Conversions are the backbone of any successful eCommerce business, but they can often be elusive if your website isn’t optimized properly. If you want to boost your revenue and grow your store, you need to take a serious look at your SEO.
With the right SEO website optimizations, you can potentially increase your conversions and even strengthen your brand. Ignoring these site elements could be what is causing you to lag behind your competitors, but how do you actually go about optimizing your website?
There are thousands of different tips out there on how to improve your SEO and get more traffic and sales, so knowing which techniques to use and who to trust can seem somewhat overwhelming. The good news is that if you really want to see results, you are in the right place.
Below we will list some of the most important optimizations you need to be making for your website, as well as a little information on the number one driving factor in SEO right now that can make an explosive difference for your conversions.
The Key to Better SEO for eCommerce Stores
So what is the one element that will really set your website apart from your competitors when it comes to boosting your SEO?
Right now, it’s all about the user experience. If you are building your eCommerce store with the user in mind from beginning to end, you aren’t going to rank as well as you might otherwise be able to.
A poor user experience is to be avoided at all costs. You want to make sure that your eCommerce website provides a professional experience, and SEO is a large part of this.
The best SEO website optimizations are the ones that address user need and that provide the proper context for Google that proves you have high-quality useful content. It’s not enough to simply lean on past success and hope that your branded keywords can carry you. In order to make inroads toward eCommerce success, your website actually needs to offer an optimal and professional experience.
How do you make your website more user-friendly through SEO? There is quite a bit to cover here, but you can boil it down to content, technical improvements, and trust. Your online store needs to convey authority, it needs to function correctly, and it needs to include the best content possible that will actually provide value to your audience.
This all seems simple enough in theory but putting it into practice requires a bit of direction. This is one area where many SEOs and digital marketers drop the ball. You have to formulate an effective SEO strategy if you want to make headway in the SERPs. The eCommerce world is far too competitive to simply make site changes at random and hope something sticks. So the first order of business if you want to boost your conversion rate is to work on your strategy.
Developing an SEO Website Optimization Strategy
What does an effective search engine optimization strategy actually look like? This is simply a fancy way of saying that you have an idea of the keywords you want to target and how you will implement them throughout your web pages, in tandem with creating certain pieces of content that will ultimately give your website the boost it needs.
Behind the scenes of this keyword strategy is of course an emphasis on the user experience. For instance, you aren’t creating content for the sake of content, you are creating it to fill a need. Informative product reviews, how-tos, and specific tips on your products and what your customers can expect from them, as well as industry news and trends. Site improvements that make it easier for your users to locate specific products and find vital information. Site links that make sense and direct the flow of traffic on your website in a manner that increases conversions.
Even if you are new to SEO, you can implement many of these kinds of improvements with a little guidance. To get started, plan out your strategy by following the SEO tips below.
With the right SEO optimization strategy, you can give your website the boost it needs to start ranking on the first page and giving your competition a run for their money.
Key Tips For Improving Your SEO
- Start by reassessing your keywords and making sure that you are targeting the right ones. Take the time to explore potential ranking opportunities by locating long-tail keywords and focusing on key phrases that better align with the search intent of your users.
- This should go without saying but remove dead product pages, broken links, and other unfriendly elements from your website. None of this is doing your website or business any favors, it looks unprofessional, and your users will find it annoying at best. You much rather have a small website with less nonsense than an ungainly one with a bunch of empty category pages, dead-end links, and thin content. Optimize everything!
- Each page URL on your website should be looked at carefully. Random strings of numbers and letters, an overuse of filler words, and overly long URLs are best to be avoided. If you do plan on making changes to a particular URL, make sure that you perform a proper 301 redirect, because in Google’s eyes, this is a new page and you need to pass the authority accordingly.
- Strengthen each page of your website by adding more content and the appropriate keywords throughout, roughly 2 to 5 per page. This includes your category pages and product pages. Thin content not only doesn’t give the search engines enough to chew on, which can hurt your rankings, it’s also a turn off for users as well that can signal low authority. A one-sentence product description is not going to get the job done anymore.
- Make sure that you are producing high-quality long-form blog content on your website. Blogging is a surefire way to improve your standing in Google, as every new blog is a new opportunity to rank. Each blog also provides potential SEO “link juice” to your most important pages, such as key products and categories that you would like to rank higher.
- Trust is a key aspect of performing proper SEO website optimization. Visitors to your website need to see that you are a professional and trusted company with their best interests in mind. Therefore, you need to make it known that you are transparent and recognized in your industry, by clearly displaying reviews, testimonials, social media channels, and anything else that puts a human face on your brand and helps establish your website as an authoritative source. It’s not just about providing quality content, your users need to know that they can trust you with their personal information.
- Focus on user-generated content, such as blog comments, on-site product reviews, surveys, and other interactive elements. Your eCommerce website should not be a static thing. Rather, it needs to be dynamic and ever-changing in order to reflect and accommodate your community. Content like this inadvertently adds pure SEO value to web pages as well, when customers ask questions that line up with typical Google queries.
- Put time and effort into your meta titles and descriptions. A meta title for a specific product page, for instance, should be more than just the name of the product in question. Think of each meta title as a special sales tagline that will appear in Google and help drive traffic to your website. In that sense, you want to think about what the customers want to see or what they would expect out of a first-rate eCommerce store that has what they are looking for. Don’t be afraid to be a bit repetitive if it means including more than one relevant key phrase, but don’t overdo it.
- Pay attention to user behavior on your website so that you can make the appropriate adjustments and enhancements to it. There is a wealth of great tools out there that can help you accomplish this, from Google Analytics to heat map software and other kinds of user behavior tools. If your website isn’t addressing user need, Google isn’t going to consider your pages worth ranking. SEO is now more about user satisfaction than simply keywords and arbitrary factors like site speed.
Be flexible and adapt to new trends. Your online store needs to be modern, relatable, and trendy. Pay close attention to shifts in the market and your industry in particular and if need be, make the appropriate changes on your website. Google likes fresh, relevant content and this is only increasing in importance with time. - Invest in a site redesign if need be. Your on-site optimizations might be on point but if the overall functionality of your eCommerce website is lacking, your users will find another place to shop before long. You may want to consider increasing your site speed, modernizing your design, upgrading to a mega-menu, improving checkout functionality, and so on. The more your website actually accommodates your users, the higher likelihood that you will get sales.
- Create several “funnel” opportunities on your website. By improving the click-thru rate of important pages on your website and driving traffic to your products, you not only increase conversions, but you lower your bounce rate, which signals to Google that you are meeting user expectations and that you are providing a quality experience.
- Though it may seem tedious, you want to make sure each and every image on your website has been properly optimized. As far as SEO is concerned, images play a fairly large role. You want to make sure that each image is compressed properly in order to improve load times, and each image should include an informative alt-tag.
- Most importantly, you should be spending plenty of time putting yourself in the shoes of your users. What search terms would your customers put into Google to find your products or services? What changes would you make to your on-page SEO in order to make your site more informative and useful? How would a user behave once they land on your category pages or if they are viewing your website on a mobile device? The better you understand your own store from a user perspective, the better chance you have of performing the right website optimizations.
Professional SEO Website Optimization Services
Even once you internalize and implement the above optimization tips, you still might be at a loss when it comes to your website SEO, and that’s OK. The truth is that over the past decade, SEO has gone from a relatively simplistic arm of digital marketing to its own science. Ever year Google makes it harder to nail down what works and what doesn’t, and have raised the bar considerably when it comes to actually making it onto the first page.
What does all of this mean for you as a store owner? Simply that you need a professional agency handling your website optimizations if you really want to move the needle. These days, given the complexities of SEO and ever-shifting user expectations, you need a team behind you that knows eCommerce SEO inside and out and that can put together a workable rock-solid strategy for your business.
Here at Genius eCommerce®, we craft smart SEO strategies every day, helping eCommerce businesses just like yours reach their sales goals and build their brand. Rather than simply trying to handle all of this yourself and getting submerged in dozens of tasks, our team of SEO experts can help you handle everything from technical updates to content creation, so that your website finally stands out and performs the way you need it to.
You shouldn’t have to scramble to figure out your SEO gameplan. Even if you understand how to implement some of these useful optimization tips on your own, do you have the manpower to consistently produce informative, high-quality blog content or keep after Google’s algorithm changes? Forget trying to tackle these issues on your own and let an elite eCommerce SEO agency take care of everything for you. Get in touch with us today and we can work with you to put together a winning strategy for your business that not only helps you rank higher in Google but also helps you build your brand and get more conversions.
