Everybody knows how important good SEO practices are in ecommerce marketing strategy today. What many people don’t know is how many factors there are that determine the effectiveness of SEO, particularly in e-commerce. Online merchants have a set of responsibilities when developing a solid SEO strategy that targets the audience and brands the product simultaneously.  Uncover the power of strategic SEO in our eCommerce marketing guide, where we dissect a compelling eCommerce SEO case study that illustrates the transformative impact of effective strategies.

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Today, we want to take a closer look at some of the most significant aspects of SEO best practiced in the e-commerce sector. These could shine some light on the area that you might have been neglecting. These tips are not ranked in order of importance.

SEO is a delicate framework with several individual parts coming together to determine how sound the structure of your e-commerce website actually is. As you read, it is recommended to make a checklist of the areas that are most lacking in your site’s SEO strategy. This would ensure that you are not overlooking any aspects. Most of these fixes are relatively easy, regardless. we will also show you how to get some help with the finer details.

What is E-commerce SEO?

SEO works the same way for e-commerce sites as it does on other websites, and undoubtedly a critical part of the marketing strategy. Of course, it’s important that a platform would be reliable (you may check this information at Website Advisor), but all ecommerce platforms work the same way. It involves a combination of keyword and page element optimization that get the attention of major search platforms and positively impacts SERPs rankings. It also includes focusing on link building to generate traffic to the websites.  Search engines look at various page elements when determining how individual pages will be ranked. This is where the real power of e-commerce SEO lies.

Keep in mind that the goal here is not to surpass some of the major players or get front-page placement. That, of course, begs the question: what’s the point of even worrying about SEO? Why not rely on paid ads and good branding instead? To be honest, marketing and branding are indeed among your best strategies. Building good SEO into the individual product and category pages, however,  is a necessity to start generating the kind of organic traffic that leads to long-term success.

Specialists use SEO apps and varied tools to improve their optimization. These tools come in handy to save time and find new ways to promote your product.

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Making Content Work

Good SEO always begins with great content. It is always recommended that e-commerce sites maintain and regularly update their blogs. Introducing new content at regular intervals is one of the easiest ways to build good SEO. Developing good blog content requires skill that the average marketer may or may not possess. The importance of content research should never be overlooked in developing unique original content for blogs.

As a general rule, it is always a good idea to work with professional writing services with a proven track record for producing optimized content. Services that specialize in academic content are often good choices for e-commerce blogs, and that is true for several reasons.

For one, the non-narrative nature of product blogging is very comfortable ground for a professional writer. Blog content for e-commerce sites is typically fact-based with a persuasive edge. Academic writers are usually well-versed in developing compelling content.

Furthermore, it would also avoid the pressure for you to come up with content by yourself every time a blog has to be posted. These writers are professional and well versed in strategically placing keywords, making the articles impeccable and to be delivered to you on time.

Have Loud Reviews 

Blogs are one way to get attention to your webpage. But there is a more specific way and probably the most important one every one search for, the reviews. Whether it is a service or a product that you offer, a review could catch the attention quickly. Studies show that around 90% of customers look for online reviews and trust them as much as personal recommendations.

The more reviews your customers present, the more authentic your service would seem. It would also create user engagement where the clients themselves serve as the salespeople for the product.

Utilizing the reviews in the right way, highlighting the best ones is an excellent way to stand apart and have unique content. The elaborate reviews work as fresh updates to the pages, that Google often rewards.

However, the one downside here is that reviews are built into pages using Javascript and not source code, which Google does not recognize. It has been focusing on reading this, but building a review platform that embeds content directly into the HTML code proves to be helpful. This way, both the search engines and readers can find these reviews. You can also use the long-tail keywords in this section to increase the traffic.

Perfect the Meta Descriptions

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What appears directly below the main heading of the site right in the SERPs could be what that entices a user to click on the link. These meta descriptions thus have high significance and have to be creative yet precise.

For eCommerce websites, writing meta descriptions that represents a wide range of products might be quite challenging. It would depend on your time, as there are companies that do take time to create unique descriptions for every page.

However, it is not a feasible option for every business. The smart way here is to use “Concatenation schemas”. It highlights guidelines for writers and programmers to use in the key areas including headings, and meta descriptions. This works with a code that uses these predetermined rules to come up with the appropriate content automatically.

For example, the rule could be simple like

Buy [PRODUCT NAME] Of [BRAND] | Recommended For [CATEGORY] of [USERS]

It would change for your website and depending on what you sell. This allows generating descriptions automatically for all associated webpages.

Use Schema Markups

Schematic markups are very effective for eCommerce but often underutilized. These are snippets of codes that places price tags and star ratings directly in the SERPs to improve the results. It might not affect the ranking factor of the searches but is certainly an eye-catching element in the meta descriptions to increase the chances of a click.

This is done using a website called Schema.org. This collaborative measure from Google, Yahoo, and Bing was intended to make the users understand what the website is actually about. By taking such steps to attend to the questions of the audiences, the webpage becomes more attractive in general and helps Google to provide effective search results.

All these different approaches described above has one integral part in common. The importance of keywords and the efficient use of it throughout cannot be stressed enough. All the SEO strategies work around the right keywords. So let’s start with the most obvious points to remember while doing the keyword research for the websites.

Keyword Research and Usage

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Since this is the area with which most marketers identify with SEO, let’s briefly discuss what makes keyword usage work. There is no doubt that good keyword usage is foundational to any successful SEO strategy, but few marketers ever harness the full power of keywords. Here are a few basic rules of thumb when implementing keywords.

1. Don’t overuse keywords – Quality content presented in an organic way is necessary for pages that want to be taken seriously in the SERPs. 1-2 percent of keyword density is plenty, about 1.4% remains the optimal target. That accounts for only 1.4 keywords per hundred words of text.
2. Use keywords organically – Never, ever, use keywords in a non-grammatical or non-contextual way. Do use connecting words to improve the flow of keywords. “Sporting goods merchants Atlanta” will not improve rankings, but “sporting goods in Atlanta” typically will.
3. Research keywords for all new content – The market and how it searches for information fluctuates so don’t use static keywords. Research and use the most relevant keywords in every blog article and product description.
4. Use different keywords on each page whenever possible – Duplicate content can kill page rankings. There are, however, ways around this that we will examine momentarily.
5. Create evergreen blog articles with basic, relevant keywords – The content and metadata can be audited and changed if those pages under-perform.

Site Auditing and Rel=Canonical

Duplicate Content, under-performing pages, and 404s can wreak havoc on page rankings. This is especially true on e-commerce sites with lots of temporary product pages. It is easy to forget about or lose track of dead pages, duplicate product pages, and dead ends that are no longer valid for the brand. The solution is to perform regular site audits to uncover problem areas.

There are services out there that will do this for you, but they typically use some of the same tools that anyone can access. Sites like ahrefs.com provide affordable, comprehensive site auditing tools with simple user interfaces that make the process easy to navigate.

For the purpose of explanation, we’ll use ahrefs.com as an example. Once logged in, simply tap or click Site Audit > Internal Pages > Content Quality from the top menu. There, you will see all your pages highlighted in either orange or green. The orange pages are duplicates or have a high percentage of duplicate content.

Such duplicated elements in the webpage are called “canonical links”. It is essentially an HTML that helps webmasters to prevent similar contents on a website. The ral=canonical element specifies with the “Canonical URL” aka the preferred version of a webpage, according to the requirements; it could even be the original version itself.

Therefore, if your pages have identical or near-identical content, they can either be deleted or archived using the rel=canonical tag. This tag tells search engines that certain pages on your site are either identical or have just slight variations that could negatively impact SEO. When the search engines see the rel=canonical tag on a page, they don’t treat it as unique.

It is always best to just delete duplicate pages, but if, for some reason, they are still needed, they should be saved with “robots” and “noindex,nofollow” meta tags. Here’s an example: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

Other details that matter in a site audit includes:

• Site download speed
• Page open speed
• Multimedia file optimization*
• Effective use of text tags and metadata

*Images and videos should always be compressed for faster loading.

Off-Page SEO and Marketing

Creating optimized content alone is not sufficient for eCommerce, it is also important to ensure that the effort actually yields outputs. E-commerce link-building is another important part of your SEO strategy.

You can utilize your blog, social media channels, email, and related forums to create backlinks to product or blog pages. Apart from your own platforms and concentrating on social media approvals, it is also recommended to seek out traffic drivers that can improve the eCommerce SEO. So some research to find out what platforms are most used by your target customers, it would be smart to reach out to them.

The social media influencers and blogs could share the product with their audience and hence driving more traffic to your website while building a worthy backlink.

In the current environment, the quality of such leads is also important. An endorsement from a popular and trusted website counts more than multiple promotions placed in other forums. So get original content, that should be worth checking out. Try to make it more educational rather than a promotional link which will, in turn, make it more attractive to promoters themselves to include on their pages.

You could also follow the lead of some of your top competitors. Note how and where they market their products and blog content and take note of how much engagement they get using various strategies.

Final Takeaway

SEO is an ongoing process. It takes time and effort to build consistent, organic traffic. Keeping up with content creation and publication is a good way to maintain rankings, as is being diligent about page and site maintenance. Remember that market demands always fluctuate, so does the way people search for products and services they require. It is imperative for an eCommerce to stay on top of current trends, pay attention to all relevant metrics, and be flexible enough to make changes when and where they are warranted.

About the author:

Michelle Brooks is working as a creative writer for essay writer service that has excelled in her skills of content creation for websites. Over the years, she has gained insights into the SEO industry and is more than happy to share her knowledge with us. When she is not feeling that charitable, she enjoys reading books and sipping tea. You can also find her on Twitter  @michellebrook23