8 Key SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Websites

Published on: 29 March 2018 Last Updated on: 03 September 2024
8 Key SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Websites

Online shopping has changed the way people shop. The popularity of the online shopping portals makes two things clear. First, people like the convenience that online shopping provides them. Being able to shop for anything and everything at their own convenient time and from the comfort of their homes or offices is a great plus point for shoppers across the world. Second, with the increase of online shoppers, the number of e-commerce websites is also increasing. This is leading to aggressive competition in the arena of online marketing. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into the picture. SEO can help e-commerce business owners to beat the competition and keep attracting targeted visitors to their website. Here are 8 key SEO strategies that can help e-commerce websites to gain success:

1. Provide unique and impressive product descriptions :

An e-commerce site is all about products and their sales. As such, product descriptions are vital for such sites. Since e-commerce sites have to deal with a huge number of products, sometimes they may tend to use the descriptions provided by the manufacturers for the products. Or, they may want to repeat the same description for similar products. But that is a wrong strategy and must be avoided.

You need to come up with a unique product description for each item you are selling on your website. Though it’s a lot of work to write unique descriptions for each product, this strategy is sure to bring in the desired results.

2. Ensure easy navigation of your website :

Make sure that your e-commerce website is easily navigable. This strategy is important not just for improving your site’s search engine rankings, but also to offer a smooth shopping experience to your customers. Create categories to organize your products and make them easily searchable. Ensure that your sitemap is easy to follow.

Also, the design of your website must be clutter-free so that your customers can continue with their shopping without feeling irritated. Place your menus in a way so that your customers can access them easily, regardless of where they are on the site.

3. Optimize the loading time of your website :

Your e-commerce website is likely to have a large number of images for the products you are selling. These images can slow down your site. Ensure to optimize the load times of your website by reducing the image sizes.

High-quality images are essential for any e-commerce website. But if they slow down your website, it can impact your SEO in a bad way. So, it’s better to include images with small sizes and have a feature that allows your customers to zoom in on the images to see an enlarged version. This will enable you to provide your customers with quality images without affecting the load speed of your website.

4. Go for internal linking of your pages :

Internal linking is an essential aspect of SEO. Even Google prefers sites that opt for internal linking in an effective manner. Your objective must be to ensure that your customers can reach your various product pages within your site with as little clicking as possible.

One way to do this is to link every page to other relevant pages within your website. This will also help your site visitors to navigate to similar products in an easy manner and give you a chance to convert them into customers. If you want to know more about customer conversion, you can check out The Ultimate Guide to E-commerce Conversion Funnel Optimization.

5. Make sure that your site is optimized for mobile :

Today more and more people are using their mobile phones to do their shopping at various online stores. This makes it essential for you to optimize your e-commerce website for mobile. By doing so, you will be providing a smooth mobile shopping experience for your users. So, either go for a responsive design for your site or create an interactive mobile application to draw in the advantage of such customers. Ultimately, your objective is to attract more customers and ensure more sales for your website and this is a good strategy to achieve your aim.

6. Assure user security on your website :

User security is one point that needs extra attention in case of e-commerce websites. Having HTTPS encryption for user security on your website is a great way to go about this task. HTTPS encryption ensures that your customers will have an added layer of security when shopping on your website. This will diminish any doubts they may have regarding user security on your site. Also, HTTPS encryption will help Google to mark your site as secured and increase the chances of your site’s ranking on the search engine pages.

7. Include social media sharing buttons on your product pages :

The reach of social media is undeniable. It can take just a few minutes for an image or a piece of information to attract the attention of thousands of users on social media. Incorporate social media sharing buttons on your product pages so that your users may share information and images of the product on the social media platforms. On one hand, this will increase the reach of your products and attract the interest of relevant customers. On the other hand, it will be good practice for SEO as well. This is because Google may perceive the social signals as an indication of authority.

8. Check your website and pages for errors :

For an e-commerce site, it’s not unusual to grow at an incredible speed and have a large number of pages within a short time. But such growth also increases the prospect of having errors on your e-commerce website. It’s not feasible to hinder the growth of your site. So, the next best thing to do is to make sure that your website remains free of errors. Carry out regular checks to ensure that none of the permalinks on your site generates 404 errors. Also, check that the links to external sources or content are in a functional state.

Read More :

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

View all posts

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related

Marketing Automation Platforms

Top 10 Features to Have in Marketing Automation Platforms

When you start a business, you have something bigger plan in your mind and to execute it you go all possible means. But, depending entirely on the human-empowered workforce can slow down your ambition. But, we have something new and extraordinary kinds of stuff to tell you about. Yes, guessed it right. We are talking about marketing automation platforms. When you leave the crucial tasks on software such as managing marketing campaigning, email marketing, and others, it ensures success to your business while keeping your staffs free from all these complicated tasks so that they focus on other important things to increase sales. In this article, we will be talking about the top 10 important things that your marketing automation platforms integrated with CRM system software. Email Marketing: Email marketing is a crucial part of any business to customer engagement. CRM system helps you send mass emails on a scheduled time and you can make things possible in just setting up the system to complete the task. More than that, the marketing automation system offers professional grade email format that could be sent after a little modification. Contact Management: Accumulating a list of subscribers, filtering them out based on category and listing them, is a complicated task and finishing this always like winning the half of the battle. Your sales team get complete data of subscribers and even set up to the automation system to take follow-ups calls and emails. Social Media Automation: Sales representatives may have to spend an extra hour to keep a constant eye on social media activities while marketing automation software easily does this and also saves the information in CRM records. Community Engagement Simplified: Marketing automation platform easily identifies the engaging post and successfully sends a reply to automatically to the visitors who come seeking information. Customer Journey: Managing customers is an essential element for driving success. Automation system integrating with CRM system can easily handle the customer journey, right from sending emails and to show products and services. Landing Pages: You need a fine, engaging, eye-catching, simple, comprehensive and conversion optimised landing page where your customer would visit and take further course of action. Customizable & All-in-one Dashboard: When you automate your business process with full stack system, you get fully customised dashboard which lets you do all your marketing and management activities do without creating any complexities. White Label Options: This feature makes your brand presence felt everywhere by putting the brand logo on various platform. Mastering in marketing will lead to you complex procedure to follow and reach your target audience while the CRM system integrated with marketing automation can do this in no time that too without involving and human resource. Conclusion: Features are not limited to the mentioned level, rather there can end a number of features depending on the types of marketing automation you have integrated with your business process. You can explore more options there and get the maximum benefit as you can. Read Also: Signs Your Traditional Marketing Campaign Is Working Creative Marketing Strategies To Put Your Small Translation Business On The Map

READ MOREDetails
Digital Marketing

Exploring The Different Types Of Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital marketing is the process of marketing services and produces using digital technology with the primary aim of reaching out to the target audience. Although you might know this already, digital marketing isn’t restricted to the internet, hence can be done on any other digital medium including display advertising and mobile phones. Some of the most popularly used digital marketing methods include search engine marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click, social media marketing, and SMS marketing among others. This article explores the various types of digital marketing methods in use today. 1. Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing is the process of marketing/promoting services and products through social media. With billions of people logging into various social networking platforms in a day, social media has become a marketing haven for marketers.  Popular networking platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn have made it possible for marketers to target specific audiences. This has led to increased output and conversion of target audiences into potential and even loyal customers.  LinkedIn, for example, is specially designed for B2B marketing while Instagram plays perfectly for the 'visual' business. There are different approaches in which one can use to target audiences on social media.  Facebook, for example, provides users with both free and paid advertising options, all of which can be profitable when appropriately implemented.  Some understanding of social media marketing is however needed to make the most out of this strategy. 2. Email Marketing: Email marketing is one of the most efficient and oldest types of digital marketing strategies in use to date. The best thing with email marketing is the fact that marketers get to communicate directly with their target audiences and customers, which again increases conversion rates. Email marketing is also known to build trust and customer loyalty, one of the reasons it has remained relevant to this date.  There is however more to email marketing than merely sending a couple of promotional emails and newsletters to an emailing list. A successful Email Marketing campaign begins by finding ids that are active and operational. One of the best ways to connect with your target audiences is on the professional social media handle. LinkedIn. Most brands and agencies understand that working with a credible Linkedin email finder can help them reach out to potential or prospective sales leads. This is something that software development agencies usually do a lot of. They can browse through designations on LinkedIn and ensure that their pitch is directly addressed to professionals that have decision-making abilities. While you need to be really good at creating eye-catching and captivating emails, you still need to build a credible emailing list. This is among the toughest things an email marketer has to do to make the marketing campaign a success. Nonetheless, collecting email addresses through user subscriptions and having audiences sign up for newsletters, coupon codes, etc. are some of the credible ways to collect email addresses. 3. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing: Commonly known as SEO, search engine optimization is one of the popular digital marketing strategies today.  SEO involves optimizing websites and pages for both search engines and organic visitors. Some of the key areas that marketers and website owners have to focus on when optimizing their sites include keyword research and analysis, link building, and the creation of unique and relevant content. Done correctly, an SEO campaign can see a page gaining higher ranks on Google, Bing, and other search engines, with the reward being increased exposure to the target audience.  A properly executed SEO plan can see your page/business show up on the top pages of a search result. Search engine marketing, SEM, involves taking on campaigns and strategies to increase traffic to a web page or site. It covers both SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) like this, whereby the web page received increased traffic through both unpaid and paid means. 4. Content Marketing: Content marketing works very differently from other marketing strategies. It employs a strategic approach that mainly focuses on creating relevant, valuable, consistent, and informative content that is distributed to help attract, inform, and retain target audiences. Thanks to content marketing, the target audience can make an informative decision on a product/service, hence one of the best ways to drive profitable customer action.  The content can be either in the form of text and articles published both on the site and blogs, video, and image content. It is also an ongoing process that involves creating fresh and unique content each time. Although a marketing strategy, experts recommend creating content to promote the brand or product without necessarily asking the target audience to make a purchase. The content simply needs to be engaging and enriching to help viewers make the right decision on the product. 5. Influencer Marketing: This is slowly becoming a popular marketing strategy today. As the name suggests, influencer marketing involves using industry experts or social media influencers to help market a product or brand. This could be a celebrity or another well-known person with thousands of followers on their social sites. All the individual needs to do is vouch for your brand, or simply promote your product on their social media pages. Most companies use these influencers to help give away discount codes, coupons, and prize draws. Influencer marketers mostly prefer using their Facebook profiles, YouTube Channels, and Instagram to promote the said product. Although a short-term marketing strategy, influencer marketing can help drive more traffic to your site, a factor that can help increase conversions and sales. 6. Mobile Advertising: With almost everyone owning a phone or at least a smartphone, mobile marketing is slowly taking shape. SMS marketing with SMS broadcast services and in-app advertising have become popular ways to promote products. Although you do not need a mailing list for in-app advertising, you certainly need one for SMS marketing. Many companies today use SMS marketing to send coupon codes, special offers, and even newsletters to their target audiences. These are just but some of the popular digital marketing strategies in use today.  Done correctly, some of these strategies can help your business grow while building a huge following. While you might be able to implement all these by yourself, it would be advisable to have an experienced professional handle all optimizations and marketing strategies. This way, you will be guaranteed better results and even have enough time on your hands to handle more serious business matters. Finding an expert in all these can however be an intimidating task. Thanks to the internet, you should be able to find a reputable and results-oriented company to help take care of all these.  You can even invest in paid digital advertising strategies such as influencer marketing and pay-per-click to get a head start with increased traffic and visibility online. Read Also: How To Integrate Email Marketing With SEO 4 Points To Consider When Creating A Great Content Marketing Strategy Today

READ MOREDetails
Mobile Marketing Tips

5 Actionable Mobile Marketing Tips That Drive Sales

Driving sales is the most important task for any marketing department, no matter how large or small your business. Here are five ways to leverage mobile marketing to increase sales immediately: Build Websites With Mobile in Mind Traditionally, websites are built to perform well on desktop and laptop computers, and then later they are optimized for mobile. In today’s business environment, however, it should be the other way around. Take a look at these statistics about mobile search traffic: 70% of searches made on smartphones or tablets result in immediate action. 73% of consumers believe mobile websites load too slowly. 68% of traffic is lost if a website isn’t configured well enough for a mobile device. Clearly, mobile searches are valuable, and your competition is losing out on these opportunities. Take the time to capture them, or you’ll lose out on sales, too. Create a Mobile Loyalty Program One of the best uses for a mobile application is to provide a loyalty program for your audience. Here are the benefits you can expect your brand to immediately enjoy: They’re less expensive than most inbound tactics that focus on finding new business rather than improving loyalty. Companies that run loyalty programs usually enjoy more growth than other companies. Your company’s reputation is improved by simply launching a loyalty program. You’ll have access to a larger portion of your customer’s overall spend. Not only that, but your customers benefit too. On average, 90 percent of all users with mobile devices believe that enrolling in a brand’s loyalty program benefits them. It’s a win-win situation. Start Distributing Coupons via Mobile Instead of Print One of the best tools you have in your arsenal to drive sales is coupons. Sending them out gives customers an instant incentive to make a purchase immediately, but if you want your customers to use them, you need to make it convenient for them to do so. That’s why mobile devices are the perfect way to distribute your coupons — convenience. Instead of having to print or clip the coupons and bring them when they shop, they’ll have instant access. This is the biggest reason that mobile coupons have a redemption rate that’s 10 times higher than print or clip coupons. Use Text Messages to Nurture Your Leads Text messages are extremely effective at getting read, with an incredible 98 percent open rate. Compare that to email, which hovers slightly above 20 percent. With that kind of power, not taking advantage of text message marketing is a huge mistake. [gallery size="full" columns="1" link="none" ids="1444"] One of the best ways to use text messages is to nurture existing leads. Text messaging is an extremely personal communication method, so sending out generalized blasts isn’t a good idea; instead, you want to send relevant, timely information to a targeted audience. Because you know that your message is going to be read, delivering the right message at the right time drives incredible results. Make Everything as Easy as Possible Mobile marketing is a great way to reach an enormous, engaged audience, but you need to understand how that audience is interacting with you. Mobile devices are easier to use than ever before, but they still can’t rival the functionality of traditional computers. If you want to drive mobile subscriptions and more business, you need to simplify everything. Don’t require too much information when somebody is creating an account for your mobile app. Let them do it with just a username and password. Once they've created an account, offer incentives, such as coupons or bonus loyalty points, for additional information. Use shortcodes to make text message subscriptions as simple as sending a single word. The fewer barriers to entry mobile users have, the more people you’ll attract and keep. Have you used mobile marketing to drive sales? Share your own tips and tricks below!  Read also: 1. App Development Benefits: Here’s why you should go Mobile 2. Role of messaging apps in enhancing a company’s market prospects

READ MOREDetails