Auditing your site’s SEO can be a terrifying experience. While it’s an essential first step to improving how your site ranks and functions, it’s also the entrance to a neverending rabbit hole that could leave you wanting to redo your site altogether.
While conquering SEO isn’t as simple as making a few tweaks, at the end of the day, it’s about providing users with what they’re looking for in a search-engine friendly way. Sometimes, a few simple tweaks can make all the difference.
Let’s discuss four SEO details that will quickly improve your store’s traffic.
User-Friendly Redirections
The Internet is always changing, perfectly illustrated by the ongoing birth and death of links. Many e-commerce stores have thousands upon thousands of pages, meaning broken links are inevitable. While Google has said 404 pages don’t directly impact search results, they can contribute to a poor user experience, which over time can send signals to search engines that you’re not satisfying user intent.
In the ‘Crawl’ section of Google Search Console, you’ll find a list of your store’s broken links. Go through each one to determine whether the page’s content exists elsewhere on your site. Many times, this will happen because the URL was updated and the old page wasn’t redirected to the new URL.
If the content doesn’t exist elsewhere, consider the page’s value to the site. If it is valuable, create a new page and 301 redirect the 404 page to it. If the page is no longer useful to have, then either leave it as a 404, or if there’s a higher level page that makes sense to redirect the user to, like a category page, go for that.
What you don’t want to do is redirect all your broken links to your homepage. Users are ending up on these 404 pages for a reason, so you still want to serve them helpful content. A broad redirection to a homepage will cause many users to pogo stick, sending negative signals to search engines.
Customized 404 Page
For e-commerce store owners specifically, staying on top of product pages is crucial. A store with a niche selling beauty products from home, for example, will continually handle new products and see old ones expire. This will cause 404 pages to pop up all the time. Instead of trying to redirect these pages every time a product or brand is discontinued, create a custom 404 page to aid searchers’ next steps. With an eye-catching graphic and short, playful copy explaining that the page is no longer available, users will become aware of the issue and are more likely to continue their sessions.
To further reduce 404 bounce rate, include a few relevant links on the page. Listing top-level category pages allow the user to continue with their expected shopping experience. If the 404 is an old blog, list a handful of your most-visited blog articles. You can also include high-level pages like FAQ, homepage or evergreen resources that might interest a prospective visitor.
Alt Image Text
After a rollercoaster couple of years, image search is back as a valuable channel. According to Moz’s 2017 State of the Searcher, nearly 27 percent of searches start with Google Images. This is second among all web search properties, only behind the expected Google.com. It’s no surprise that humans resonate with images, but how do you get your product images to be more visible than competitors’? This can be accomplished with alt image text and—to a lesser extent—image title tags.
Alt image text is an accessibility feature. Screen readers aid blind and visually impaired users by reading the contents of a page, including images, which is done through alt text. In other cases, alt text will display if an image fails to load. Instead of an empty spot and broken image icon in place of a Chicago skyline picture, the blank image would read something like “Panoramic view of Chicago skyline as seen from Willis Tower observation deck.” Every image on your site should have descriptive alt image tags, usually around 125 characters due to some screen readers’ restrictions.
Well-Written Copy
Whether it’s your home page messaging, ‘About’ page, FAQ, contact us or category and product pages, you want your content to be captivating, consistent and aid to your brand’s credibility. Typos, poor grammar and bland language can kill a conversion in its tracks. How to get around this problem? Hire a professional copywriter and editor. This might seem like one area to save in your budget, but aside from the products you sell, how will you stand apart from your competitors?
Do not to gloss over the quality of your product descriptions in favor of the evergreen areas of your site. Thorough product descriptions that are also fun to read can generate additional traffic if you sell products sold by other sites, not to mention seriously improve your product conversion rate.
No site is ever finished with SEO efforts. Google will keep establishing new guidelines and developments that’ll continue to inform SEO trends. But SEO plans don’t have to be inflexible long-term roadmaps that take months to yield results. No matter your store’s current state, focusing on these four SEO details will quickly improve your store’s traffic, and for only minor time and budget expenses at that.