Table of contents
If you are running an online store, you certainly want as many customers as possible. You can achieve this through good optimization of your site and actions to increase your store’s visibility in search results. Where to start and what to keep in mind when positioning an online store?
Internet stores
It is estimated that nearly 80% of online shoppers now use the option to shop online. It certainly saves time, allows us to check product information and, most importantly, we can place an order from anywhere with Internet access, without having to organize a trip to a stationary store at the other end of town.
More and more merchants are moving their business online or running a store both online and stationary. If you are one of them and you are looking for a way to increase conversions in your store read our tips.
Take a look at our tips.
E-commerce optimization for SEO
The first step in the SEO process is to optimize the basic elements of SEO. The same is true for e-commerce. In addition, online stores are usually much more elaborate – they contain sub-pages with products, manufacturers and increasingly also a blog or guide.
The process of optimizing a website is worth starting with SEO Audit Thanks to the analysis of the entire site, you will learn what technical problems your site has, what are the main blockers, and what direction to take in order to strive for increased visibility and conversions. SEO Audit contains information about errors but also recommendations for implementations that are necessary to grow your business. What, among other things, are the analyses included in an e-commerce audit?
Menu and site navigation
A well-thought-out and well-planned store layout is a big part of success. The category tree, subcategories and product layout should be intuitive and a fairly flat structure. Before dividing products into categories, it’s a good idea to do research and analyze keyword phrases related to products and categories to best match their names to customer searches. The menu itself should be clearly visible to users immediately upon entering the site and provide easy navigation through the site.
Optimization Core Web Vitals and mobile versions
When shopping online, we want to find the products we are interested in and complete the transaction as quickly as possible. A site that is slow to load or not fully interactive discourages us from shopping and returning to the store in the future. Optimizing elements that delay page loading or cause performance issues is an essential step in the SEO process. Removal of rendering-blocking resources, elimination of unused elements in the code or use of graphics in next-generation formats are just examples of actions to be taken when adjusting a site according to Google’s guidelines. We wrote about them in detail in an article about Core Web Vitals
The adaptation of the site to mobile devices also plays a big role. Nowadays, when almost everyone uses a smartphone, creating a responsive website (RWD) or a mobile version is a must. It’s also one of the key factors affecting a site’s position in search results. If you want your store to be not only pleasant to use, but also visible in the search engine – take care of CWV & mobile SEO
Optimize product pages
Online stores in various industries often have thousands of products in their offerings. Each product has a corresponding sub-page, which is a kind of business card. If you care about sales you need to make sure that you present the product in the best possible way. So take care of a good optimization of product pages
How to do it?
Memorize the basic elements, such as the meta descriptions Title and Description and H1 headers. It is their content that should indicate what kind of product is on the page and include its most important features or uses. Including product-related key phrases in the meta descriptions and headers is a good way to increase your store’s visibility.
Don’t forget to optimize graphics Each product should have images dedicated to it, so that potential customers can see it in detail and check the details they are interested in. Before adding graphics, determine the appropriate size and format of the photos so as not to cause delays in loading and operation of the site.
Sublink additionally recommended or similar products in linking modules. Using cross selling or up selling is a great way to bump up the conversion rate and increase customers’ shopping cart. Suggesting other products helps users match additional accessories or shows an alternative to the ordered goods.
In addition, the use of modules strengthens internal linking within the site, which is useful not only from the users’ point of view by making navigation easier, but also helps robots to index sub-pages faster
Product descriptions that comply with SEO guidelines
Product description is one of the most important issues affecting visibility. It is in the content of the description that you can include keyword phrases for which your site will appear in search results. Before you start creating a description, use tools that will allow you to select phrases and saturate them appropriately. For this you can use both free analysis tools and those used by SEO specialists. (Keyword planner, SENUTO, SurferSEO or Semrush).
Remember that the product description must be unique. Unfortunately, one of the most common mistakes online stores make is duplicating description content. Even if you do not sell your own products, but are a distributor of different brands, you need to create a unique description, different from the one provided by the manufacturer.
Content duplication negatively affects your position in search results, resulting in fewer sales.
Also pay attention to internal duplication, which can occur when you offer several variations of the same product. If you don’t want or can’t create an original description for, for example, several color versions of a given product, you can introduce filtering or use canonical links.
Blog or Guide
The past few years in the SEO industry have definitely gone by the slogan Content is King. In practice, this means that on-page content has become the most important ranking factor.
More and more sites from various industries are engaging in maintaining a Blog, Guide or News sub-page, where articles related to the site’s subject matter are posted.
Maintaining a blog is a great place to grow your site and increase user interest. Well-written, valuable content that answers the queries of potential customers, in addition to influencing search engine rankings, also results in increased conversions.
Entertaining articles that additionally include links to specific categories or products in their content encourage users to make a purchase decision and return to the store’s website for future online purchases.
Rich Snippets
Everyone pays attention to other users’ reviews, average rating and product availability and price when deciding on a purchase. To make this information appear directly in search results, apply structured data Rich Snippets to your site. These are elements that increase the attractiveness of links directing to your online store from the search engine.
Secure your customers
When we give our data on the Internet, we want it to be as protected as possible. Security in such cases is guaranteed by SSL certificate(Secure Socket Layer). It is a data encryption protocol, thanks to which all the sensitive data you enter on the site (such as address, PESEL number, phone number or bank card number) are properly protected from getting into the wrong hands. An up-to-date SSL certificate on your online store lets customers know that they can trust you and builds domain authority.
Link-building activities
Link building is a process that definitely supports on-page optimization efforts. By placing links to your store on other sites, you let customers know that your site exists. Search engine robots also treat links as a kind of recommendation and go to the linked sub-pages.
In the link building process, you should pay attention to the domains from which you acquire links. Properly selected portals with high parameters and generating a lot of traffic can pass your site the so-called link juice and affect its evaluation by Google robots.
Also remember to have well-chosen anchors and the textual environment in which they are placed. Links should be placed on a key phrase related to the topic of the page, such as a product phrase, and fit the context of the content in question.
The links should be placed on a key phrase related to the topic of the page, such as a product phrase, and fit the context of the content in question.
We wrote about how to acquire valuable links to a site in a previous article.
UX
Adapting an online store to the needs of potential customers is definitely the key to success. Users who easily navigate the site, have all the necessary options and product information at their fingertips, are more likely to make purchases and return to the store in the future.
The use of a Call to Action message (e.g., “Buy now,” “Add to cart,” “Check out,” “Notify availability”) engages users and encourages interaction. In addition, it is worth paying attention to the purchase path, i.e. the path a user has to follow from adding a product to the shopping cart to finalizing the transaction. Often, customers abandon products when the purchase path is too long, involves too many steps, or the product purchase and delivery information is unclear.
The website should be clear and pleasant to look at in terms of graphics as well. Choosing the background color, font, appropriate graphics, button design and combining it into a coherent whole is not a simple task. Marketing agency specialists often offer UX services to facilitate this process for online store owners.
Positioning of an online store – what can you gain?
All the aspects discussed above are important in building e-commerce visibility and form a complete process. Starting with an SEO Audit, which will show us the areas to optimize, and going through the other elements discussed, we are able to develop good visibility for specific phrases, increase traffic to the site and thus product sales.
Webshops are usually elaborate websites, containing lots of sub-pages with categories, products and blog posts. Optimizing the entire site often requires a lot of work and time. It is worthwhile to use the services of an SEO agency, which will individually analyze the store in terms of industry, competition, degree of optimization and perform the necessary guidelines or implementations.
With good optimization, you are able to increase traffic to your site, increase profits from product sales, gain greater recognition of your brand online and gain new customers.
Wondering if it’s worth it? Get back to us for analysis of your online store!
