It is easy to underestimate the importance of SEO for ecommerce websites despite the fact that SEO has one of the highest ROIs of any marketing campaign. Unfortunately, many online websites are designed without giving a thought to SEO. Rather, they rely on social media campaigns like Facebook, Instagram and paid Google ads. While there is nothing inherently wrong with that strategy, such an approach requires constant effort and sufficient income to overcome advertising costs. Ecommerce SEO, on the other hand, requires little ongoing effort once the initial SEO steps have been completed.
Building a fantastic website that no one ever sees is an exercise in futility. If you are selling products or offering services online, you need to make it easy for prospective customers to land on your site. To be successful, your website needs to appear in the first few positions of a Google search engine results page (SERP). In fact, if you want to beat out your competition, you must rank higher than they do. To accomplish that, you must have a solid ecommerce SEO strategy. Such a strategy will help you to rank higher and get more visitors to your site. To help you accomplish that, here are some tips that can take your SEO to the next level:
Meta descriptions summarize page content so that a user knows what to expect when they click on a link. The descriptions are short—typically 155 characters or less. While there is some disagreement as to whether meta descriptions are actually SEO, there is little doubt that good meta descriptions improve the chances of a user clicking on a link that lands them on your page. To maximize their effectiveness, try to use actionable words in your meta descriptions, such as shop, discover and find. You can also embed keywords into your meta descriptions. However, be careful to make the descriptions unique so that they stand out against your competition.
There is a lot of competition online, and you must provide your customers with a pleasant shopping experience if you want conversions. To do that, it is important that your site loads quickly and is easy to navigate. We will provide more detail on both of those subjects later in the article. You must also make sure that your site is mobile friendly because customers want to be able to shop by using their smartphones. Next, ensure that your site is projecting the right visual appeal. If you display products, provide plenty of photographs so that your customers feel like they are in your store and physically handling your products. It is also important to simplify the checkout process. Too many complicated steps will result in a number of abandoned shopping carts.
You need to make sure that you are using the proper website architecture. If your architecture is too complicated, the bots may not index it properly, and you will not achieve the results you are looking for. You also want to ensure that your website is easy to navigate. A visitor to your site should never have to click more than three times to find what they are looking for. Otherwise, they will give up, and you will lose a potential customer. Your home page is the most important in that regard. It should use a combination of menus and internal links to direct your customers to the information they are looking for.
You want to make sure that your site loads quickly. Otherwise, potential customers will get tired of waiting and visit a competing site that loads quicker. If your site is loading slowly, it could be that your site is too complicated or has too many high-resolution images. In most cases, simple is better. You should also ensure that the web hosting service you are using has fast servers specifically designed to load pages quickly. Keep in mind that page-load speed is used as a ranking factor, which means that your site will rank higher if it loads quickly. There are several free tools available online for checking your loading speed, including gtmetrix.com, webpagetest.org and uptrends.com.
It is a waste of time and money to develop a website that no one sees. If you want to increase website traffic and up your conversion rate, it is important that you utilize the tools available to you through SEO for ecommerce websites. If you follow the tips provided above, you should be able to do that, and you should experience a significant increase in traffic and conversions. Contact us today to get started!
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