This post walks readers through the 10 best tips for ecommerce website optimization. Managing duplicate content, using long-tail keywords, marketing the best selling products and maintaining a certain level of content quality are a few to mention.
When it comes to your ecommerce website, there are several issues that may crop up – mainly duplicate content, poor copy and a huge product list – all of this adversely affecting your site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Then, there are some ecommerce website optimization techniques to help your site perform better in the SERPs.
Though there are no miracles to improve rankings, but focusing on little things would help you considerably. So, let’s have a look how you can shape up your ecommerce website for better performance in the SERPs.
1. Manage Your Duplicate Content
It’s needless to say that any duplicate content will adversely affect your site’s ranking and this is the most common challenge faced by ecommerce site owners. Here are some ways to deal with the problem.
- Always submit your site’s URL to Google
- Canonicalizing links are important
- Referencing of URL is important
- Be wise to syndicate content
If you find that your content is used without your prior consent, make sure that you request Google to remove those contents. This comes under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Dealing strictly with content duplication issues will help your web pages rank better in the SERPs.
2. Content to Meet Certain Quality Standards
When we talk about unique content, it also implies that it must have a certain standard of quality. The primary ecommerce business optimization factors include the layout of web pages, ease of user experience, amount of time spent on your site, bounce rate and site traffic diversity. If you take care of these aspects, Google would offer users with quality search results. Web pages written just to please the search engines will not take your ecommerce site much forward.
You can persuade your visitors to make comments, upload reviews, post images or videos. It has been found that the content uploaded by existing customers often matches with the search query of prospective customers. This helps in driving increased traffic to your website.
3. Use Long-tail Keywords
Spending your marketing dollars for traffic and which doesn’t help in terms of conversions is wastage of money. There is nothing like getting better rankings – be it organically or by paid marketing. Then, you need to understand which keywords will bring customers closer to your products and make them buy from you. For example, instead of using the keyword ‘smartphone’, consider using long-tail keywords such as ‘Samsung Galaxy s5’. Such search terms would help you reach your potential buyers easily than with generic terms.
Always using a keyword tool may result in having search terms similar to your competitors. For better results, you can study your product page analytics to identify the long-tail search terms that are driving visitors to your product page. These are the terms you can include in your product page copy for Google spiders to crawl.
4. Market Your Best Selling Products
It’s not possible to display all your merchandise in the front of your brick and mortar store. You need to know your priorities. Studies show that the bulk of a store’s sales are derived from a small fraction of its products. So, be prudent to market more on your best selling or best performing products instead of promoting every single product. Remember to link your popular product pages from your home page.
5. Explore All Kinds of Content
Both Google’s search and image search play a significant role in optimization. Experts opine that the optimization of ALT tags and title tags is essential and also links pointing to an image must incorporate the relevant keywords. Therefore, it’s important that you rename your image title as ‘Polo neck T-shirt.jpg’ and not ‘Product 10.jpg’. You can also make use of the lately released structured markup for your videos.
6. Stay Updated with the Most Recent AdWords Features
To rank better, it’s important that you stay updated with the up-to-the-minute AdWords features. The new features offer mobile targeting, extensions, retargeting, enhanced site links, and leveraging the Google Merchant tie-in. Be smart to embrace the new features, implement them and make the most of an inexpensive cost-per-click i.e. CPC.
There are many ways to improve your AdWords so that you can customize your program to suit your requirements.
7. Make the Most out of Google Places
Use Google Places if you have a physical store. According to Google, one out of five searches is associated with location. For instance, if you have several stores, it’s important that they are individually listed and incorporate detailed information such as hours of business, live updates, images and also coupons. As per Google Places for Business, 97% customers look for local businesses on the internet.
8. Be Active on Social Platforms
We all know that all brands – big or small – have their Facebook pages. With time, more social sites emerged, such as Google+, Tumbler and Pinterest. This means that users are able to see content, images and posts from their acquaintances and friends incorporated into their search results. Be active on G+ to increase the possibilities of appearing more significantly. This way, a prospective buyer finds your products easily when searching for them.
9. Schema.org
Ecommerce websites are frequently developed from organized data which is then converted to HTML. However, this doesn’t make your site optimized for the search bots. The formal outlines present in schema.org will help Google or any other search engine access your data. Experts say that schema.org helps search engine crawl your web pages and also return structured results for visitors.
10. Use Google Products if that’s Where You Want to Rank
It’s prudent to make use of Google products if that’s where you want your website to rank. Now, you can make the most of Google Merchant Center where website owners can upload product feeds so that users are able to easily know about your products in Google product search.
So, these were some of the tips for
eCommerce website optimization. Do you know of others? If so, you can share your knowledge with us and we will add your information to the discussion above.
