Top 5 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Boost Sales
- October 27, 2020
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” You could be selling the best products imaginable, but if no one is seeing them, and you’re not getting sales, what is the point?
SEO is crucial for your ecommerce business. When done right, optimising your ecommerce store SEO will drive more traffic and convert visitors into paying customers.
You must identify with your customers and use search-friendly content to target their needs. SEO makes sure your customers are getting the relevant information they need to ultimately attract and direct them to your product.
Why should you care about getting to the first page of Google anyway? Research tells us that while the top result on Google tends to have a click-through rate above 20%, the drop off is steep—falling below 1.5% for anything after the first page.
Due to the current pandemic, we find ourselves in an ever-evolving digital world. Therefore, you’re not alone if you’re wondering how to get your ecommerce store out of a slump.
So where should you start?
1. SEO Audit
A technical audit is a useful tool to help catch errors that can be hurting your site and preventing customers from converting.
Many issues plague ecommerce sites from getting good visibility in the search result pages, such as:
* Not having the correct redirect strategy in place once products are out of stock
* Incorrect URL structures
* Slow loading times
* Pages missing a meta description
* Duplicate content
* Broken links
* Titles too long or short
* Low word count, and many more
Once you know the findings of your audit, you can begin to ‘fix’ any issues.
2. Keyword Research
Keywords impact almost every SEO related task, and without them, it’s impossible to optimise your product and category pages, site architecture, and URLs, for example.
In-depth keyword research is important because it impacts all optimisations moving forward. You need to rank for the right keywords – not just for any that will gain you traffic – but ones which will turn traffic into sales.
Using an analytics tool like SEMrush enables you to collect information such as average monthly search volumes, keyword fit, and high ranking keywords which can lead to conversions.
If you find that with some keywords you would be competing with much bigger companies in the market, you could look at longer-tail keywords to compete for.
Transactional keywords target those customers who are ready to buy, yet some customers are on your website to browse and are not ready to buy, so you also need to include keywords for that audience. The table below gives you an idea of how the keywords can change depending on the intent.
3. Consistent Content
The future of search is only getting smarter, meaning it’s imperative to ensure your content is relevant, helpful, and of high quality (while including those keywords!)
Content Marketing and SEO must go hand-in-hand in order for you to stay relevant and be a trusted leader in your field.
Every ecommerce store should be creating content, whether it be via written blogs, ebooks, video, or audio — content is king.
The benefits of your content go way beyond higher search ranking. The conversion rate for websites with content marketing is nearly six times higher than websites without it.
Some users are in the informational stage and want to find out more about the product before they buy it. When it comes to content marketing for ecommerce, first learn about your customer, then you can promote the solution to your customer’s problem(s).
The frequency of your content is vital, as seen in a recent study outlining the impact that fewer blogs can have on your traffic:
Content Marketing is an organic way to implement keywords and be optimised for search engines, which is vital when you learn that up to 80% of users ignore paid search results.
Top Tip: You can also update old content on your website to increase traffic and encourage sales.
4. Link Building
Google doesn’t just analyse your website’s content, it now looks at how many people have linked to your content, and further to that, it looks at the quality of the links.
The more reputable sources which link back to your content, the higher position you will rank on Google.
A link building strategy enables you to not only build relationships with key influencers and establish your brand as a leader in your field but also to increase traffic and improve lead generation.
Using an online tool such as AHRefs, you can check another website’s authority and relevance and determine if it is a ‘high quality’ link worth pursuing.
It should go without saying, but bad links are detrimental to your SEO success.
Link building techniques are in abundance. However, they can include:
* Blogger/influencer outreach – for example reaching out and asking for reviews of your products
* Content creation that’s shareable i.e. press releases, long-form blog how to’s, podcasts, and infographics
* Guest posting to sites of a similar nature
* Attendance at events, being shortlisted for awards, etc means your company link will feature on those websites
* Internal linking – providing your audience with further reading options within your content. To be optimised, your links must be relevant and use clear anchor text.
5. Website Optimisation
When you are evaluating your ecommerce SEO, it’s vital to implement a strategy to improve your website conversion rate.
Users do up to 70% of their purchasing research online. It’s therefore essential to optimise your ecommerce store to help customers find what they need – and buy it from you.
Visitors who are led to your site must have a simple, user-friendly experience if they are to convert into customers. This means making any changes necessary to your product pages, URL structure, images, internal links, and so on.
A speedy loading time is also a big SEO ranking factor. What is your website loading time like?
Did you know, according to a study by Socpub, average smartphone conversion rates are up 64% compared to the average desktop conversion rates? Therefore to compete and to increase your sales, your website should be fully optimised for mobile.
To conclude…
SEO makes it easy for your target customers to locate you and ultimately buy from you – and it only grows stronger over time, leaving a lasting effect on any website.
Not only will it boost your sales, but the authority that SEO provides will generate brand awareness and maximise your potential influence within your industry, as well as ensure you build trusting relationships with your customers.
Are you ready to invest in the SEO process for your ecommerce business but could still do with some help taking that step in the right direction?
Contact us to find out how Fly High Media can help you to define your ecommerce SEO goals, perform keyword research and a bespoke SEO audit, and deliver a measurable ecommerce SEO strategy to turn your traffic into sales.
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