Ecommerce websites are gaining wide popularity thanks to the growing number of online shoppers who prefer to buy products from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, the competition is also increasing with the growing number of eCommerce stores offering similar products. As per statistics by Fortune, Google and Facebook have the largest share of the digital ads market with $30 billion for the search engine and $8 billion assigned to Facebook. 

This show how crucial is search engine optimization in determining the growth of any e-commerce business both for the present and in the coming years. 

In addition, SEO for your eCommerce store can make site navigation smooth and boost traffic for your website. 

Here are some of the best practices that you need to follow for your eCommerce store:

Use Strategic and Descriptive Keywords 

It’s important to find the right keywords for ranking your eCommerce website higher in the search results. Long-tail keywords can be especially useful in achieving high rankings on specific niches with less competition. This type of keywords can help in boosting your website conversion rates and matching user queries. 

Think in terms of user intent and something specific which they might be looking for. 

Optimize your anchor text so that the links on your eCommerce site point to the right pages and look natural. 

Also Read: What Makes Best eCommerce an Ideal Platform to Choose?

Include title tags for product pages

Title tags must be unique for every product page to attract search engine traffic and for this purpose, it’s necessary to use unique key phrases. 

Most eCommerce stores use duplicate title tags that need to be avoided at any cost. The length of the title tag must not exceed more than 70 characters and place the key phrases at the beginning of the title tag as search engines give more priority to the first key phrases. 

Secure your site using SSL certification

Ecommerce sites need to use website security solutions to safeguard their customer information by encrypting those using SSL certificates. EV SSL Certificates can help in verifying your business name and help in encrypting confidential online transactions. 

They follow a strict validation process and helps in data protection against hackers and other online frauds and scams.

Optimize your category pages with keywords

Category pages are critical and more important when compared to individual posts or pages. They need to be optimized so that they can appear first among the search engine results. Use a keyword planner to optimize individual pages and posts for specific brands and link them to the main category pages. 

This will enable the individual pages from competing against the same keyword as the main category page.

Use permanent 301 Redirect to a detour page

A permanent Redirect is quite useful for SEO as it allows you to inform your search engines where your old content has been moved to. By using a 301 Redirect, PageRank, traffic value, page authority, etc are all moved to the detour page. 

On the other hand, if you do not redirect a page or expired product or change in the link structure, search engines will see the 404 Not Found page which will direct the users to this link resulting in loss of traffic and ranking for your website. 

Adopt good link building practices

You need to increase the number of links from reputed sources that may be pointing to your URL. 

As per research, among the 1 million searches in Google, link building was one of the major factors taken into consideration by Google while deciding on the type of content to be displayed. 

At the same time, it’s necessary to avoid duplicate content on your eCommerce site.

Optimize product images on your website

Google indexes the images on your website and they play a vital role in informing the search engine about what they have to offer. They are displayed under the image tab, so it is recommended to name your image files accurately. 

Alt images may also be added to images if they are not displayed properly to the visitors so that they can see some text in its place. 

Make your site mobile friendly

It’s important to have an eCommerce storefront that is optimized for your mobile in terms of content quality, page loading speed, navigation to ensure high rankings for your website. 

According to Google, a mobile-friendly site needs to avoid software like Flash. In addition, your mobile text needs to be readable and sized to the screen so that users do not have to unnecessarily scroll horizontally or zoom to read the contents. 

Use schema markup to add rich snippets

You need to improve the visibility of products on your eCommerce store by implementing Google’s rich snippets. The snippets help in providing more details to your customers to click through SERP’s for driving revenue. Example-You can optimize product information in the form of markups for providing details about your product including color, size, the model number to help your visitors.

Optimize your URL

URL’s are important for your SEO and can help search engine bots for finding and crawling your website to know about them. They can also assist in providing an improved experience to your users and keeping them engaged for a longer time on your website to convert them into potential customers. 

Conclusion

Search engine optimization presents plenty of opportunities for your eCommerce site to yield organic traffic and improved user experience to boost your sales prospects.