SEO Strategies to Increase E-commerce Sales

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Effective SEO strategies are vital for all types of websites, whether you are growing your blog or wanting to increase sales in your e-commerce store. However, among the different digital marketing techniques, SEO is known to be one of the most difficult forms to execute well.

SEO marketing requires essential steps to be taken and these requirements, when followed, will pay off. Google and many other search engines have rules that will help provide the best quality search results to their users. That’s why businesses need to create outstanding content for consumers and also meet the standards of search engines.

If e-commerce businesses know how to use SEO strategies in their marketing practices, there is a higher chance of getting relevant organic leads.

Even though it takes time to grow an organic following, the best part is that, if done well, it targets the right audience. Thereby sales will increase.

So, are you ready to increase sales in your e-commerce shop? Let’s look at how you can use SEO marketing to help you achieve that.

SEO Strategies to Increase Sales

Create Great Content

Search engines seek to provide the best, most reliable and relevant content to their readers, and so should you. If you provide valuable and entertaining content to your audience, it can help convert them into customers. In addition, well-written content can be shared easily, hence, reaching out to more potential customers.

Here are some tips to remember when creating content for your e-commerce website.

  • You first need to think of content that will solve the problem of your audience. It must be original, effective, and robust. Furthermore, consider one of Google’s requirements when providing content to your readers – Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). Google uses E-A-T to determine whether a website or online content is credible and a source of information providing value to readers. Therefore, keep this in mind when creating your content.
  • Another thing to remember is not to write content that sounds like you are hard-selling your product. Instead, provide the audience with information that can help them with what they need. When you need to mention your product, do not oversell it! In this way, you will better gain the trust of your readers.

When you create content that is important and engaging, your readers will gravitate towards your company, and will more likely purchase what you offer.

Use the Right Keyword/s

Before you can write great content, you need to determine what keywords work best for your website and the content you are to write.

Keywords are important to all searches, whether on social media or the web. They determine how content or a website is going to appear on the search engine result page when someone is looking for something.

When doing keyword research, you need to think also of the buyer’s intent. When someone is buying a gift and they are in the decision phase, they may search for “best gift for…,” but, if a buyer has already made a decision, they use more specific keywords.

There are tools you can use to conduct a keyword search for your website. Some tools worth mentioning include Ubersuggests, Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and AHREFS

It is also worth noting that there are different types of keywords depending on the intent. Certain keywords are required for your blog posts, in your product description, or for your Google Ads. That’s why you must ensure you plan and use keywords that will drive traffic to your content, ads, or directly to your product.

You can also search for keywords used by your competitors or, to be more specific, you can use long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords cut the competition and better target a specific audience that will increase your e-commerce conversion rate.

Work on Your Product Pages

Just like writing valuable and entertaining content, your product pages need to have the same experience.

Using the keywords you have identified for your products, you can now include them in your product descriptions. Furthermore, your product page should also implement the E-A-T guideline mentioned earlier.

Businesses like e-commerce websites must create product pages that focus on quality, with better (and truthful) information. Another way to attract potential buyers to your product page is to make it worth the experience.

  • Write a detailed description of the product (insert keywords here)
  • Use high-quality images that visitors can zoom into to see the details
  • Provide multiple colours and sizes of images
  • Add an explainer video
  • Include ratings and reviews

Improving your buyers’ experience by providing them with all the details they need will help them in their decision-making process.

Improve User Experience on Website Navigation and Structure

Your user’s experience needs to be optimised for your website to make sales. This can happen in just a few seconds. If your site is unappealing and the structure is disorganized, people will quickly leave your site. The structure and navigation experience of your e-commerce website is extremely important.

  • You need to ensure that the navigation on your site is simple and easy to understand. You can use “breadcrumbs” to help in the navigation process. A breadcrumb is a small text path that will indicate where the user is on your website. It will give an overview of the page for them to better understand it.
  • Fixing the URL on your website’s pages can also help in improving the structure. Instead of using a messy URL with numbers and unnecessary words, you can simplify it by adding keywords that matter.

Having an organized structure in your e-commerce shop can help with Google’s ranking and user experience.

Optimize for Mobile Users

79% of smartphone users purchased online using their mobile device, which only shows that mobile users are ever more prevalent nowadays.

Optimising your website for a mobile-friendly experience will help you retain your visitors and turn them into paying customers. Even Google now insists that websites should work seamlessly on mobile devices.

You need to solve the problem by making sure your website is both responsive and mobile-optimized. You can check your website to see whether it is optimized for mobile users using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

Moreover, you need to take note that having a responsive design doesn’t necessarily mean it’s mobile-friendly. That’s why you need to work on both of these factors.

Integrate Social Media Accounts

Using social media for your business is exceedingly important. It’s another way to reach out to potential customers, build brand awareness, and harness better relationships with your audience. And, since most people are on social media nowadays, it is best to stay connected through this channel to know who your audiences are and reach out to them.

The more engagement and shares you have on your social media accounts can indirectly affect your SEO strategies.

Optimize Images on Products

The quality of your product image is crucial for your customers’ shopping experience. Another thing to remember, aside from using a high-quality image of your product, is to add ALT tags to them. You should incorporate keywords into your images tags where appropriate.

Don’t forget to provide photos of your product from different angles and allow your customers to zoom in and out of it.

Include Reviews and Ratings

Reviews and ratings help customers in their decision-making process. The more they know about the product, the more easily they can make a decision. Adding reviews and ratings to your e-commerce website will enhance the experience of your customers. Furthermore, it will cut down the decision-making time and they’ll be more likely to buy your item without the urge to look on competitor websites at all.

Enhance Your Website’s Loading Time

Whether it’s on mobile or through a desktop, an e-commerce shop that takes too much time to load will have an increased bounce rate. An increase in your website’s bounce rate can affect your ranking on search engines.

It takes only three seconds for the average internet user to abandon a website, so make sure to make the loading speed as fast as possible. You can hire professional web developers to take care of this.

Use Robots.txt

Use Robots.txt to inform Google bots to only crawl relevant pages on your website. (You can save time and resources by informing bots not to index some files and pages on your e-commerce shop).

Fix Broken Links

Broken links harm your SEO strategy. In addition, they have an impact on the consumer experience, as well as on the performance of your website. Users will be stopped in their tracks if you interlink with broken product pages and categories. Others are more likely to exit your site than to stay and browse around on new pages.

You can find broken links on your website and resolve them by using SEO tools like AHREFS, SEMRush, and more. Once you have discovered these broken links, all you need to do is unlink the content from them.

Earn Backlinks

Link-building is a strategy that helps websites inform Google that their content or products are relevant and authoritative. This signals search engines that they are worth linking to.

Ecommerce owners must learn to reach out to other websites for backlinks. It will scale their SEO e-commerce strategy and get relevant traffic to their site.

There are several ways to earn backlinks. One very effective one is to write a guest post on other brands’ websites, where you can add a link to your own site. You do need to understand that reaching out for guest posting to promote your brand can sometimes take time. Furthermore, you’ll need to work with brands or websites that are within your niche and already have a following.

If you want to make things faster and easier, you can pay websites to list your products on their site though make sure you do it properly and in accordance with Google policies. Another way is to create valuable content that people will share and link back to.

Link to Your Products

Inform Google that a page is important by using internal links within your posts or pages.

When you link to your products, categories, and blog pages from within your site, you give that page link value. The more internal links referring to certain products or sites, the more evidence Google has that this page should be prioritized.

In addition, a study has shown that internal links can increase your organic traffic.

Faster Checkout Process

Cart abandonment and increase in bounce rate are commonly due to two factors: a slow-loading page (which has been discussed earlier) and a complicated checkout process.

If you want your potential customer to buy your item, make sure that the checkout process is simple. Don’t require your customers to fill out lengthy forms; instead, ask only what you need and give them the option to store their information for future use.

You can also add more payment options for your buyers to choose from, as well as shipping options.

Optimize Out-of-Stock Products

If you don’t want to frustrate your potential customers or negatively affect your relationship with them, make sure to optimize out-of-stock products. By adding an out-of-stock sign on the product or removing it from the site, you don’t have to worry about your customers adding the item to their cart and then finding out it’s not available.

If your product is out-of-stock, you can also add the projected date for when it will be available.

Work on Other SEO Elements

When you create content or a product description you have to include the following SEO elements:

  • Heading tags (H1, H2, H3…)
  • External links
  • Meta title and description
  • Readability

Use Videos as Content

Videos are the most consumed form of entertainment. The number of people who watch videos surpasses those who view an image and read a blog. Video content gives potential customers a better understanding of a product. 

According to Wyzowl, 96% of people said that they watch explainer videos to learn more about the product, and 88% of them are convinced to purchase the item.

Using videos can attract traffic to your website, make your audience stay longer, and help them make immediate purchase decisions. You can create simple videos (like how to use your products) without spending a lot of money. You can use affordable editing tools (Pinnacle Studios Ultimate or Adobe Premiere Elements) or your phone’s camera to shoot the video.

Don’t forget to optimise it and share the content across your social media channels.

Conclusion

Implementing SEO expert strategies on your e-commerce shop can help increase traffic and conversion rates. However, it is important to know that growing your organic traffic takes time be it SEO or SEM campaigns. Furthermore, with all the competition out there, e-commerce brands need to be patient with their strategies – patience and focus will reward you with more traffic and conversions soon.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Guest contributor Vanessa Venugopal is a passionate content writer. With four years of experience, she mastered the art of writing in various styles and topics. She is currently writing for Softvire Australia – the leading software eCommerce company in Australia and Softvire New Zealand.

Posted in SEO