ECommerce businesses have a unique challenge compared to physical stores or service area businesses. When your customer base is strictly online, the marketing aspect becomes even more important. With so many people looking online for products and services and with companies advertising, it can be difficult to get a spotlight for your business.
This eCommerce SEO guide is designed to help you gain traction in improving your online presence. As a result of following the steps in this guide, you can increase web traffic and sales. ECommerce SEO adopts many of the methods that local SEO and national SEO use but has its own challenges to overcome.
The Best eCommerce Platform for SEO
There are a lot of different eCommerce platforms out there, but they are not created equally. If you are looking for the best eCommerce platforms for SEO, we recommend Magento or WordPress (WooCommerce). These platforms allow you to optimize your site to the fullest, unlike Shopify, Square, or Wix.
There are pros and cons of using one over the other, but that comes with any platform. Our recommendation is WordPress. One-third of all websites on the internet are made using WordPress. This kind of reputation makes it an easy choice for many. WordPress also has excellent integration with inventory systems, secure checkouts, and necessary SEO plugins to increase your site’s online presence. WordPress is significantly cheaper than Magento, too, so you can save money on maintenance and building costs.
Whichever platform you choose, you can feel comfortable knowing both offer excellent SEO options for businesses. From there, you can start optimizing your site to the fullest.
Source: WooCommerce
Keywords and Content
Like all digital marketing strategies, eCommerce SEO heavily relies on content marketing and keyword research. It is important to know what your potential customers are searching for so you can market to them. Once you know what others are searching to find products or services like yours, you can start creating content that has those keywords integrated.
Website content is one of the most important aspects of your website. When visiting your site, the content should answer questions the visitor might have. With products, the content should detail it as much as possible. If questions are left unanswered, the customer will be hesitant to purchase the product. We recommend the minimum word count for products should be 300 words. Do your best to detail the product as much as possible. Tell the visitor what your product can do for them.
Your products are not the only places content will be found on your site. After all, you need to populate your homepage with plenty of informative, engaging, and original content. We recommend your homepage be at least 1,000 words as it will be the most authoritative page on your site. Incorporate the keywords you researched. You should be able to fold these keywords into subheadings, bullet points, captions, and more.
Source: Home Depot
Website Design
Your website cannot sell your products if it fails to be user-friendly among customers. People are buying products on their phones more than ever before. Smartphones are forever ingrained into our lives, meaning your site needs to accommodate. A responsive web design proves to Google your site offers a friendly mobile design. Your website should work on different sizes of screens so that the user experience is as positive as possible. Poor mobile design leads to issues like a higher bounce rate and lower search engine rankings.
Magento and WordPress can assist in the mobile design as both of these platforms make it easy. Additionally, page speeds should be as fast as possible. The longer it takes to load your website, the less likely customers will wait to reach your site. There are many methods you can implement to reduce your website page speeds and increase user-friendliness.
Finally, the structure of your site is important. If your products are hard to find on your website, customers will leave without purchasing anything. Google’s crawl bot acts similarly to a real human in how it navigates your site. When it finds your products are difficult to find or your site’s structure is overly complex, it will penalize you.
All of these qualities will affect how your products perform and how your site ranks overall.
Source: GameStop
eCommerce SEO Agency
ASAP Marketing Solutions offers a wide range of services for various types of businesses. We are known as an eCommerce SEO agency with many of our clients. We work closely with them to develop strong, user-friendly sites to drive sales of products. Call us at (832) 737-2752 for a free estimate. Our team will develop a proposal for your business outlining our methods in detail. Reach out to our eCommerce SEO agency today!