SEO for Ecommerce, with iPullRank’s Michael King

Many newly established businesses need to learn how to boost their search rankings. Search engines use ranking factors to show the most relevant search results. Since many companies rely on paid advertising to generate fast results they need to become searchable and increase their website traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) offers organic traffic that can benefit ecommerce websites for the long term even if you no longer have to spend money on advertising.

Relevance of SEO for Ecommerce

Try searching for a product you want to buy on Google. More often than not, you base your decision on the best price offered on the first search engine result page shown. SEO is essential for any business to generate more revenue. It provides organic traffic without needing paid marketing ads or paid traffic. 

Online stores rely on customers to purchase on their sites to generate income. However, it would not be accessible if your website is not shown in the top search engine result pages. 

You might be wondering why SEO is important for ecommerce. Simply put, it is the best marketing strategy for businesses, providing more visibility by improving your rankings. Ecommerce businesses rely on attracting more customers to grow, and higher traffic on your website shows the high quality of products or services you offer that generates more revenue.

Your objective should be that once a consumer searches for a specific product or service, your business website is one of the first ones they’ll see. Small to medium businesses have a good enough chance to compete with bigger companies although it can be challenging. 

SEO for an ecommerce site is the best long-term strategy that ensures your business’s visibility in the highly competitive online business environment. When utilized correctly, SEO ranks your business higher than any other prominent companies online. 

Understanding Ecommerce SEO

For users and consumers, shopping has been made easy ever since ecommerce was introduced and everyone can shop from wherever they are and at any time of day. A simple web search can generate results for the products or services you need through Google or any other search engine. 

Online business owners must ensure that you are directed to their website each time you search for something related to their business and purchase anything they offer. People don’t have the time or patience to check every site available to see which deal is the best. It’s always the top search results fighting to get conversions and revenue. 

Ecommerce SEO optimizes how their business shows up once a customer does a web search, showing consumers that their offers can compete with other stores. However, no matter how impressive or affordable your products are, it won’t matter if they are not visible to any consumer. 

SEO for ecommerce sites ensures that any customer doing a web search related to your business will be led to your website, focusing on generating targeted traffic from their customers and ensuring conversions.

What is Ecommerce SEO?

Online stores want to generate traffic without needing paid advertisements to lead customers to their landing pages. SEO focuses on improving your business’s organic ranking. 

Ecommerce Search Engine Optimization (SEO) boosts organic traffic, enabling consumers to be led to your website without paying for any traffic. It makes ecommerce sites more visible to consumers by ensuring your business is one of the top listed websites on the result page once you conduct a web search. 

It makes use of specific keywords ensuring search engines that your content utilizes the factors they use for you to be ranked in web searches. SEO for ecommerce has combined art and science, making sure business owners that only the best content ranks on top of the search results. Sound SEO strategies are more important than ever, ensuring that consumers are provided with only web searches tailored to their specific needs. 

This makes business owners focus on content strategy, ensuring that their websites offer valuable and usable content to be used effectively for content marketing and provide relevant search results. 

Search engines focus on customer satisfaction, only providing the best possible content through particular algorithms that make a ranking system that encourages online businesses to be more optimized in their content to be rewarded with traffic. The better the quality of your content, the higher the traffic your website will receive.

How Ecommerce SEO Differs From General SEO

In the early days of SEO, it did not matter how websites got traffic so long as they did, usually by tricking people into using ads to send users to their landing pages, which is still prevalent in today’s world, especially in social media. 

This has made Google’s algorithm much more complex, introducing “Panda”, which reduces low-quality search engine results, and “Penguin” which diminishes spam websites. Ensuring that what is posted online provides the best quality possible to be visible to users has made SEO a vital tool for ecommerce business owners and content creators. 

So what is the difference between General SEO and Ecommerce SEO? General SEO uses high-quality and relevant content to build brand awareness through organic traffic. Its primary focus is attracting users to get a broader audience. In contrast, ecommerce SEO focuses on the same thing in addition to the goal of improving sales through its online store. 

While tricking users generates traffic, it is not guaranteed to lead to revenue-generating conversions. E-commerce’s primary focus is to generate organic traffic that can be converted into a sale in the long term.

Key Components of Ecommerce SEO

Organic rankings are essential for any ecommerce business, ensuring higher organic traffic leads to sales. Here are the critical components of ecommerce Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

• Specificity of Keywords
  Using the right target keywords that are specific and match your consumer’s web searches provides data to search engines. If your content meets the needs of the consumer, then you will show up in the search results.
   
  Examples of using keywords to your benefit include adding long tail keywords to your content and a clear call to action that pushes your site visitors to make a purchase.
   
• On-Page SEO
  This includes using compelling headings, title tags, meta descriptions, product descriptions, and descriptive alt text for images.
   
• Page Speed
  Page speed shows the quality of your website. A study done by Imperva Incapsula of 4,500 users shows that 35% only wait around 3-5 seconds before leaving your website, while 7% already leave once the page does not load immediately. Every second counts and the slower the loading speed, the more likely you are to lose potential customers.
   
• User Experience (UX)
  Sales don’t only come from new consumers but from customer repeat purchases as well. When your site is viewed from the website or mobile phone seamlessly, the better the user’s experience is on your site. This will also result in a higher customer retention.
   
• Content
  Search Engines rank websites based on the relevance and quality of their content. The better your content marketing and quality, the more relevant it is on the user’s web search, and the higher the ranking will be to generate more traffic.
   
• Customer Reviews
  Consumers are more likely to buy a much more expensive product with numerous reviews rather than a cheaper product without any reviews. Customer reviews give your consumers confidence and boost your business’s credibility – that your product is of quality that will meet their needs.
   

These are just some of the critical components you need to focus on and utilize to ensure your business will be able to generate more traffic through increased visibility, leading to your online business generating more sales and conversions.

Common SEO Challenges for Ecommerce Sites

You may have done thorough research to incorporate SEO into your website but still not generating the desired traffic and results. This can be extremely frustrating but this is not a roadblock. You can do something to correct this.

Here are common SEO challenges that eCommerce sites face:

• Disregarding the Basics: Titles or headings play a huge role in SEO, as do the product descriptions you use and the pictures you use on your website. Not paying attention to detail can cause your rankings to deteriorate or your site to not show up when users do a web search.
   
• Poor Site Structure: You need good site architecture for easier navigation and clearer calls to action. Consumers must be able to proceed to the next page easily up to when they check out. Ease of use without requiring assistance for consumers plays a significant role in whether they make a first-time purchase or return purchases.
   
• Duplicate Content: Using or copying content that is not unique and original will not make your site stand out. If all sites provide the same description and titles, the ranking would only be based on companies that already have a name, not much giving a chance for new or small online business sites to be on top of the search engine ranking.
   
• Mobile Compatibility: Not designing a user-friendly website for mobile phone users is a big mistake since most people nowadays cause website traffic on their phones. Without considering this fact and relying only on the computer design of your website will cause you to lose sales.
   
• Too Much Content: While it is essential to pay attention to detail on the blog posts on your website, make sure that they are all relevant to your product or services provided. Informative short content is better than a whole article about a single product. Providing too much information than the customer needs might give the wrong idea of what the website truly is about.
   

SEO for an ecommerce site takes time and patience to provide you with ordinary traffic. If you spend most of your revenue on paid traffic, redirect some to improve your site’s SEO. While results might not be able to show up rapidly, they will eventually compound over time.

Take the time to invest in it for 6-12 months. From there, organic traffic will start to compound, and your search engine rankings and visibility will reach new heights, contributing greatly towards revenue growth.

Advanced Ecommerce SEO Strategies

There are a lot of advanced strategies you can use to grow your website’s visibility and traffic. Some might be readily apparent, while some need more focus. Here are the best SEO for ecommerce strategies to better optimize your website:

• Conduct SEO Audit: Examining and being aware of your site’s strengths and weaknesses will enable you to improve your website and get the results you are hoping for. Tracking your competitor’s strategies and what works for them might also be a way for you to grow your brand awareness. Knowing the search volume of your target market makes it essential for you to understand how big the market is for you to work with. Finding issues where traffic doesn’t lead to conversions will be the key to growing your website revenue.
   
• Keyword Research: SEMrush is a highly recommended SEO tool you can use to help your keyword research be more straightforward, enabling you to find specific keyword ideas you need to use in your particular market. It also provides you with competitors’ analysis, helping you make strategies that stand out. SEMrush provides relevant data from multiple sources on how consumers behave online.
   
• Technical SEO: Your website needs to meet the requirements of search engines to make your website visible when specific web searches are conducted. You need to structure your website for indexing, which is how search engines analyze and organize the content available. And for crawling, which is how search engine bots find new and relevant content on certain websites.
   
• On-Page SEO: Sometimes referred to as “on-site SEO”, this is where search engines base your website’s data – whether it is relevant to a user’s web search and how you optimize URLs, keywords, and images. The rest will be based on the user’s preference for whether your website is “click-worthy”.
   
• Offsite SEO: These external factors affect your website’s credibility and visibility. It is your website’s reputation beyond its boundaries, illustrating your website’s experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).
   

These are the advanced strategies you can use to grow your website if you lack the time or expertise to do any SEO. There is always the option of hiring professionals, although you will need to conduct thorough research to check whether their expertise is right for your website.

Even though SEO strategies can be applied to different types of companies, be aware of the quality of work they can provide. Spending more on professional expertise might be costly in the short term. Still, it could benefit your website’s visibility and traffic levels in the long term.

Measuring and Tracking Ecommerce SEO Success

While search engine rankings are essential, they don’t necessarily guarantee higher revenue. SEO is one of the most remarkable ways to improve traffic and boost conversions, but how do you measure or track your ecommerce SEO level of success? Here are the ways for you to see if the efforts you’ve made are leading you and your business to success.

• Organic Traffic Benchmark: Organic traffic is always the best way to grow brand awareness. Suppose you are simultaneously using paid traffic and generating organic traffic. In that case, it is crucial to see the statistics on whether SEO is establishing you to develop in raising the levels of your organic traffic, which might soon lead to you no longer needing paid traffic.
   
• Keyword Rankings: This provides information on your website’s rankings through specific web searches. It helps you track your website’s level of visibility in search engine results pages (SERP’s). Using Google Analytics can help you identify your website’s rankings.
   
• Conversion Rate: While tracking the amount of traffic your website has is essential, it is vital to know the percentage of the traffic that leads to a conversion, whether making a purchase or signing up for your website. Gaining traffic without any conversion is a problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.
   
• User Engagement Metrics: How users behave once they enter your website is essential to know where you can improve your website. Knowing how long they stay, the depth of pages on your site they reach, and how many calls to action are made provides valuable insight into how you can build your website to be stronger and much more efficient.
   
• Bounce Rate: Bounce rates tell a whole story on whether your page is being shown to targeted users and how most likely they are going to purchase if the product or service they have meets what your website is offering. Data provided based on bounce rates will help you strategize so that potential consumers will be turned into consumers.
   

Generating organic traffic with high conversion rates and reasonable revenue does not indicate that there are no more improvements to be made on your website. SEO for an Ecommerce website is a continuous process that you need to consistently and regularly do so that your business can get the most traffic and revenue, allowing you to grow your business to reach new levels of success.

SEO is a long-term investment that poses many challenges, needing effort and patience to provide you with the results you are looking for. SEO will always be more sustainable for any business, generating your ecommerce business free organic traffic compounding as your business grows without having to spend revenue for paid traffic. As many new and small businesses struggle to compete with larger companies, it doesn’t mean they can’t control certain parts of the market to lead in certain products or services. SEO is best for your business to compete in this competitive market environment.