If you have an online business or are running an eCommerce web store, you probably know how important it is for your website to be visible to customers, easy to find, and approachable. That’s the reason why everybody pays more and more attention to SEO optimization. Money and paid ads can bring you some visibility, but the first place on SERP is harder to approach – it requires good SEO skills and patience.
SEO optimization will help you to rank higher on SERP, making your website more visible to your targeted group. Also, SEO will implement some good habits that will make your website more accommodating to the changes in the future, which are a long-term investment.
How to manage your website’s SEO for the best results? We are giving you the most popular and efficient tips.
What is eCommerce SEO?
eCommerce SEO refers to a practice that website owners and maintenance teams use for optimizing sites by following the guidelines of the most dominant search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
It may sound difficult if you’re not familiar with the technical parts of website maintenance, but once you meet SEO and its advantages, you’ll realize that it’s very logical and natural for every website owner to use it for the best results.
SEO practices involve many things like using keywords, optimizing a website for mobile devices, creating interesting content, etc. Some of these practices you’re maybe already using, which is great, but here are the most efficient tips for proven SEO success.
Keywords
Find the right keywords to rank your eCommerce website. Take time and do keyword research to pick the most efficient keywords that will suit your business niche. Try to avoid short ones because those are the keywords everybody’s using – try some long-tail keywords which could be more specific for increasing conversion rate. Just imagine what users would search for and follow that pattern and their queries.
Think about user experience
Always keep in mind that your website should be practical and attractive – it should invite users to put products in a cart, not make the shopping process hard and confuse them. You can have the coolest products and the biggest discounts – with poor user experience, customers are more likely to abandon shopping carts which can impact website bounce rate, and that directly impacts SEO.
Design is an important part of SEO. When your website is well-designed, it will encourage users to spend more time on it, and search engines will recognize it as a sign of trust because the bounce rate will be lower. Also, well-designed websites are more attractive not just in a technical, but in an aesthetic way – properly positioned navigation bars, easy searching, and good, intuitive organization are always a better option than complicated high-end designed websites that are maybe beautiful but completely useless.
Start taking notes about your favorite websites: what they do well, and how you can apply that pattern on your website. Research is always good because you can see what the competition does and what you can learn from it.
Your content should be unique
When you’re selling products online, you probably receive product descriptions directly from the manufacturer. While it’s probably the best and most objective description with the right amount of information, you should avoid duplicating product descriptions. Why? Crucially, duplicated content won’t harm your website, but search engine algorithms recognize it and make a kind of restriction for your website that affects your search ranking.
To avoid that, you should focus on creating unique descriptions for each of the products – it may be hard, especially if you have lots of products on a website, but remember it can help you with the competition and even raise brand awareness. Your descriptions should be easy to understand, clear, and preferably interesting; 3 to 5 sentences are the perfect length.
The same pattern applies to a blog section or any other written content – avoid already written ones and try to be unique, just like your business.
Optimize website speed
The online market is expanding every day, and competition is bigger than ever. Customers usually know what they want, and they want it now. A fast, properly-optimized eCommerce website is a real treasure, especially because large websites have a lot more components than others. According to the latest research, if the customer needs to wait more than 2 seconds for a website to load, he’ll go to another website.
How to optimize speed? First of all, choose a reliable hosting provider that can support your website and all of its needs.
A relationship with a hosting provider is maybe one of the most important things for your website – don’t try to save money and just pick the best for you because inappropriate hosting can cause you lots of headaches. If you are in pursuit of a reliable, long-term solution for hosting, read reviews about Hostinger from its satisfied customers. Hostinger offers affordable packages for all kinds of websites with the best uptime, technical support, free domain registration, etc. Always try to do the research and see what customers say about the service, not just pick the first one.
One more thing that can affect your speed is unused plugins that you should uninstall because they can slow down a website. Also, large images are little hell for speed so try to compress them via Photoshop so you don’t destroy resolution, just size.
Let your website be for humans, not for search engines
Although search ranking has a huge impact on eCommerce business and a website’s popularity, sometimes owners are too focused on optimizing their websites just for search engines, forgetting people in that calculation. Let your website be primarily focused on people, their needs, and their habits, and combine SEO optimization with it.
Test your website and show it to a few people, asking them questions about the whole experience. It’s important that everything is accommodated to customers, their intuitive navigation, and aesthetic needs. Let your UX designer do the best job, and test it while thinking about how customers would react.
Always keep in mind that, although algorithms do their job, customers are your primary focus, and you need to do everything for them to be satisfied – SEO is just a part of that process. An important part, but still just a part.
Extra tip: Pick the right plugins
Although this is not exactly an SEO tip, it’s definitely one you need to take into consideration.
Using good eCommerce plugins affects both site performance and user experience. But how does one differentiate a good eCommerce plugin from a bad one? Let us try and help with some suggestions!
WooCommerce Table Rate Shipping
With this plugin, you will be able to create advanced shipping rules, restrict shipping to logged-in users only, determine shipping costs based on a multitude of factors and do much more.
Along with that, you also get to manage handling fees, hide shipping methods, import/export shipping methods, use unique shipping method names, use shipping classes, force the usage of shipping methods, among other things.
In a nutshell, this is the plugin you want if you need that perfect shipping rate plan.
WooCommerce Order Export
Order data is important data. That is why you need a good tool to export WooCommerce order data with ease. Luckily, you stumbled on the right plugin for that.
WooCommerce Order Export can automatically export order data, even on a schedule you determined. Where does this data go? To your inbox or you receive it through FTP.
What’s more, the data can be filtered and the columns in the reports reordered. Impressive, if you ask us!
Both of these plugins have great reviews and a significant user base, so why not give them a try? We did and were left feeling impressed!
