It’s so important to consider all of the options available when it comes to increasing traffic to your site, especially for eCommerce websites, where profit is driven directly by online sales. It is vital that your efforts are focused on converting every website visitor into a customer.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plays a huge role in ensuring your website gets the visibility it deserves and when done right, will greatly enhance your chances of catching the eye of a potential buyer.
There are many factors to consider where SEO is concerned but it can become particularly complex when you are managing an eCommerce website. There are many avenues and many issues you can face along the way if you don’t employ the right techniques. Here, we summarise some key SEO tips which will aid you in boosting the volume of organic traffic to your website:
Ensure your site has HTTPS
We know, we know, we have mentioned this one several times, in several blog posts previously but it’s first on the list for a reason. Nowadays, most sites are secure but when you do hit one that clearly isn’t, confidence in the safety of that site is zero and you aren’t likely to continue any further. Securing your website’s SSL certificate is crucial. If you don’t, this will not only affect your bounce rate, but it will very obviously negatively impact your volume of sales.
Unique product descriptions
When it comes to SEO, creating unique product descriptions, for all of your products, is essential. On the surface, you may think you are saving time by copying & pasting the manufacturer’s description for each product, or by using identical content to bracket similar products together, but the best strategy really is to dedicate a totally unique description for each and every product on your site.
This may seem like a lot of work but if your aim is for SEO to work long term (and it should be!) you have to concentrate your efforts in the short term. Redundant and duplicate content can severely damage your SEO campaign and by creating truly individual and unique product pages, you will have the ability to link these to specific keywords and to create a clean backlink profile. Further detail on optimising product pages for eCommerce websites can be found here.
Product Reviews
Reviews are great, not only for the user but search engines favour them too. Allowing your customers to post reviews demonstrates legitimacy and confidence in your products. Encourage your users to post product reviews on every product page, if possible. Popular eCommerce sites such as Amazon, ASOS, etc. are great examples of how this is done.
Optimise your site speed
It’s great to have high-resolution images on your site but not at the cost of diminishing load speed. Having too many high-resolution images can slow down your site dramatically, which is very bad for SEO. This doesn’t mean having poor quality images across your site, it simply means reducing the size and memory of the image.
Zoom-in features are great for eCommerce sites, allowing the user to hover over and set finer detail, rather than having to click into a larger image which takes a longer time to load. Zoom-in allows you to maintain your site load speed, whilst still allowing users the visibility of your images that they need.
Error 404 pages
eCommerce platforms can get messy very quickly because of their growing number of pages and because they evolve and change quickly. Site owners often tend to remove products from their site once they are out of stock and with products disappearing, this can cause bulk 404 errors, which is bad news for SEO. It’s important to keep on top of deleted pages by redirecting them and removing them from Google when they are gone for good. If your product is temporarily unavailable, a simple ‘Out of Stock’ label will help to prevent the 404 error tidal wave from ruining your site’s SEO performance.
Take advantage of local SEO
If your eCommerce store caters to a very specific region, it’s essential to employ local SEO measures as well. This can help you reach all those who live in that region or within that more specific group. Prioritising a more granular, local SEO strategy gives you a much better chance of ranking within local searches where customers look for products or services near them. And it would be a shame if you missed out on all that potential traffic.
Referral marketing
If you don’t have a referral program in place for your eCommerce store, it’s worth firing one up. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Include a simple way for customers to view reviews and recommendations, as well as enabling them to recommend your brand to others. It takes a little work on the front end, but it is so worthwhile. Take Dropbox for example. They grew from 100,000 users to over 4 million users in only 15 months, thanks to their referral program.
And finally…
There are many factors to consider when it comes to supporting your eCommerce website to perform well on Google (other search engines are also available). We hope that these tips have provided some inspiration and some food for thought but if you’re thirsty for more, why not get in touch with one of our SEO experts today?