E-commerce sites are becoming increasingly important to the overall health of the internet. It’s estimated that e-commerce sales will reach $4 trillion by 2021. But for this growing industry to continue its success, some fundamental changes need to be made now — especially regarding SEO. Here are some SEO tips for eCommerce websites:
Fix and monitor broken links
If you run an eCommerce site, broken links can be a serious problem. When your customers click on what looks like a link to place an order, and it doesn’t work, they’ll get frustrated. They will likely go elsewhere for their purchase if they are still looking for the product they want or need.
You should regularly check for broken links on your eCommerce site using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Xenu’s Link Sleuth (available as part of our Site Audit tool). These tools will crawl through your entire website and show you where there are problems with internal linking or external links pointing to pages that have moved off-site.
You should fix these issues as soon as possible before too many people lose trust in your brand!
Improve site structure
The second thing on the list of SEO tips for eCommerce websites is improving your site structure. You can improve your site structure by reducing the number of clicks required for users to reach their destination. The faster users can reach their goal, the more likely they will convert. For example, if you want them to buy something from you, it’s not enough to have an “add to cart” button on every product page; you need a prominent link that says “checkout” or “buy now” right there on your homepage. This way, visitors don’t have to go hunting around for it and risk getting distracted by other things along the way—they’ll know exactly where they need to go!
Of course, this should also be made as easy as possible. There are no unnecessary steps between clicking through and reaching the checkout, so people don’t get bored waiting around while they navigate through pages of content just trying to find what they came here looking for in the first place (we all hate those!).
Optimize for search intent
It would help if you focused on the user’s intent when it comes to keywords. In other words, think about what they’re looking for, not just the keyword itself.
You can do this by using search intent modifiers such as “buy”, “review” and “discount”. These modifiers modify your keywords to provide more information about what people are searching for when using these terms.
Search intent modifiers can be added to target specific pages on your website to improve their relevance for users with a certain goal (e.g., making a purchase or reading a review).
Schema markup
Schema markup is a way to communicate the meaning behind your content. It adds context and helps search engines better understand what type of content you’re presenting.
Schema markup also allows users to grasp the purpose of your page quickly. This can help increase conversions by making it easier for them to do what they intended (i.e., purchase a product).
Optimize content for featured snippets
Featured snippets result from Google’s featured snippet algorithm, which selects a short and helpful summary for certain search results. This is different from regular organic results, which show a list of links to various web pages. Featured snippets appear at the top of search results, above paid ads, and alongside normal organic listings.
The information from these snippets is pulled from page content that you or your team write. If you want your store to rank higher in Google and have it appear more often in searches, then your pages need to be optimized for featured snippets!
Optimize for voice search
The best way to optimize for voice search is by using keywords in your content, metadata, and URLs. Keywords are the words that you want to rank high in search results. They are usually specific terms or phrases describing your business or product(s). For example, when people say, “how much do I charge per hour”? You should add this keyword to your page title and meta description: How much does an SEO consultant cost?
You can also include them in the body of your text using H2 tags (heading 2) like this: How much does it cost?
If a user asks Alexa, Google Home, or Siri, “How much does it cost?” they will get a list of websites with that phrase in their title tag and meta description as well as somewhere else on their site (like within blog posts).
Test Google’s mobile-first index
Google has started to roll out a mobile-first index, which will be fully rolled out soon. Your website will be ranked based on how it looks on mobile devices instead of desktop computers.
If you still need to check if your website uses the mobile-first index, now is a good time to do so! To test if your site has been updated, use this tool from Google: https://search.google.com/webmasters/#mobile-friendly.
If your site hasn’t been updated yet, don’t worry — there are still things you can do to prepare for this change:
Improve load time, user experience, and site security
People don’t want to wait for anything – this is the most important of all SEO tips for eCommerce websites you will ever get. An improved site speed will improve user experience and conversion rate.
The fastest websites load in less than one second, so you should aim for this to stay competitive in your market. You can achieve this by using a content delivery network (CDN) like Google Cloud CDN or Cloudflare to host your content on servers closer to your users, optimizing images and videos with tools like Google Image Optimizer, using lazy loading techniques for JavaScript assets (like those from jQuery), minifying CSS/HTML files, compressing assets with tools like [Gzip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip_(file_format)), eliminating unnecessary HTTP requests by combining them into single files such as sprites or image maps if possible, and so on.
Conclusion
With these eight SEO tips for eCommerce websites, you’ll be well on your way to becoming an eCommerce SEO expert! Remember that it can take time for your site to rank higher and see traffic increase. Try implementing one tip at a time and track its progress over time. After a few weeks or months, check back with another strategy from this list.