To ensure that you are moving on the right track in your eCommerce business, focus more on receiving quality traffic from organic search results.

So, a set of good SEO strategies highly helps you achieve top organic results. That’s why many believe that SEO matters for eCommerce websites.

Let’s explore more about the topic in the coming sections. I will list a few valid points on why SEO matters for eCommerce websites, followed by the E-commerce SEO definition.

What is E-commerce SEO?

In general, SEO is the optimization process that is usually done to achieve top results on search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.

The same is applied to eCommerce websites, and the process is called eCommerce SEO.

While doing the process, you should produce high-quality content related to your eCommerce products on the store using the right keywords. When your content gets positioned on top of the results, you can drive targeted yet quality traffic organically to your store.

Let’s now look at the benefits of SEO for eCommerce websites.

6 Valid Benefits of Why SEO Matters for eCommerce Websites

1. Increase the Visibility of your Brand

When your store pages start getting ranked at the top of the search results, they will get a lot of clicks from different audiences. A bunch of people started knowing the existence of your brand.

If it happens, your brand visibility will be increased.

Once your brand becomes popular among a set of target audiences, even after your position slightly drops, people who already know your brand may pay their direct visit to your online store and make purchases.

So, SEO for eCommerce websites is highly important to increase your brand’s visibility.

2. Online Shopping Gets Bigger and Bigger

Shopping offline is decreasing daily because of the increase in online shoppers. As online shopping gets bigger and bigger every day, if you have a good SEO score for your eCommerce website, you can get a good number of orders from your online store.

eCommerce websites that are not following proper SEO strategies will not appear on the top page of the search results.

To use the demand in online shopping, you should work well on SEO practices to gain better rankings for your eCommerce store.

3. SEO is a Cost Effective Process

If you know the process, you can do it yourself. Even if you are not aware of the process, you can learn by watching videos and reading blog posts related to the process and handling all the techniques yourself without spending any money on SEO.

Organic traffic is free as you need not pay anything to Google to get your keywords ranked at the top of the results.

So, SEO is a cost-effective process by which you can drive thousands of free traffic to your eCommerce websites. You can do SEO for eCommerce websites and beat your competitors with a minimal budget in your pocket.

4. SEO Matters to Survive for the Longer Run

SEO effects are long-lasting, and you can keep receiving free organic traffic to your eCommerce websites for a more extended period until your URLs stay on the top results.

When you are trying paid advertisements to receive paid traffic, you can only run the ads till your budget remains. If you do not have a budget, your paid campaigns will stop, and you will no longer drive traffic to your eCommerce websites.

Unlike paid advertisements that stop as soon as your budget finishes, SEO effects are long-lasting.

Once you create your SEO campaign with a strong pillar, possibly, the results remain the same for years, and you will continuously receive a good amount of free traffic to your eCommerce websites.

5. Get Rid of Paid Advertisements Costs

Spending money for paid advertisements to drive traffic and convert the traffic into sales is one of the biggest headaches for eCommerce store owners nowadays.

Most of the owners need more than hundreds of dollars for paid ads. In this case, SEO matters a lot for eCommerce websites.

Suppose you are focusing well on your SEO campaigns and achieving the results you expected from the campaign. In that case, you never need to worry about costs for paid advertisements, as SEO can drive quality traffic at no cost to your eCommerce websites.

6. Drive Target Audiences Organically

Not every audience visiting your eCommerce website will make a purchase.

Some may visit to experience your store or compare your store prices with other stores. But, when target audiences pay a visit to your store, there is a high possibility that the visit gets converted into sales.

There are only two ways that you can drive interested audiences to your eCommerce store. One is via paid campaigns, and the other is through organic results.

For paid advertisements, as said, you have to spend hundreds of dollars, but for SEO, no such money is required to spend.

What I meant by the target audience is if someone wants to buy a dinner set, they used to search with a query like buy dinner sets online, intending to purchase the product. So, when your website is on the top results, visits from particular questions quickly get you sales.

So, SEO helps a lot for your eCommerce business to drive target audiences organically.

Bottomline

For all eCommerce website owners, there is no point in depending only on paid advertisements to achieve sales in your store.

Sometimes your ad account gets disabled, you will be restricted from publishing some ads, and you cannot keep spending money on ads.

So, focussing on SEO is the clever choice you should follow to gain organic traffic at no cost. Don’t take SEO lightly, as it dramatically affects your eCommerce website’s growth.

The post Why SEO Matters for eCommerce Websites? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

As of 2018, the number of e-commerce stores has exploded all over the internet. Almost every niche has a few online shops that are making huge sales than the rest. Overall, Amazon, Overstock, eBay and a couple others have shown relentless efforts to keep themselves at the top of the online shopping roost. In order to be able to contend with the best, your store must display the best optimization techniques.

Some of those practices are described in detail below.

Keywords are everything

All search engines use algorithms based on keywords to rank sites. But not every term qualifies as an effective keyword. You need to research your niche and find out phrases that are performing well. For positive outcomes, take advantage of tools like Semrush, Serpstat, Spyfu, LongTailPro, and other tools to find the best keywords.

One of the nifty ways to find a product-focused keyword is to use Amazon Suggest. Being the biggest e-commerce platform, it makes sense to use them for keyword research. Simply visit the site, and type the general term of your product and other phrases will be added to the end.

Most of the terms you are going to get on Amazon are long-tail keywords and they do convert better than the conventional 2-3 word varieties. The problem with short-form keywords is that they are pretty broad (not to forget, highly competitive) and can take a long time to deliver substantial results. Such terms also cast the net too wide which results in poor targeting.

For a long list of keywords, you can use the Keyword Tool Dominator to scrape some of the suggestions from Amazon. This tool not only spits out dozens of phrases but gives you the chance to organize them and save to a list for future use.

You don’t have to know everything about keywords or read every book to produce the best results. Sometimes all you need is to tap into your competitors’ metrics and copy-paste their methods if they have proved to be fruitful.

Produce outstanding content

There is enough crap on the internet and thankfully, search engines now know how to bypass such content when ranking sites. Informative blogs answer customers’ questions without droning on. If you are writing a product review, make sure the reader is able to grasp the context of your posts without having to look into other guides for supplement information.

According to Lemon stands research, websites with top quality content convert six times more than those with subpar content. As you can see, their purpose goes beyond mere SEO. Informative posts entice prospects to stick around and check out other goods or services you offer.

It’s imperative to use different types of content to get maximum results. Blogs can work for some time but it gets tiresome- especially when reading epic content that spans several pages. Try to use images, videos, infographics and other forms to increase user engagement.

User-friendly site architecture

You can create stunning content and fine-tune all other core areas of your e-store but without a good design, all that effort is pointless. A page that loads slowly will motivate visitors to check somewhere else. As of July 2018, Google announced that they will incorporate the page speed metric for ranking of sites on mobile devices.

Since speed is of the essence, you must keep testing your website pages to ensure customers are having a smooth time on your e-store. Page Speed Insights and other similar tools can help you test the mobile performance of your websites. The faster your site, the more visible it will be on handheld devices.

Still, on architecture, the categorization of the pages of your eCommerce store is also important when it comes to improving SEO results. Normally, there are very many pages and it can be a confusing experience for customers if they find it hard to navigate back to the previous sections or home page.

The arrangement of pages can also make it easier or hard for such engine bots to crawl your store during a ranking exercise. But what’s the secret to the proper organization? There are two golden rules you can observe:

1. Keep everything simple and scalable
2. Every page should be 3 or fewer clicks away from the homepage

Simply put, don’t adopt a too “deep” architecture such that authority gets less effective by the time it gets to your product, service, or category pages.

Use LSI keywords

Latent Semantic Indexing keywords refer to words or phrases that closely relates to the main keyword. For instance, if you are optimizing your e-commerce product page around the keyword like “slow cooker,” terms that could be used as LSI keywords include:

• Pressure cooker
• Timers
• Crock-pot
• Stainless steel
• 4 quart, 6 quarts etc.

It’s not hard to find LSI keywords that you can use for eCommerce SEO. Some of the resourceful places you can pick them are Amazon (The Amazon Eyeball Test), Google Keyword Planner, and Wikipedia.

LSI keywords for a backpack from Wikipedia

Use Short, Keyword-packed URLs

There is a clear connection between a site’s URL and ranking. If you look at Google’s first page results, you’ll note that sites with shorter URLs rank higher than those with short URLs.

The issue with e-commerce is that products’ URLs have the tendency to get longer thanks to categories and subcategories being included. A simple URL for one of your products could look like this; https://forexample.com/category/subcategory/yourproduct.html

Having an unnecessarily long URL can be confusing to search engines and this will end up to hamper your SEO efforts. It gets worse if the address includes meaningless numbers towards the end. If you have to make it long, then make sure it is as keyword-rich as possible. Here is an example of a well-optimized URL:

As you can see, the address includes the main keyword, LSI keyword, and displays the product category as well. Some e-stores avoid including categories and subcategories to their URL as a way of making it shorter. You don’t have to try that method; just find a technique that works well for your store. And I also recommend using the Keyword in the URL.

Internal links

Internal linking can happen automatically for most e-commerce stores. However, this time-saving feature isn’t enough to deliver satisfactory results. You need to be strategic enough and link various high-performing blog posts to one or several of your priority products.

For instance, let’s say you have a post that has generated a lot of online Buzz and one of your products (which relates to the post) ranks well on Google’s first page. You would want to link these two using a keyword-rich anchor text. Do this for all your prioritized pages and your e-commerce efforts will yield exemplary results.

Establish authority

There is a lot of noise on the web and frankly, the loudest get more attention. So, if you have the slickest site and sell the best products but no authoritative sites link to you, then there will be no sound of money flowing in.

Through backlinks, you can ask for influential sites to mention your site so others can know about its existence. The more you do this, the more credible and known you become and this translates to better ROI. Remember most search engines now consider backlinks as one of the most important ranking signals. So focus on building the authority of your e-commerce website.

Despite Amazon, eBay and other sites occupying the largest share of the e-commerce space, there is still a big slice of pie to go around to other online retailers. However, to get to it, you must optimize your e-commerce so it’s visible to many online visitors.

So, there you have it- a number of e-commerce SEO hacks which most store owners won’t realize until they figure out that their efforts are paying off.

Would you happen to know any other tricks that you don’t mind sharing?

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