Foolproof Strategies to Make Your e-Commerce Site More SEO-Friendly

It’s hard to imagine life without the internet. From indulging in entertaining material to accomplishing various daily tasks, the worldwide web has undoubtedly dominated a huge part of our everyday lives. Since 1991, the Internet became available for commercial use and has served as the home for various types and sizes of businesses.

Today, in a world dominated by Google searches and online platforms, e-Commerce is considered the key if you want to expand your business at a faster rate. But the question now is: how can you get your brand and e-Commerce site noticed in a highly saturated market with plenty of competition?

Simple: with search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO.

Without SEO, It’s nearly impossible for e-commerce businesses to survive and thrive today. To be able to generate sales, you need to rank higher than your competitors on Google and be right in front of your target customers. A solid SEO strategy can easily achieve this for you.

However, making your e-Commerce site SEO-friendly can be challenging due to the complexity of the job. In this article, we list down the ways to make your e-Commerce site more SEO-friendly so you get more targeted traffic (and customers) from the search results.

  1. e-Commerce Keyword Research

Yes, keywords still matter. If you get keyword research wrong, one of two things will happen:

  • You’ll rank for keywords that don’t target your ideal customers or get a lot of quality traffic.
  • You won’t make it to the first page of Google because your target keywords are too difficult to rank for.

Neither of these situations is ideal, which is why it’s crucial to perform proper e-Commerce keyword research. With proper keyword research, you can easily target the search terms that are fairly easy to rank for, alongside decent search volume and high conversion rates.

However, there is also more to selecting keywords rather than simply looking at how many people search for them or how difficult they are to rank for. To use the best keywords possible in your content, you should also factor in commercial intent or buyer intent.

Additionally, make sure you strategically place your keywords all over your content. Mention your primary keywords in your title tags, product headlines, meta descriptions, sub-headlines, and image alternate attributes. It’s also good practice to scatter latent semantic index (LSI) keywords throughout the content. These are supplementary keywords that will help Google better understand your page in context.  

  1. Simplify your site/URL architecture

Many e-Commerce sites tend to have tens and even hundreds of product pages. Because of this, you need to carefully plan your website’s structure. Some of the product pages may not be indexed on Google if your site doesn’t follow a proper architecture.  

Here are the golden rules for the proper architecture of an e-Commerce site:

  1. Keep it simple yet scalable.
  2. Ensure your main target keywords are contained within your URLs.
  3. Manage your categories or deep pages. As much as possible, keep each page three clicks away from your home page.

A good way to handle your e-commerce website’s category issues to technically differentiate your category pages and product pages. For instance, keeping three clicks away from the home page doesn’t necessarily mean that all your pages need to be within three clicks in the navigational menu. What matter is how deep the pages are from the home page. If a product page exists within so many directories, there’s a very limited chance that Google will index the page and for it to rank.

This is because Google also has limited resources. You can’t simply expect for Google to automatically save all your web pages in their index. When they visit your website, they will only save or crawl the most important pages of your site. If a product page is located after so many directories or categories, the crawler bots will think that it’s not an important page. But if a page exists right after the main root domain, this indicates to Google that it's a key page on your site with valuable content for users.

  1. Optimize on-site content

Content – perhaps the most important part of any e-Commerce strategy regarding SEO.

For many e-Commerce sites, the home page, individual product pages, and main product category page drive the majority share of overall organic traffic. However, most online stores forget to optimize or add value-adding content on these pages.

When you want your e-Commerce site to be more SEO-friendly, you need to remember that content is and will always be king. It’s good practice to have at least 300-500 words on category and product pages. The more value-adding content you have, the higher chances of you ranking at the top of Google.

Your content shouldn’t focus only on category and product descriptions too. You can include other pieces of information like Reviews, FAQ’s, and other elements relevant to the page. This will help to increase the overall content of the page and possibly answer more search queries.

  1. Reliable Hosting & Trust Signals

Page load speed is a very crucial aspect of any e-Commerce site, as it can help decrease your bounce rate. Make sure to subscribe to a dedicated server or a managed hosting plan that offers excellent page load speed.

Aside from speed and performance, trust signals are also an essential element of an SEO-friendly e-Commerce website.

Here’s a list of features you can implement to the authority and trustworthiness of your site:

  • Install site wide SLL (https://). This signals not only to visitors that you’re a trustworthy site, but it also lets Google know that there won’t be any risks involved when they send users to your website. In fact, this is a crucial ranking factor for SEO.
  • Make sure there’s an option to add and manage customer reviews and testimonials on products.
  • Obtain Google Trusted Store Certification and other certification. This is especially important if you’ve just set up your site as it’s the best way to prove and increase your online shop’s credibility. Once you have a substantial transaction history, get the Google Trusted store certification as soon as possible. You can also get other certifications such as “Money Back Guarantee” or a certification stating that payments are secured by trusted financial networks such as Visa Mastercard or American Express.

But other certifications and information can be included on your website like below.

All of these factors contribute to your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (otherwise known as E-A-T), which is a valuable ranking factor.

Conclusion

If you want your site to get thousands of monthly visitors, you’ll need the help of e-Commerce SEO. A solid e-Commerce SEO campaign can result in hundreds or even thousands of extra sales. And it doesn’t have to take you years to achieve that milestone.

Simply follow the steps above and you’ll stay ahead of your competition. You’ll start ranking on the first page of Google — and even in the top 3 results - for all your online store’s main keywords.