How to Make Your Online Store SEO Friendly
One of the main challenges Ecommerce businesses face is the ability to be found and seen online. Most people will use search engines to look for products online and if your webpage sits on page 20 of search results it will statistically be clicked on far less times than the businesses on page. Online businesses arguably face much stronger competition because of this race to the top. Finding a way to get in among the big players is key.
Why Is SEO Important to Ecommerce Businesses?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the name given to the technique of maximising a webpage's chances of ranking highly in search engine results pages. The technique is a major driver of customer acquisition and success. One study suggests that SEO accounts for as much as 30% of ecommerce site traffic. Understanding how you can improve your business’s chances of ranking highly for relevant keywords is an important skill to master to improve your conversion rate.
Unfortunately people often misunderstand SEO, believing it to be a quick one-off task. SEO should be viewed more as an on-going and important part of maintaining a website. It is not just restricted to keywords and keyword placement but instead touches on many parts of a website.
If you are looking to improve your online store's SEO here are some of the most effective and popular techniques you can try to give your website that sought after boost.
Link Building
Links are an important element of any website. Not only do they help a user to your website navigate from page to page but they help search engines crawl and browse the pathways of your website.
Link building can be broken into two categories: internal and external. Internal links are those which connect your webpages together. Internal links help to establish your website's architecture. Important pages in your website need to be linked together so that the search engine 'spiders' have a way to reach them. Without direct, crawlable links these pages essentially do not exist in the eyes of Google and other search engines. The optimal structure for a website is to structure your links in a pyramid format, with your homepage at the top, category pages below, and product pages below this. In an online store you may have many products so it is important that you correctly link these to the right category.
Add A Blog to Your Website
Adding a blog to your website will help you maintain communication with potential and existing customers. It provides a way to keep your website up to date with new information, deals, new product launches and company updates. Besides this a blog can also help your website to rank higher on search engine results pages as it provides a way to add fresh content as frequently as needed. This fresh content is important for SEO for two reasons: firstly it shows that your website is active, something that can improve your website's SEO chances. Secondly, adding new content gives search engines more to crawl, particularly if you are able to create lengthy, keyword focused posts.
Pictures and Descriptions
A good quality photograph, or multiple photos, is important in an Ecommerce website. Customers cannot see the product personally when shopping online so high resolution photographs are needed to give a sufficient alternative. When uploading photos to your website you should always give them a descriptive alt-tag, preferably with relevant keywords. This is important as search engines cannot see images, so need the alt tags to understand what the images are of. As an additional step here, it can be good practice to get into the habit of renaming the files on your computer to keyword focused titles, as opposed to irrelevant names such as 'SCD0001'.
Avoid Duplication
Search engines heavily penalise pages deemed to be offering duplicate content. When setting up an online store it can be tempting to use the same description for several products which are similar. However this could result in a penalty for duplicate content. The best method to avoid a duplication penalty is to write multiple descriptions for similar products before uploading them to your product pages. You should look to use synonyms and variations and re order the content to decrease the chance of a penalty.
Use Your Social Media Accounts
When you set up an Ecommerce website it is likely that you will have set up social media accounts at the same time. If these have become under used or unloved in recent months it is time to make a change get on the social media bandwagon. By updating often on your channels you will be able to build a loyal following for products on social media, which will help improve your business's authenticity to other customers and to search engines that go through user comments and links.
Whilst some search engines have said that individual posts are not crawled, social media channels themselves can rank, and social media channels can increase the traffic to your website.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
Many people are using mobile phones to shop online. A recent study found that in the UK, 65% of Ecommerce sales in January were conducted on mobile, showing the switch in preferred platform. If you are not ready to cater to this segment, you are losing out on a potentially large part of the market.
Creating attractive and functional sites is not difficult. You can rely on platforms such as Kommand for creating sites even if you have minimal technical knowledge. Kommand allows users to build responsive Ecommerce websites easily. You can work with one of our designers to build a website bespoke to your business, at an affordable monthly price, that is safe and secure for online payments - and which works great on mobile.
For more information, you can contact Kommand:
Glasgow - Tel: 0141 345 2130
Middlesbrough - Tel: 01642 989 069
London - Tel: 0203 026 0730
Email: support@kommand.me
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