the bots to be welcomed are and which pages are dead or gone as off-limits. The robots.txt file is a very minute document that search bots access when they visit your site. When robots.txt disallows the access to a certain page or a directory path within a website, bots from other responsible sites will stick to the instruction and will not visit that page at all.
Types of URL
In an E-commerce store, the types of URLs that are user-friendly, SEO-friendly and those which the bar will access are: Checkout pages – Self-explanatory, they are the most used by shoppers to confirm their purchases. Dynamic pages – These pages are created via unique user requests such as internal searches and page filtering combinations. They have no interest to the shoppers, though, but technically they are important.
The XML Sitemap
Another technical aspect of on-site SEO guide – The XML sitemap that is an important document that search bots read to get useful information. This file lists all the pages that you want Google and other spiders to crawl.
Crawl Errors
While doing on-site SEO for an online store it is imperative to make sure there are minimal crawl errors, because, in an online store, products are characteristically added and deleted depending on a lot of factors thus when indexed product or category pages are deleted, it doesn’t automatically mean that search engines mechanically will forget about them. You will have to tell Google about it!
Ultimately, for a good on-site SEO for an online store higher degree of crawlability promotion is important with relevance to the pages. Adding all these to optimization tasks to your site which we discussed above should go to your maintenance bucket list, although there are any more to add to the list, but here we have kept it to the prudent ones that are rewarding and are well worth the effort.