As more and more people become comfortable with the idea of purchasing goods and services online, it’s important that businesses understand how to get their e-commerce website to rank top on the SERPs. The two unpaid ways that every online business uses are by investing resources in SEO and content marketing.
SEO makes sure that your website is optimized for search engines and that search engines can find it and display it higher than your competition for better visibility.
And for content marketing , it is simply a matter of using the right keywords, tags, descriptions, Images, videos and creating content that looks great on mobile as well. The most important thing is to make sure that your website is indexed by the major search engines and this all becomes part of SEO.
When it comes to SEO & content marketing, they go together and there are some best practices for doing this as listed in the below mentioned sixteen e-commerce SEO hacks for ranking top on SERP and it is mix of onsite, offsite & technical part of SEO.
Onsite focuses on improving visibility by ensuring that your web page contains all essential elements that search engines need to rank your site on top. This includes optimizing titles, descriptions, URL, headings etc. In contrast.
Offsite SEO concentrates on building external links & strong social media presence that can drive quality backlinks to your business.
Tech SEO revolves around the speed & responsiveness of your online store.
Step 1: Designing the product page and home page to rank top on SERP
Think about what your customers want to accomplish and position your product strategically to help them do so and this also helps you in increasing your online sales, by optimizing each product page on your e-commerce store.
Ensure product description & titles for your products are optimized for keywords.
- Make sure the product images are optimized for keywords.
- Display product reviews and customer testimonials.
- Promote your content Make sure you are using social media, email, and your website to promote your content.
- Use Social tabs on product page will increase the sharability of the product on social media that will increase the organic traffic.
- If you’re using Adwords to drive traffic to your site, you should know that there are some basic things you need to do. You’ll want to focus on keyword research to determine which keywords are the best fit for your business and use this with google shopping by listing your products on google merchant center.
- While researching for keywords, find the right keywords for your products, make sure you are researching the keywords that your competitors are getting traffic for, and what keywords you want to rank for. Use Google Adwords Keyword tool and Google Search Console to find out what are the high search volume terms that users are using to search for your products.
- On home page, display your category pages and list subcategories if you have and use tags. Segregate your products accordingly.
- Ensure that UI/UX is simple and intuitive that offers easy navigation and lesser steps towards the checkout process and offers a great customer experience. eliminate unnecessary information and pages from your site that complicate the shopping experience. This helps in CRO & shopping cart optimization.
Step 2: Backlinking strategy in SEO
When it comes to offsite SEO, building backlinks to your site with high domain authority sites than your website, leads to increase your chances of ranking higher in SERPs. More such backlinks, better will be the rankings.
- Do your homework before building links. Read blogs or forums where other businesses could be interested in linking to your site, such as industry related blogs.
- Find influencers who may have an interest in linking to your site.
- Use Forums like reddit & Quora and social media to create backlinks.
- You can also use tools such as Ahrefs, Ubersuggest or Majestic SEO. They create a list of websites with potential backlinking opportunity for you to review so you can see if they would be interested in linking to your site.
Step 3: Internal linking strategy in SEO
This is important and necessary. You should make use of internal linking strategy in your website to create correct xml sitemap that will help in improving your page rank and increase your site’s traffic.
The main purpose of the internal linking strategy is to create a smooth flow of information between the pages of your website. Use the anchor text for each link that links to another product page on your website.
It’s important to create internal link to relevant pages and content on your site.
Step 4: Optimizing for mobile
It is one of the most important tasks that you need to perform on your website. Make sure that your site looks good on a mobile device. Mobile-optimized sites typically receive more visibility in search results than their desktop counterparts and this is because of Googles mobile first indexing policy that predominately uses the mobile version of the content to index first and rank those sites that are responsive and mobile friendly.
Also, If your potential buyers cannot view the products with ease, then it leads to lesser sales. To remedy this issue, make your website responsive and adjust its design accordingly. Not only will the customer experience improve from an ergonomic standpoint, but also. If you don’t have a mobile version of your website, create AMP version and that will help. Also, consider optimizing your site for tablets.
Step 5: Post-launch optimization
While your site is up and running, you’re going to want to do some post-launch optimization. This involves making sure that your site is on all the major search engines, making sure that you’ve removed any malware or viruses that may have been found on your site, and making sure that you’ve taken care of any issues that may have been found by your webmasters.
Step 6: Cart Optimization on your site
Is about maximizing check outs and lesser cart abandonment and this can be achieved by doing the following
- Add products that are in inventory and remove old ones for which you don’t have inventory, you can use software to achieve this. Also remove backlinks of product that are not in inventory.
- Easy to reach checkout after add to cart or direct buy now.
- Ensure easy checkout process that doesn’t involves long forms and distractions on checkout pages.
- Offer payment options and clear shipping instructions with delivery time & tracking process.
- Don’t add charges on the checkout page ( taxes, shipping, etc ) it increases cart abandonment.
- Mention the refund time frame for hassle free shopping and less cart abandonment.
Step 7: Promote your e-commerce website
By using social media & creating shops on social media for social selling. Use hashtags with keywords & locations to market your products and to generate organic visitors, and be sure to leverage hyperlinks to direct them back to your product landing pages. This assist SEO process and helps in ranking your prodcut better.
Step 8 : Use Google merchant center for SEO
Google Merchant center is a free service provided by Google to help retailers better manage their Google Shopping ads. With Google Merchant Center, you can upload all your product data, including images and prices. All the items in your store will then display on Google Shopping when shoppers search for them or when you advertise on Google Shopping. Set up multi country feeds on google merchant centre to sell your products globally. Inside the Opportunities page of Merchant Center, you can get a better sense of ways to improve your product data or campaigns to drive more clicks. This way you get more organic traffic.
Step 9: Monitor your competitors SEO strategy
A lot of people don’t realize this, but they actually should monitor their competitor’s rankings. After doing so, they will see what they need to change if they want to beat out their competition. There are plenty of different keyword research tools out there that help you identify which keywords of your competition to target. In addition, measuring traffic data from competitive websites and seeing how they’re ranking can give you new ideas of where you could potentially improve. Learn about UI & UX from your competitors best practices and adapt them to serve better to your customers.
Step 10: Monitor your website’s keywords
Your site may have been optimized for various key words. As time goes on your website might start changing its content and may add or delete pages and links. It may even re-optimize itself for another set of keywords, depending upon the products, categories or subcategories that you add on your online store. The point here is to make sure that you keep watching for potential changes and create content accordingly. This helps to ensure a healthy level of searching and crawling activity on your site, as well as giving you an opportunity to retarget visitors who are no longer completely engaged. If you focus on these things, then you’ll find your ecommerce store rising on the search engine results page (SERP) within weeks rather than months. This is very necessary for e- commerce sites with too many products.
Step 11: Monitor your website’s traffic
You also want to check out the amount of visits your website receives per day. And if it has changed at all over time, this means that your optimization efforts were successful in driving more traffic. Google Analytics is one way to view this along with hotjar & google search console. Both allow you to track visitor trends, generate reports, and analyze performance metrics. At any rate, tracking your own website’s growth allows you to determine whether or not you should continue optimizing for certain terms. In fact, most sites will experience upswings and downtrends throughout the course of a year. There is nothing wrong with continuing to optimize during times when your rankings are low – but remember that there is always room for improvement.
Step 12: Get creative
If none of the previous steps worked in improving your search ranking, try getting creative. Some ways include getting into social media marketing, running PPC ads, or even hiring someone to growth hack for your business. These tactics can help you drive ever-increasing amounts of targeted traffic to your website, by doing so. However, just make sure to capture data and run remarketing campaigns to get the maximum conversion out of this marketing initiative.
Step 13: Get reviews and feedback
Also, see what other people are saying about your product or service online. This helps you improve your site by giving you insight into how others perceive you and your company. The feedback might be positive or negative, which can give you insights into where to make changes to get better results. Make sure you research your competitors before you use this method, though. Since it seems like everyone else has done the same thing, who are they going after? Are they targeting keywords similar to yours? What do their pages look like? A lot of people end up copying what other online stores are doing without really understanding why they’re being successful.
Step 14: Run a contest
It’s important to run contests and promotions regularly if you want more organic traffic. You could set aside a few days for each month or use a festive opportunity and target specific types of users (i.e., new customers). For example, you could offer free shipping if the user purchases within a certain time frame. Or, you could provide exclusive coupons for first-time purchasers. Giving away something free is always good for generating traffic or leads as well as driving sales.
Step 15: Conversion Rate Optimization for E-commerce
CRO starts from tracking conversion events that are necessary for sales or marketing goals and are not generic to every visitor on your site. Analyzing these conversion events for improvement and taking necessary steps till they yield better results is the key to success in increasing conversion rates. This can be achieved through tools like Hotjar, Google analytics, Google Tag Manager & Google search console.
Step 16: Create an affiliate program, do Influencer Marketing
For your e-commerce website, the best way to attract affiliates is through creating an attractive affiliate program. When done right, it should be able to earn commissions without having any effort on your part. That means no extra programming or anything else like that. Simply put, create an effective affiliate program and let everyone come knocking. You don’t have to worry about running the program by yourself anymore because there are already a number of reputable companies offering such services. All you have to do is select one that suits your needs and sign up to become an affiliate. And voila, a steady stream of new clients flows in. You can also hire an influencer that goes well with your niche and promote your product or service to leverage the influencers community. Hiring multiple micro influencers seems to be more effective as the engagement of micro influencers is comparatively higher than those who manage communities of more than fifty thousand people.
Conclusion :
E-commerce sellers are always looking for ways to outrank their competition on search engines. To help you push your product ahead of the pack, we’ve compiled these sixteen steps that will boost your rankings and make your e-commerce site rank higher! Feel free to share this with all of your friends who want to get their e-commerce store ranking top on SERP or Share a comment below.