If you have an online store and are wondering how to increase your brand awareness, standing out from the competition and increasing sales, you should know that there’s a useful tool that allows you to increase organic traffic to your website: it’s called SEO for e-commerce.
Very often companies focus on paid advertising, using tools like Facebook Ads or Google Ads. While it’s true that these techniques can lead to excellent results, they also require constant investments.
SEO for e-commerce, on the other hand, requires research work with well-defined phases for website optimization, but over time, if used correctly, it allows you to grow your organic traffic with high conversion rates on the e-commerce. This will also affect advertising costs, lowering them, as you’ll have less need to invest in paid advertising once visits to the website increase.
Let’s see what the main steps are for building a successful SEO strategy and useful tips for an entrepreneur who wants a complete guide to apply SEO optimization to their site pages.
And remember, if you don’t want to dedicate yourself to an activity that’s not within your expertise, you can always contact us for a personalized SEO consultation.
What is SEO in Web Marketing
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization, which means optimization for search engines.
Good SEO practices serve to optimize pages within your website in order to improve ranking in search engine results, the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), to appear as high as possible and thus get more attention from the public.
As we’ll see, there are many techniques to keep in mind, including both on-page SEO strategies such as content quality, choosing the right keywords, and the presence of optimized infographics and images.
In addition to these, it’s important not to forget off-page SEO activities, which are all those actions that take place outside your site and which search engines rely on to establish your ranking: shares on social channels, links leading to your pages, and reviews.
How can SEO be useful for your e-commerce? By using SEO optimization, many more people will visit online stores and consequently your sales potential will increase.
Why Search Engine Optimization is Important for Your Online Shop
SEO is one of the winning strategies for any kind of online activity, and it’s useful for positioning as high as possible in searches made by users worldwide on Google, when specific keywords are searched.
The process is simple: the purpose of search engines is to show users results pages as close as possible to the things they’re looking for. “The search intent, in fact, is the purpose of a web search and from this point of view, doing SEO on an e-commerce is important, as it allows you a prominent place on search engines, showing your product to all those people potentially interested in” purchasing.
From this first reading, it’s already clear how SEO is fundamental for increasing sales. You should know that, according to data from some studies, organic searches bring 300% more traffic compared to activities carried out, for example, on social media.
Here are the 10 steps of our SEO strategy for e-commerce
Let’s talk about the factors that marketing directors need to know and work on to create an SEO-friendly e-commerce site and what practical strategy we adopt with our clients.
1. Market and competitor analysis
The first step for a well-done SEO is to analyze the market, studying the work of competitors and defining the average user to understand how to meet their needs.
Only through this first phase is it possible to understand what they offer and how they do it, to understand how to distinguish yourself and do better than them.
When it comes to SEO, it will be necessary to analyze not only their product descriptions and their blog, but also their landing pages. Later, it’s also possible to verify the loading speed of their site and the keywords they rank for.
Since they are our competitors, the audience niche will be the same, but precisely for this reason, it is essential to study the content that is published to understand the tone of voice, frequency, and type of publication.
Only in this way will we have a clear and valid overview to create a strategy with valuable content.
2. Keyword research
Once you have studied your target market, it will be necessary to identify which keywords you want to rank for in search engines.
The keyword is that word within the search intent that the user types in the search engine bar to find a specific product or service.
The main purpose of SEO optimization is therefore to appear among the top Google results right after the user has typed that specific keyword.
To understand which keywords to rank for, a search for the best keywords (balancing ranking difficulty and search volumes) within search intents, i.e., the phrases that the target uses to reach us, is necessary.
How can you perform an accurate keyword research? There are many different ways, but the main tools you can use are:
Once you have defined the strategic keywords for your ranking, you will then need to use them to create content such as product pages, blog articles, and landing pages for your site.
3. Keywords: long tail or single words?
Unlike single keywords composed of one word, long-tail keywords are multiple keywords put together and are used to rank in the SERP for a specific topic.
Very often, the right strategy to achieve a good ranking is precisely this: expanding the single keyword into a real search intent.
If we take for example an e-commerce that sells sports shoes, instead of trying to rank only with the keyword “sports shoes” it is advisable to use more specific long-tail keywords such as: “women’s running sports shoes” and “men’s tennis sports shoes”.
By using these keywords, we’ll be using a long-tail keyword with a lower search volume than “sports shoes”, but this is not always an aspect to discard because in this way, we’re choosing a less competitive keyword and we’re specializing. Thanks to this method, you can target a more specific and narrow audience, increasing the chances of conversion.
4. The structure of the e-commerce site
Once you have identified the main keywords to position yourself with, we suggest you divide them into macro topics to identify the categories of your online shop, considering both products and blog.
The categories will serve to vertically divide your content, but they will be horizontally connected by tags, which are all those topics shared among multiple contents, even belonging to different categories.
This structure is called site tree and is useful for SEO, as it not only helps the “user navigate better within” the pages, improving the user experience, but it will also help the search engine crawlers (software that analyzes network content) to better index and position the content to present to users in SERP.
5. Google Shopping
Google Shopping is part of the Google search engine and allows companies and e-commerce to publish products directly on Google and users to quickly view multiple products, comparing them with each other.
This is a true search engine, which not only highlights its products with paid advertising campaigns but also shows certain content based on the user’s search.
For this very reason, it is advisable to create a useful SEO strategy on Google Shopping to appear among the top search results.
To do this, it’s good to keep in mind that high-quality images, detailed descriptions with relevant keywords, and reviews are the key to best positioning your e-commerce site on Google Shopping.
6. YouTube
In recent years, the video format has been gaining more and more success, and for this reason, this element should not be excluded from an SEO strategy for e-commerce.
There are many possibilities. You can create videos where you explain, for example, the functioning or main features of your products, as well as presentation videos of the physical store if you have one.
What matters is that besides entertaining the user, the content is useful and valuable. Only in this way can this strategy bring you excellent results.
Google has also understood the enormous potential of the video format and strongly pushes this type of content. A good quality video with an accurate description will increase your business’s reputation, making you a more authentic and transparent reality and also increasing organic visits to your e-commerce.
7. Local and Industry Directories
Have you ever heard of directories? These are actual websites that collect a list of businesses offering their services locally.
Very often these are historical directories, with high credibility from users and specialized in a specific niche. Generally, they are well-positioned in search engines, and it is precisely for this reason that being cited within them will allow you to increase visibility and awareness of your site.
8. Product Pages
The product description pages within your e-commerce must also be written with SEO in mind and contain the keywords and search intents in the text. Don’t forget to optimize every part of the page, from the title tag to the meta description, because these elements are fundamental for positioning.
Furthermore, the site should also contain optimized images and videos, as well as good loading speed. Only in this way will your e-commerce have an excellent user experience.
9. Creating a Blog for E-commerce
More and more companies are choosing to include a company blog “within their website. This” has a dual function:
- increases organic traffic: creating content with a specific keyword will bring more traffic to the site, also increasing conversions.
- Increase brand “awareness”: by creating useful and informative content for your users, you will also increase their average time spent on your site, building loyalty through original and quality content.
10. Reviews
Google highly values user opinions, as it wants the browsing experience to be positive on the sites that appear in the SERP.
For this reason, all e-commerce sites that publicly display reviews from other customers are favored. This is not only a sign of transparency that increases trust from potential customers, but it also helps with positioning, as Google will show you in the top search results among shops that have received high reviews.
Displaying reviews will therefore also help with SEO. The more you have and the higher they are, the better you’ll be able to rank.
The “importance of” internal linking and link building in an SEO strategy
To increase the reliability of your e-commerce site, it’s important to work on internal linking, incoming external links (link building) and outbound external links.
Internal linking is a technique that uses links to connect various pages of your site by topic, thus improving not only the user experience, but also the average time spent on site and SERP positioning.
This happens because search engine crawlers understand that “your site’s content is valuable and that the” site structure is set up correctly, indicating that the e-commerce site provides good usability to visitors.
Link building occurs when other sites link to your page. This element should always be considered, as it increases your brand’s credibility and is rewarded by Google with good positioning. However, it’s important to pay attention to links from spam sites and those with low value, which risk lowering your authority.
Outbound links are those links you insert in your content that link to resources external to your site. These can be used intelligently when relevant. Crawlers, detecting this connection, semantically bring your site closer to the linked one, and if the latter is of high value, it can help you with positioning.
Optimized images and videos are crucial for SEO. Find out why
Using high-quality media, videos, and images is very important for your e-commerce SEO. It’s no coincidence that product images are the most influential factor for users during the purchasing phase, which is why it’s important to pay special attention to this aspect.
It’s important to remember that texts accompanying images should also be optimized, such as titles, captions, file names, and descriptive texts. Google examines the site page and extracts information related to image content, including texts. In this sense, for example, the alt text is an aspect that is too often undervalued. It’s a portion of text that describes an “image, improving” accessibility for people unable to view images.
Google also penalizes sites with low-quality images or videos, as they negatively impact the user experience. Moreover, sites that use duplicate images or images present in other web sources are heavily penalized.
SEO analysis: let’s X-ray the website
To take stock of your SEO strategy, it’s good to periodically conduct an analysis with a SEO specialist, who can identify any critical issues of the e-commerce site.
This way, it will be possible to list the key points to work on within the pages, defining everything in order of priority: low, medium, urgent. Each identified issue will then need to be resolved by the relevant professional: copywriter, graphic designer, or IT technician.
“SEO analysis is also useful in monitoring the positioning in SERPs, positioning keywords, and website traffic. The” goal of the SEO audit is precisely to assess whether we are on the right track to achieve our objective, which is to increase organic traffic.
SEO for e-commerce, you too can start doing it
As you’ve seen, if you have an online shop, doing good SEO on your website pages is crucial for increasing traffic, as well as company credibility and your revenue.
To always do a good job, therefore, we suggest you don’t forget our 10-step strategy:
- Market analysis.
- Keyword research.
- Focus on long-tail keywords.
- Organize the site structure.
- Google Shopping.
- YouTube.
- Local and industry directories.
- Take care of product pages.
- The blog.
- Reviews.
This guide is the work scheme that we apply daily to our clients’ e-commerce sites and that allows us to use SEO to improve their sales performance.
Want to know how to build a winning SEO strategy for your online shop? Contact us!
