Developing an E-commerce Site with Built-in SEO

In this article we will show you how you can improve your e-commerce SEO ranking in the search results in various parts.

Part 1: Research

Research is the first and the most important part of the process of SEO. Before you plan anything, do a thorough research. Research here is all about keywords and competitors. If you ask why research is important, well without proper research you may never get to the keyword which works best for your business website and you may end up targeting the wrong keywords. Wrong keywords means low quality traffic, limited conversions and high bounce rate. You surely do not want that, right?

Research can be divided into two sub heads, former being keyword research and latter being competitor research.

1. Keyword Research

The areas you should focus on while conducting research for keywords are-

• You should start looking for keywords for you main or important pages such as home page or the product pages. Optimize these important pages with relevant keywords keeping in mind the search volume and ranking difficulty.
• Work on your blogs. Blogs generate leads more than any other tool can ever do. Blogs help with the ranking of your website on the search results. Use keywords in your blog topics as these additional keywords can boost your ranking. Usage of long-tail keywords in your blog can also help. Long-tail keywords are the unique searches that people used to find things online. They are combination of a group of words.

2. Competitor Research

When you have worked with the keywords, next comes the competitors’ research. if you are running a business, you are very well aware of your competitors, so you have to look for the keywords that your competitors use and find out what works best for them. Form a complete list of the keywords your competitors use in their SEO strategy.

Next thing is to look for the site architecture of your competitors’ sites. Their navigation, their landing pages, their links. Especially if you are an e-commerce site, look for the popular products of your competitors. you can really work on your keywords with the information you get from the competitors’ research.

Next comes the optimization and testing part. Usage of analytics to find out which keywords works best for your website. You can find this by measuring conversion rate. You can also use PPC (Pay Per Click) to find out which are the keywords for high conversion rate, and you can then add those to your strategy list.

And last but not least, stand out of the crowd. Work on your site’s architecture and make sure that you are different from your competitor and better too. Architecture includes, navigation, social media add-ons, informative blogs. These can help you gain more customers. Here are some good web design practice to attract more visitors.

Part 2: On-Page SEO

Now that you have gathered the list of all-important keywords for your e-commerce, its now time to work on them and implement them.

Work on your Meta Titles and descriptions

If you randomly look at any e-commerce website on the search engine, you will find something like this, they use old template approach for their meta tags which is not unique and very boring. Ditch the template approach and work on writing tags that are well-optimized which can be then followed by template approach. Using different template for every page is the key here that sets you apart from your competitors. Some additional pointers here are to include and set primary keywords, use some long-tail keywords in variations whenever required. You can also use some effective action words such as sale, free, click, buy, learn more, etc. optimize your CTR and market your USP. These may include free shipping, free returns and so on.

Work on your URL

We know e-commerce URLs can get messy, but we have some tips that can help you.

1. Keep them short as much as possible.
2. Always include your primary keyword.
3. The URL should clearly mention the context.
4. Avoid using underscores or spaces or other characters and URL parameters.

Product and category descriptions should be unique

Take a look at any e-commerce giant. You will find that they write unique descriptions on every category page. This is a very good technique as it helps the visitors on the website know more about the product they are looking at and it also helps the search engines understand what the page is all about.

The content on the page feeds the algorithm that most search engines work upon. The algorithms gives better ranking to the websites which have some content written on every page. So, you can add some description which is unique and is for both product page as well as category page. The descriptions should be unique everywhere. Do not copy it from the product’s catalogue.

How to do it?

1. Always include the keyword you are targeting the most in the description.
2. The content should be well formed and easily understandable by all visitors.
3. Short and sweet is always eye catchy. Also use some long-tail keywords.
4. This may be a very tiring process, so start with the most important pages.

Part 3: Identifying Problems

After the implementation of these keywords, its time to check and audit all the problems that are occurring and needs to be fixed. Here are some points-

Find site errors

Look for all the errors that are there in any of the links of website, images, content, CSS from the SEO perspective. There are various tools available online for checking the errors. Then all the data with errors, duplicate pages, redirects or any missing tags can be sorted and worked on. Correct 404 pages, change 302 to 301 redirect, changing duplicate content and so on.

What is your website’s speed?

SEO also has a huge impact when it comes to the site speed. This step can be performed when the errors are fixed. Slow websites are never appreciated by the customers or visitors. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load the visitor will simply press the back button. Data says that 40% of abandoned sites are due to slow loading speed. Buy more server space and reduce the loading time. Good Luck!