It is no wonder that over 40% of our clients use eCommerce to sell their products and services. Nearly 8 out of every 10 Americans is using online shopping to purchase products and services. When the search engines stated 50% of the internet was using mobile there was a big push to fix websites to be mobile friendly. With roughly 80% of the internet purchasing online shouldn’t you have a piece of the pie as well as being optimized to take the best advantage of it? We think so and these are my top tips for rocking your eCommerce SEO organically.
- Patience – Like all aspects of search engine optimization this is a marathon and not a sprint. Be prepared to make a lot of changes, revise based on your purchasers needs and the needs of the search engines, and be ready for change.
- Prioritize your pages – Every page of your site is important. Your visitors will routinely be going to certain pages before others. Those should be your focus. The products that you sell most of or make you the most profit should get the first care.
- Don’t wait – We see this one all too often. People come to us a few weeks before Black Friday and want their 500 products not only on a brand-new website but in the top position of the search engines organically. It won’t happen. If this year is any indication business owners are becoming more aware of this as our first 5 of 6 websites this year are eCommerce sites.
- SEO Descriptions – Each of your pages you write beautiful copy to entice people to buy when they are on your site. Make the SEO META Descriptions equally beautiful. Grab a person’s attention and interest within the search engines before they even reach your site.
- Speed – Optimize your site for speed. This is more important than being graphics heavy. You will have pictures on your product pages but the rest of your site should be kind of “bland”. Look at Amazon. It’s not flashy, get’s the job done, and brings in billions of dollars per year.
- Images – Make certain all of your images have ALT tags explaining what the picture is.
- Friendly URL’s – Make the URL of your site consistent, easy to read, and understand.
- Categorize – All of your products should be in categories that “make sense”. If you are selling a bunch of widgets put them in the widget category. If those widgets also apply to another category add them there too.
- Mobile – More people are using their phones to shop. Don’t forget them. Make certain your site works well for your mobile users just like you do for desktop users. This is often forgotten.
- Payments – We love payments. Make certain to accept the widest range as possible. Credit cards and PayPal should be available for all purchasers. Others could be check, in-store credit, etc. Payments are also critical in saving money. As an example, PayPal will cost you a monthly fee for pro, 2.9%, and $0.30 per transaction. You can do better than that and we often save our clients over a $1,000 a year in credit card transaction fees giving you more money to your bottom line.
- SSL – This is the green pad lock. No longer should you have it on just your checkout process. Add it everywhere. Every page no matter what. This is a ranking factor on the search engines and builds trust with those purchasing from you.
- Blog – It may seem crazy for an eCommerce site to blog but it isn’t. You can promote products, build your internal links, and get more keywords on the search engines. Like any website products beyond price don’t change often. By blogging you are keeping content on your website fresh and relevant.
- Site Map – Like a map when you are driving a car to get you from point A to point B a sitemap for your website will help the search engines find every page on your website.
These are my top tips for any eCommerce site. They are no where near a complete list. This is the core starting point for a plan to make your eCommerce site a success using organic SEO.