Many digital shop owners tend to look for different ways to have their new online shopping websites show up and rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are certain strategies that are very helpful and work very well for businesses in the eCommerce industry, which is why some websites rank higher than others in SERPs.
Keyword Research
The first, as well as the most important step of SEO, is keyword research. One of the most common issues that digital shop owners tend to face is not doing extensive keyword research, which leads to a decline in sales.
Businesses should be utilizing all of the data that’s available to them for keyword research. This includes data from Google Autocomplete, Google Trends, AdWords, company feedback, and even from keywords and common phrases that are frequently used by people online.
On-Page Optimization
The second step of having an eCommerce website rank well on Google is performing on-page optimization. This is what makes the content of the store a lot easier for search engine crawlers to read.
It’s important to focus on textual content, images, internal linking, video, social media integration, as well as information architecture including headings, tags, URLs, sitemaps, etc. Aside from all that, eCommerce websites, just like all other websites, should be optimized in terms of loading time, size, alt tags for images, product descriptions, and other details regarding targeted keywords.
Loading Time
One of the elements that is important both to search engines and to users is how fast a website loads after they’ve been opened. Many internet users these days don’t have the patience to wait a long time for a website to load, even if the issue is with their internet provider.
That’s why websites should have short loading times so that even if a user has internet connectivity issues, the website is going to load relatively quickly, and they won’t click away.
Clicking away is another thing that’s registered by search engines, which affects a website’s ranking in SERPs. And if a website has a long loading time, which leads to many visitors clicking away, search engines will take that as a sign that the website is low quality, and therefore, will recommend it less.
Content Optimization
Just as websites themselves should be optimized for search engines, so should the content on them. The key element in content optimization for eCommerce websites is to make sure all of the product descriptions are user-friendly and rich in keywords.
The content should also be updated on a regular basis because most search engines prefer websites that have high quality and fresh content on them. Additionally, content duplication and plagiarism are strongly penalized by all search engines, which means all content should be original, and not copied from other websites.
