When it comes to ramping up sales in the World of Ecommerce, your website design and advertising are crucial, but you should never dismiss the organic arm of your marketing strategy. We’re referring to search engine optimisation (SEO), how you bring your customers from Google (and other search engines) to your product pages. With these Ecommerce SEO tips, we can ramp up the clicks that you receive and in turn hep you get more of those clicks into sales.
1. Start with the XML sitemap
Sitemaps are effectively, a list of URLs. You may already have a standard HTML sitemap, but search engine bots (or crawlers) index your website by reading this sitemap. This dramatically helps search engines better see the importance of each individual page on your site, which in turn helps with rankings. Setting up an XML sitemap is straightforward, and there are tools that can automatically generate it by scanning your existing site.
2. It’s all about structure
Link anchors aren’t the only way to establish the structure of your website. You can also do it by defining that structure yourself. This can be done by setting up the navigation from the home page that makes it easier to explore the different categories and in turn sub-categories. Create a hierarchy of pages and products, which are in sub-categories - which are in categories, which are accessible directly from the home page. You do not have to make every single page immediately accessible from the home page, but the series of clicks to get from the home page to each individual products or page should make clear sense and involve going through the most logical categories in order to do this.
3. Internal links and the importance of them
A great, intuitive site structure and layout are definitely going to help your customers find what they need, especially if you have a large product catalogue. However, it’s also really important to your SEO efforts. By utilising internal links to create a clear structure, you make it far easier for the search engine’s bots to crawl and index your site, indexing the pages as they go. Having link anchors (the clickable hyperlinks in text) connecting the different pages of the site, especially with keyword rich text can help those bots understand the context of each individual page. Ensure that the clickable text best describes the content that it’s taking the visitor too, using at least one keyword.
4. Don’t put too much emphasis on product descriptions
These descriptions are going to help sell your products, but when it comes to SEO Ecommerce, the real value is in better defining the product categories. Writing tailor made descriptions for hundreds of products is extremely time-consuming, especially if those products aren’t especially interesting. Users tend to search more for categories of products than specific products, so put your time into jazzing up the category pages instead. If you have a smaller range of products, then individual attention on each might be more reasonable.
5. Don’t be slow
Search engines priorities usability of your website, and penalise any aspects of the website that would cause interruption or trouble for the visitors. Aside from broken links, this means you should focus on your overall page speed. Essentially, the longer your website takes to load, the more your results are going to suffer. There is a range of ways to help your site load quicker, including using better-optimised media such as videos and photos.
