8 Key SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Websites

Published on: 29 March 2018 Last Updated on: 03 September 2024

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.

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Importance of proofreading your website content

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7 Proven Marketing Tactics to Increase your ROI in 2018

The digital marketing landscape has become more diversified than ever in 2018 because consumers are generating their own content and marketers are searching for more ways to create product awareness and interest. Since the digital space is highly competitive, marketers are ready to do whatever they can for gaining a competitive advantage. However, instead of dipping your hand in all the pies, it is best if you use marketing strategies that are bound to increase your ROI in the form of more leads, higher traffic, increased conversion, and sales. In a nutshell, you want to use tactics that add something to your bottom line. Listed below are 7 of those marketing tactics that do exactly that and can be used to boost profits in 2018: Tactic 1: Instagram Ads After Facebook, Instagram has become the newest force in social media. Just like Facebook Sponsored Posts and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets have given results, Instagram Ads can also be immensely powerful. They are like digital chameleons because they are able to blend in with the audience’s feed for increasing awareness and driving traffic to your website. While the demographics of the social network is similar to that of Facebook, Instagram has distinguished itself with a greater level of engagement and creativity and gives you exposure to the right audience. Tactic 2: Reviews The online reputation of a business can be hugely influenced by customer reviews. Businesses with no reviews, no recent reviews or with negative ones are at a significant disadvantage as opposed to their competition. As a matter of fact, more than 80% of people have stated that their buying decisions are influenced by negative customer reviews. Thus, it is essential for every business to get positive customer reviews and should also respond to them in a timely manner. Positive reviews can be showcased on the website and on social media and negative reviews can be addressed before they go viral. Improving the customer review score boosts SEO ranking and improves online reputation. The best way to get reviews from your customers is by contacting them directly. By using a tool called GMass, you can email all of your customers at one time asking them to write a review of their experience. They would be more likely to write a review if they are already online checking their emails than having to remember to write one after they got home from their shopping trip. Tactic 3: Evergreen Content This is content that stays relevant and interesting for a long time, regardless of any cultural change. This can include industry resources, tutorials, tips, and product reviews. While this usually refers to white papers and blog content, evergreen content can also be used for video content, infographics, and email marketing. Tactic 4: Crowdsourced Content Yes, the statement ‘content is king’ might be getting old, but it remains true still. Content remains very powerful in today’s competitive market and can turn the tide for a business. The problem is that turning out heaps of creative and useful content requires lots of resources and time. Therefore, it is not surprising to see a new trend emerge; businesses have begun to collaborate and crowdsource because this allows them to get access to meaningful and relevant content. By soliciting ideas from others, a business is able to get the best quality content and save a ton of its valuable time without making any compromises on quality. With crowdsourcing, you leave the idea and word generation to someone else, mostly in your industry. This enables a business to get insights it may not have come up on its own. Also, using this content allows you to reach a greater audience because the ones who created the content will also share it out. Read also: Improve Your Local SEO Via Content Marketing Tactic 5: Retargeting Ads You just checked out an amazing new camera on Amazon and now when you visit Facebook, YouTube or any other website, you can see ads about cameras. This is a feature of Google Adwords and ad serving networks of other search engines, which is called retargeting or remarketing. When you check a business’s website, they can serve you with relevant and interesting ads wherever you go. Marketers are thrilled with this tactic whereas customers feel a bit creeped out. The best part? Your business already knows what the customer is looking for and targeting them with similar products will actually bring them back to you. Tactic 6: Video Content Marketing Traditionally, video marketing for dispersing content was termed unfeasible and getting an ROI from the video was quite difficult. However, this is the era of smartphones that have spectacular cameras and video streaming services that show you videos in just a few taps. This means that now the benefits of video content marketing can go beyond its cost. Every business needs to use video for product launches, Vlogs, tutorials, and tips because they provide value to the viewers. Videos allow a business to use humor, appeal to emotion and aid apprehension for relating to your customers in a better way. The same cannot be achieved with a written blog. Tactic 7: Custom Landing Pages Simply put, landing pages are webpages describing a piece of content, which require users to enter their information to unlock the said content. It is regarded as a lead capture tool because you want to be able to convert the readers into leads and customers when they go over your content. Otherwise, it is only a waste of time and resources. Landing pages linked from an email or blog should be connected to digital marketing content. Also, the featured content can be an eBook, white paper or anything else, but it has to be valuable enough for people to give their contact info. Using these 7 proven marketing tactics will help a business in increasing its ROI in 2018 effectively. Read also: Building a Brand for Your Small Business Avoid these 5 Mistakes before Starting an SEO Influence Marketing Tool to Move from Local to Global Market How to Write and Design an Article that Attracts New Customers to Your Business

The Real Cost of Assortment Planning Mistakes

In the world of e-commerce, there are many practices, concepts, and techniques that can help you boost your revenue and enjoy some extra profits. One of the least mentioned category of mistakes in this manner - and yet one of the most important - focus on the mistakes related to the assortment. In other words, these mistakes include all the wrong moves that e-commerce store owners are making during the buying process. The real trouble of these mistakes is the fact that many are unaware of their real cost. This is why we have decided to guide our readers in on the dangers of improper assortment planning - and how it can be fixed. The key, as you will notice in the sections below, is to optimize the process of buying inventory and therefore match the customer demand in a perfectly precise way. Mistake #1: Using Excel to Track Your Buying Process: One of the biggest mistakes that e-commerce owners make is the use of Microsoft Excel as a way to track their buying. Even though this seems as a logical way to organize your buying process, spreadsheets are generally a bad way to organize your information. Speaking of, anything that contains information in categories (added manually) has to be automated. In times when e-commerce owners are experiencing a magnitude of orders online, adding buys manually is time consuming - which is why it needs to be automated. Mistake #2: Improper Arrangement of Clusters: Clusters are the next mistake we are focusing on, and one that is tremendously big nowadays. The main way in which e-commerce managers are making it is by assigning every store to a single cluster - which needs to be reorganized. More importantly, products need to be clustered at a product class level, and use the information in quantities (before the assortments are bought). By doing this, you can link the buying process to the actual allocation and eliminate problems before it’s too late. Mistake #3: Inter-Store Inventory Balancing: If you ever caught yourself in a situation where you are losing sales in on store due to your lack of stock for a particular item, you are probably having the same product sitting and collecting dust on the shelves of another store (if you manage more than one store). At this point, the best way to solve this problem is by a simple trick - which does not involve the purchase of new inventory or the elimination of the inventory in one store so that it can be moved to another. Alternatively, you should use a smart predictive analysis engine and a tool that is known as “Inter-Store Inventory Balancing” to analyze every single influencing factor of your retail supply chain. As an advanced form of analytics, a tool like this will recommend the optimal inter-store transfer schedule so that you move merchandise from one store to another (from low to high demand). Mistake #4: Going Big (Instead of Going Custom): A lot of multi-channel retailers are nowadays focused on the “best rated” programs and solutions for optimizing their assortment planning. And while in most of the cases programs like these are built to last and cover as many aspects of product assortment as possible, they usually lack the functions that are needed in specific situations. For example, these programs often fail to calculate hundreds of algorithms on the kind of Big Data that today’s omni-channel retail products are able to churn out on a daily basis. Therefore, the general conclusion that we can all take from this mistake is to properly analyze your needs and implement a solution to analytics that works for you as you scale your business, is end-to-end integrated and coordinated between your merchandising and marketing. Final Words: At the end of the day, we all must accept the fact that mistakes linked to product assortment happen all of the time - and there is no harm in admitting that. As a retail expert, however, you should always be able to know how to fix them. Your assortment needs to be consistent, scalable, matching your needs and optimized for your specific customers. This is what proper assortment planning is all about. Ultimately, it is what will help you determine how much of your merchandise should be placed on your shelf. The end result of proper planning goes a long way - mostly resulting in increased sales and improved customer satisfaction. Read Also: Avoid These 5 Mistakes Before Starting An SEO 7 Proven Marketing Tactics To Increase Your ROI In 2018

Performance Testing For E-Commerce Platforms

Are you an E-commerce brand or platform that is looking for experts to run mobile app testing for your channels? Do you how specialized software testing services can help you climb over your competitors in the E-commerce space? Have you looked at enlisting the services of experts like QA Madness that can help you grow your E-commerce platform? Time and again, we see blogs on the internet that suggest running an E-commerce platform is as easy as eating a piece of cake. To be honest, if being successful and generating sales in E-commerce would be so easy, everyone would be acing it. The fact of the matter is that E-commerce is not easy. It requires a lot of effort, time, strategy, and resources. You cannot simply create an E-commerce website and hope to become the next Jeff Bezos! In this article, we look at how performance testing for E-commerce platforms is essential for garnering success. We take help from leading experts and friends at QA Madness to understand what goes into making a successful E-commerce business. What is Performance Testing and why your E-commerce Business should Invest in it? In simple words, without sounding too nerdy, let us try to look at what is Performance Testing. Performance Testing is the process of rigorously testing all the tech and digital components of an E-commerce business. This includes the desktop version of the platform and mobile app testing. The key is to look at and analyze how the entire tech and digital ecosystem operates when exposed to real-world use. Imagine hundreds of people are using the E-commerce platform app at the same time. The questions that then arise are- Is the server being able to handle the heavy load of all the traffic using the mobile app at the same time? Is there a lag or breakdown that any of the users are experiences or are the UI and UX getting compromised under stress? What are some of the benchmarks and standards that should be used to judge speed and whether the platform is exposing some bottlenecks? Performance Testing is more than just looking at loading page speeds. It seeks to test each aspect of the E-commerce platform and suggest the perfect optimization for the same. 4 Important Things to consider during Performance Testing for E-commerce: In this section, we request experts at QA Madness to help us. Specifically, to list down some important things that should be considered during Performance Testing- 1. Testing Financial Transactions- One area where things can go wrong is in the area of financial transactions. With so many people using the same platform at the same time, you need to test to ensure that every transaction is going through. Integrations with Payment Gateways, the ERP, and Inventory Management Software are all areas that should be covered under this software testing services. 1. Checking the Mobile App Exhaustively- Mobile app testing perhaps constitutes one of the most important verticals for Performance Testing. How the app performs, is the search is optimized, whether the graphics are getting compromised are all issues that mobile app testing will help resolve. In addition to the app, the mobile version of the E-commerce platform’s website also needs to be tested rigorously. 2. Region-Based Testing for Different Geographies- If you are starting an e-commerce business, you are looking at a truly global audience. This is why you need to make sure that the internet protocols of the different countries are not interfering with how the customers in those countries are engaging with your platform. Changed domain URLs, IP addresses, and other rules and regulations need to be considered. 3. Data Management Testing- Any successful E-commerce ecosystem is incomplete without integrated data management. For an E-commerce platform, data is the lifeblood that helps all its verticals- marketing, sales, and CRM. Performance Testing needs to ensure that the data collection, cloud storage solutions, and the final outputs are being generated in a systematic and orderly fashion. The Three KPIs of Performance Testing as stated by QA Madness- While there can be multiple KPIs that software testing services can help E-commerce brands with, QA Madness states that the following are the three major ones. They refer to the same as the three ‘S’s of their Performance Testing goals. 1. Speed- When it comes to speed, we are referring to the speed of the website, mobile version of the web, and the mobile application. It also includes the speed with which users are progressing from one page to another on the app and the website. The higher the speed, the better will be the user experience. This combines to deliver the best sales and revenues for an E-commerce platform. 2. Scalability- You do not want your website and app infrastructure to be so weak that it crashes only after a hundred visitors. Your E-commerce website and the app must be tested for scalability to handle massive loads all at the same time. This will help you provide a fluid experience to millions of users and potential customers all at the same time without compromises. 3. Stability- A lot can go wrong on an E-commerce website when it is put under stress. Graphics can fall out of place and payment gateways can collapse. You never want the users to experience these problems on your platform. An E-commerce platform needs to be stable all the time, with or without load. Performance Testing seeks to build the stability of an E-commerce platform. The Bottom Line: There is no set rule as to when an E-commerce platform should go for Performance Testing. Some believe that it should be done at the early stages of development. Others believe that it should be done once the development of the platform is complete to identify the loopholes and then plug them accordingly. No matter when you get them done, Performance Testing is essential for your E-commerce platform. If you want to create a highly optimized and result-oriented business, this is a great investment you should look at making. If you have any other questions on software testing services or mobile app testing, feel free to ask them. Use the comments section to drop your queries. We will once again request, or disturb, as the case may be, our friends at QA Madness to help you out. Read also: The Right B2B E-Commerce Platforms to Sell Your Used Machinery Approaches for Increasing E-commerce Sales Through Inventory Reports 5 Reasons to Use Magento for Your Next Ecommerce Website

8 Key SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Websites

1. Provide unique and impressive product descriptions :

2. Ensure easy navigation of your website :

3. Optimize the loading time of your website :

4. Go for internal linking of your pages :

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

6. Assure user security on your website :

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

8. Check your website and pages for errors :

5 Importance of proofreading your website content

Why Every Business Needs Digital Marketing

Content Rally

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.

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Related

7 Proven Marketing Tactics to Increase your ROI in 2018

The Real Cost of Assortment Planning Mistakes

Performance Testing For E-Commerce Platforms

8 Key SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Websites

1. Provide unique and impressive product descriptions :

2. Ensure easy navigation of your website :

3. Optimize the loading time of your website :

4. Go for internal linking of your pages :

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

6. Assure user security on your website :

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

8. Check your website and pages for errors :

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5 Importance of proofreading your website content

Why Every Business Needs Digital Marketing

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.

Leave a Reply

Popular

Follow Us

Recent

Related