The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your E-commerce Website for Search Engines

Are you selling products online and want to reach a wider audience? If yes, you need to have a well-optimized website.

Why? Because there are several benefits to e-commerce website optimization. The most obvious reason is that it helps take advantage of the significantly growing e-commerce sector.

The e-commerce industry has rapidly grown from $1.3 trillion in 2014 to $5.7 trillion in 2022. This figure is expected to cross $8 trillion by 2027.

With more people shopping online, e-commerce SEO's importance cannot be overstated. You can drive more sales, attract visitors, and increase your website’s visibility by improving your e-commerce SEO.

In this blog, we will understand why e-commerce SEO is important and the SEO best practices that you can follow to optimize your e-commerce website for search engines. No matter if you are an experienced e-commerce retailer willing to improve your website’s SEO or a new business owner, this guide will help you succeed.

Why is E-commerce SEO Important?

An essential aspect of digital marketing for e-commerce websites is SEO. However, the SEO for e-commerce is not similar to traditional SEO. That’s because e-commerce SEO involves category pages, product page optimization, and other elements of online stores to rank higher in SERP.

Basically, e-commerce SEO requires careful product page optimization, including meta descriptions, product descriptions, title tags, and more.

In the short term, e-commerce SEO will help with web page ranking so they appear higher in the search results.

This will help you drive more traffic because almost 75% of users do not scroll past the first Google search page. It means if your website does not appear on the first page, chances are you will miss out on most digital traffic.

In the long term, e-commerce SEO will help you find more users from organic searches.

Since your website has been perfectly optimized, you can get qualified leads and offer your customers the smoothest journey. This will significantly increase your retention rate.

E-commerce SEO Best Practices

If you have not already optimized your e-commerce website, this is your sign to do it.

Follow these 6 ways to optimize e-commerce sites for search engines to gain significant benefits for your business.

1. Perform Keyword Research

As an e-commerce business owner, it’s your responsibility to conduct keyword research the right way for your store.

Your goal should be to find the most relevant keywords for your niche and also to understand the buyer’s intent behind each keyword. To do this, you can look at the phrases that people use when searching for an item and the results that are shown to them via Google.

You will often see two types of keyword intent:

Information Keyword Intent

It is when users try to understand a particular topic in detail or find answers to a question. In such a situation, the user is not trying to make a purchase. Instead, they want to understand a particular product or niche in detail. For instance, if you have an outdoor clothing store, an informational keyword like “What is the best apparel for hiking” will work for you.

Commercial Keyword Intent

It is when users try to search for a product to make a purchase. Customers most often use commercial keywords when they know what to purchase but don’t know where to purchase it from. Commercial keywords appear when you type certain terms into Google “find new laptop deals” or something else.

It is when users try to search for a product to make a purchase. Customers most often use commercial keywords when they know what to purchase but don’t know where to purchase it from. Commercial keywords appear when you type certain terms into Google “find new laptop deals” or something else.

2. Optimize Product Pages

If you want to attract new customers and grow the search traffic for your online website, you need to optimize its on-page elements like meta description, site structure, and heading tags.

Remember that not every on-page element needs to be optimized. You can simply focus on reviews, images, and product descriptions to gain satisfactory results.

Optimize Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are important because they offer keyword-rich content that Google uses to rank a site higher. Also, it encourages users to purchase products once they land on a page. You can maximize the impact of your product description by adding keywords, CTAs, and unique images.

Optimize Images

Images are a neglected area of on-page SEO for e-commerc. But by carefully using images, you can show your products at their best. Image optimization increases search engine rankings & traffic and helps with e-commerce conversion optimization. You can optimize images by providing captions with alt tags, keeping the images small, and using keywords in file names.

Feature Reviews

Reviews help users understand the pros and cons of a product so they can decide whether to make a purchase or not. It also helps build trust with potential customers and encourages them to leave reviews after they make a purchase.

3. User-Friendly Website

Your e-commerce store must offer a good user experience so people can stay engaged and easily find what they are looking for. To enhance your website’s UX, you need to have a better site structure, visually appealing aesthetics, and good design.

But user experience is not just about making a website look good. It is also about making the website function properly. In simple terms, user experience includes everything from good design and ease of use to the overall “feel” of the website.

By offering a good user experience, you can help customers find what they are looking for and keep them engaged. Website owners often think UX does not affect SEO but it does. In fact, UX has a direct impact on how well a website ranks.

Google uses Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics to analyze a page’s user experience. Below are the three factors that Google uses to measure a site’s user experience:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

It refers to how useful Google thinks a page is for users as per the largest blocks’ load time.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

It measures the number of interactive elements and buttons present on a website after the page has completely loaded.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

It refers to the time taken to respond to a user’s input.

If you want to enhance your Core Web Vitals, you should:

4. Avoid Duplicate Pages and Content

Avoid using content that’s already published by someone else as it will reduce the legitimacy of your website. Even if you don’t have time to write fresh content, you can always reduce the amount of duplication on your website.

Here’s how you can do it:

5. Focus on Page Speed

A website’s page loading speed is measured by how long it takes an internet user to open a particular webpage. Page speed is a ranking factor because users don’t wait for a long time while a site loads.

Almost 19% of shoppers are likely to abandon a web page if it is taking longer than two to three seconds to load. You can use tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to know about your website’s current speed.

Website speed can be significantly reduced if there’s a problem with your web host, your site has too many scripts, your site has too much content for the server to handle or images are not optimized.

If the speed is too slow, you can:

Besides these 6 ways, you can focus on adding category-level navigation, more internal links, live chat, product recommendations, implementing proper heading structure, and creating a sense of urgency to optimize your e-commerce website for search engines.

6. Quality Content

E-commerce SEO does not just revolve around keywords and images but it also focuses on the written content. By regularly posting high-quality content, you can attract organic traffic, improve your website’s ranking, establish your brand, and gain customer experience.

You can focus on different types of content like:

You must also try to understand your audience in a better way so you can rightly address their main concerns and problems. Whenever you build a content strategy, focus on knowing your users’ preferred content, establishing a content calendar, and measuring & tweaking results.

Conclusion

Focusing on SEO for e-commerce can help bring in new customers, build a loyal audience, and boost website visibility. It might seem a lot but you can take the load off your shoulders by availing of e-commerce website development services from Protonshub Technologies.

Reach out to us today!

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Ekta Singh

"Senior Content Writer"

Ekta Singh is a rookie food experimentalist and k-drama fan with 4+ years of experience in writing. Bridging gaps between companies and customers through conversion-driven content is her forte. She believes in writing stories for a living and living life for exploring places.