Tips that will help you improve the positioning of your ecommerce website in a natural way.
Getting an eCommerce to stand out through SEO is becoming increasingly difficult. Google strives to offer the best result so that the big brands like Amazon, Zalando or Spartoo are increasingly difficult to beat.
But there is still hope for small e-commerce businesses who want to make a name for themselves among the giants, these 10 tips for improving the SEO of your ecommerce will help you improve your search results.
- Adding texts in the categories
A category without text is simply a list of articles with some text from the product descriptions which in turn is duplicate text inside the product.Having original, well written text that really helps the user can push your ecommerce SEO further than you think.The important thing here is not to write the text with the search engines in mind, but rather that the text helps the customer potentially, you should add at least once the keyword on which the category is focused, but not fill the text with them.The good thing about this is that in Spain there are very few online stores that make good use of category descriptions, on this American pet product page you can see well optimized descriptions:
- Linking between products
Adding links on product pages to other products, in addition to improving cross-selling between items, increases the number of pages Google reaches. There are many ways to implement these links: - Offering products related or complementary to the one the user is looking at
- Products that other users have bought
- Based on the user’s purchase history
By adding links on product pages, you’ll get Google to the rest of the products without having to go back to the top of the web, while also improving cross-selling by offering products that may be of interest to the user.
3. Do not index the parameters of the URLs
In ecommerce it is very common to use parameters when creating sessions for users and filtering products: filters by product characteristics (color, size, score, etc.), sorting (lowest price, by relevance, highest price, in grid, etc.) and by product types (LED TVs, plasma TVs, etc.). The problem is that many of these parameters do not change the content of the page, that generates many URLs for the same content.
- (link) www.ejemplo.com/televisores?tipo=plasma&precio-desde=200&precio-hasta=800
In this example we can see three parameters: type of TV, minimum price and maximum price.
Solution
The solution for any problem with the parameters is to add a “rel=canonical” tag to the original page, this could avoid any problem of duplicate content between the different pages created by the parameters.
Besides this you should tell Google through Google Webmaster Tools > Crawling > URL Parameters which parameters should be ignored when indexing pages on your website.
This will let Google know which page is the most important of those for the same products, eliminating any potential problems with duplicate content and boosting that page’s rank.
4. Use your products as a Link Baiting strategy
The best way to get links is with quality content, in the case of an ecommerce, it is even easier since there are many ways to sell items that get links themselves:
- Fake articles: Like Thinkgeek’s Unicorn Flesh, with fake products that are clearly seen to be fake (if not, they could end up being a scam) it’s very easy to get users’ attention and get mentions in social networks and links in blogs in your niche
- Special but extremely expensive items: Since this Playstation game station costs $90,000, you don’t even need to have it in stock, the important thing is to make sure that if someone buys it, you’ll be able to fulfill the order.
2. Original and affordable items that can’t be found in other online stores, study your competition to find out what they don’t sell and offer it in your store. Like these grizzly bear shorts image
5. Don’t forget your cell phone
According to a study by Forbes, 20% of purchases in online stores are made from mobile devices, estimating that in 3 years half of the purchases will be made through mobile devices.
Currently, very few online stores in Spain are optimized for mobile: buttons look very small, product descriptions are difficult to read and the shopping process is frustrating. The best option is to include a responsive design in your ecommerce that fits any type of screen.
Unfortunately I haven’t found any responsive design in Spanish, but in this knives website you can see how by reducing the screen neither the product photo nor the button to add the item to the cart lose importance:
6. Add structured data to your product sheets
Why can it be beneficial to add structured data to an ecommerce? Google is showing more and more enriched results and the richer your ecommerce search results are, the more likely they are to appear in the top positions.
With Google Webmaster Tools it’s very simple. You have to go to search aspect > data marker, this tool allows you to add information to the elements of your web in a direct way, without the need to add code or any plugin. You can add price, photo, description, price, availability, average rating and reviews.
Just enter the URL of the page you want to add the marked data to and follow Google’s instructions.
What you see on the right is the template that will appear when using this tool, just highlight the information within the page, click left and indicate what information it is.
7. Customized product descriptions
The vast majority of online stores use the product descriptions provided by the brand, which means that none of their products stand out from those of the competition so that the original page, i.e. the brand page, will always have a better positioning.
In this snowboard you can see an original, informative text, with a list of the characteristics of the board and a demonstration video:
Adding personalized descriptions on product pages that respect Google’s guidelines (original text, useful and without excess keywords) in addition to making your page different from your competitors and more likely to position well will also help your users decide whether to buy a product or not, do not just list the features, indicate who the product is suitable for and the utilities it may have.
8. Loading speed
This applies to any website, but in ecommerce it is even more important:
- Your users expect your website to load in less than 2 seconds
- 40% of users leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load
- For every extra second it takes to load the conversion falls by 7%
- For every extra second it takes to load, user satisfaction drops by 7%
- Faster loading reduces website maintenance by 50%.
- If the loading speed is reduced by 50%, the number of indexed pages increases by 100%.
- The loading speed is one of the most relevant positioning factors that is gaining importance since the less time it takes to load your website the more time Google will have to go through it from top to bottom.Data extracted from CPCstrategy
9. Use your own quality photos
The fact of making your own real pictures of the products in which the user can see in detail the products, increasing their confidence, will give you a very interesting opportunity to get links, using tools like Image Raider you can monitor if any other page is using your images, in that case you can contact the webmaster of that page and ask him to link you.
A clear example of quality photos is the Threadless clothing ecommerce that photographs all their photos on themselves
Also, if the photos are personalized and don’t look like they were taken from the brand’s website, you’ll get your potential customers to be more confident that what they’re seeing is the real product and not a studio montage.
10. Don’t get obsessed with keywords
Including the keyword for which you want an article to be positioned on your page is an action that can benefit you at the SEO level, but if you take it to the limit you can fall into an over-optimisation and get penalised by Google.
Let’s take an example, if you have a running shoe store and you call all the articles “Running shoe model x”, “Running shoe model y” and “Running shoe model z” the word running shoe will appear in the category page as many times as you have articles, which will surely cause you a keyword stuffing problem.
But the best advice I can give you to make your ecommerce work is to treat the customer as if he were the last one: answer the doubts the faster the better, if the customer has problems making a purchase solve it, if he doesn’t get a product send him another one, etc., etc., etc.ion
Addition Tip – E-commerce stores are the prime targets of hackers as they store lots personal information like card details & have high DA & traffic. Malware attacks on ecommerce stores can lead to site slow down, Google backlist & can affect your over site’s SEO. Follow best ecommerce security practices to avoid such situations.