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Why is eCommerce SEO vital for an online store?

Before we start, here are a few statistics that make eCommerce SEO a vital part of conversion optimization. Let’s have a look…

7.5% of all traffic to eCommerce sites comes from search. (SEMrush)
Of the billions of searches on a given day, 15% of daily searches are new to Google. (Search Engine Land).)
According to Think With Google, at least 51% of people using the internet have found out about a new product or company online.
Google Images, Google Maps, and Google search account for at least 92.96% of the global organic traffic (Sparktoro)

On page – eCommerce SEO 101

Most people are aware of on-page eCommerce SEO changes required to optimize your website, but there are a few key factors that shouldn’t be ignored.

Don’t avoid On-page for generic pages: Homepage, About page, Contact page, Work page, Clients, etc. Don’t neglect these vanity pages when it comes to On-page SEO for eCommerce websites. Coming up with interesting titles and a good call to action can improve your bounce rates significantly.
Focus on content and being to the point: Adding content to your website to squeeze a few more keywords on-page is not a great practice in 2022. Make your content pop by using good action phrases. Highlighting USPs is a good practice; providing value to the user is another method (Free downloads, Answers for FAQs, etc.)
Slow page loads due to large images: Although website speed optimization is a whole different process making it standard practice to check for image file size helps improve on-page by a great margin. No user would want to wait before getting to read, download or fill out a form.
Image SEO: Image search is one of the top sources of traffic generation via Google, and having the right SEO strategy in place for product images can place them in front of the right audience (Audience searching for it – High intent audience.

There are a lot of on-page eCommerce SEO guides. Here are the top points we feel are the most important when it comes to ranking and keeping the user engaged at the same time.

The most important On-page factors for eCommerce SEO.

Title: The section that can grab the most attention and make users click on it. Titles are by far the ROI generating when done right. Highlight a value proposition in your title. Keep it focused and simple.
Product Description: Using Power and Action words in your description to talk about your product benefits and ongoing offers works wonders. Adding timelines for offers that are not going to last is great for creating a constant reminder for the user.
Examples: Before power/action words – 5% Off on all our products. Valid till “xx:xx:date” After power/action words – Superb Offers: Get 5% Off Storewide. Valid for 36 hours!
Right Product Images: This is the most ignored in the eCommerce space. We believe that just having generic 2D images is not enough anymore. VR/AR images for your product are the way to go now, it entirely depends on your industry, but if it looks like a possibility for the products, do it!
The Keyword Magic: Adding keywords with content that goes hand in hand is the best way to optimize your product pages. Long-tail keywords in eCommerce have comparatively less competition and more intent. Ranking for such keywords will help boost your overall store performance.

Keyword Research – eCommerce SEO 101

eCommerce keyword research: One of the most critical steps when executing your eCommerce SEO strategy is having the right keywords in your arsenal. Keyword research requires good tools to analyze the monthly volumes for each keyword and understand the difficulty of ranking each keyword.
Pick your suited bunch of keywords: Selecting the right keywords for your products is the main goal to achieve this. Leave the top and bottom keywords alone i.e., keywords with highest difficulty and highest volumes and lowest difficulty with lowest volumes should be kept aside at first.
Best tools for eCommerce keyword research: Ahrefs, SEMRush, Ubbersuggest and Google Keyword Planner are by far the best tools when it comes to doing your eCommerce keyword research.

The 1H-1M-3E eCommerce SEO Keyword Strategy: This strategy includes picking 5 keywords starting with 1 Hard, 1 Medium, and 3 Easy. To break it down, an eCommerce store can go with the hard keyword being something that is not extremely competitive (60+ difficulty) but has good amounts of competitors and difficulty. One of your easy keywords will be a long tail form of this hard keyword.

Next is to pick the medium keyword that is not hard to rank and has good monthly volumes; your second easy keyword will be a long tail form of the medium keyword. The last one is an easy keyword, and this one should have low but acceptable volume and low competition.

Link Building – eCommerce SEO 101

Email Outreach to the right people: Although this method has very low ROI, the links you get to build out of this strategy are high quality and rank-worthy.
Resource pages and value creation: Most eCommerce websites do not implement this strategy; let’s say it has been a secret for a while now. Creating lists/ top 10s/ Resource sheets are amazing ways to improve your brand reach and promote your products.

eCommerce SEO is not always about your product pages. It involves creating value for visitors. The more visitors your business has, the better the probability of an increase in users that ultimately leads to more conversions, thereby more revenue.

Broken Linkbuilding: Many blogs on the internet provide links to resources and references but most of these are not maintained over time, and a few go out of existence.

Consider you have found a blog that links to a webpage that doesn’t exist anymore, but one of your blogs has a similar context and can be a great reference point for the blog. Draft an email explaining the same and send it to the blog owner. Depending on how they feel about your idea, they will implement it.

Collabs and guest posting: In 2022, a better version of collabs and guest posting exists. We call it influencer marketing. Depending on how your brand wants to position itself, your brand can opt-in for influencer marketing.

Website Architecture – eCommerce SEO 101

A website’s structure is crucial for eCommerce SEO; it not only defines how the search engine looks at it but also creates the user’s navigation process. A good website architecture will hold users for longer periods and be more sure to provide them with something before their attention fades.

The page layouts: This step isn’t directly related to SEO, but it affects one of the most important ranking factors, i.e. your website’s bounce rate. Optimizing your website User Interface and Experience can yield multifold results, so avoid ignoring it. Running A/B tests on your pages is a great strategy to find what resonates better with customers.
Main landing pages: Make sure all your landing pages have proper and unique meta tags (title, description and URL). Duplicate metatags can cause indexing problems and even copy data penalties if not monitored properly.
Category pages: The most ignored pages can create tons of value when optimized well. Category pages should never be auto-generated pages for eCommerce websites. A great eCommerce SEO strategy will always include creating and optimizing category pages to allow users to navigate better throughout the website.
Post/Blog pages: Not all eCommerce websites have blogs and miss out on improving reach and grabbing more market share for their product keywords. As mentioned previously, it is always a great idea to display your products and make lists depending on ongoing events (Example: Winter Special, Summer Sales, Top 10 things etc.)
Product Pages: Highlight product USP and pricing well. SEO-optimized product titles and descriptions that explain the product in detail are other important factors too.
Product Images: Many eCommerce businesses ignore product imaging, the only way consumers can understand the product. Implementing AR/VR, if possible, is a great way to offer the end user a real-life feel of how the product would look like.

Conclusion

In 2022 and onwards, eCommerce SEO is not only about making search engines happy but also focusing on your user experience. An ideal eCommerce website is one where users can easily navigate, understand the product, and make a purchase.

Improve Product Discovery

Users find a product they are looking for in different ways depending on how and where they landed up on your site. Making sure they can find what they are looking for at each of these landing pages is crucial to reduce bounce rates and improve conversion. Let’s look at a few different ways users find products

Home page Merchandising

Images and products on the home page are what a user who lands on the home page sees first and hence is the best location to promote products that customers are most likely to buy if they are simply browsing and haven’t made up their mind about what to buy. Personalization of the home page can significantly improve click rates on these products since the customers see products that are to their taste. The home page can also be the right place to surface products that you want customers to see, like new product launches or more profitable products.

Merchandizing is hard to get right even in physical stores and is best optimized through A/B testing of different combinations to measure click-through and conversion.

Search and its role in eCommerce Conversion Optimization

If a user lands on the home page of a store looking for something specific, there’s a high chance they will use the search functionality to search for the product. If search is able to return results that customers are looking for and want to buy, it eases one step of the user’s journey on the website. While this seems easy enough and is supported by most platforms, there are some nuances that a store owner should be aware of

Catalog content

Any search tool is only as good as the content in your catalog since the search engine us essentially using the content to find and display products. Add different synonyms to your products catalog to display them when users search for the same product in using different words.

Spelling Errors

Many modern search engines are able to handle spelling errors, but if you are using one that doesn’t handle spelling errors, it helps to add common misspellings to your catalog. Whatever the method, stores should stive hard not to show the dreaded “No products found” message which almost always drives customers off the site.

Autocomplete

Autocomplete enables users to quickly search for products in your catalog and avoids spelling errors by prompting them the correct spelling. It also enables stores to surface content that might further refine a user’s search. For example, a user searching for “outdoor table” might see an option for “outdoor table with umbrella” and if that’s what the user really wanted, it guides the user to the right search results and eliminates undesired results.

Natural language processing

Another important aspect of a search engine to consider is its ability to understand natural language especially in searches like “Phone case” vs. “Phone with case” where understanding the conjunctions and language constructs becomes important to understand what the customer is looking for

Personalization

Personalization of search results is a relatively new concept that personalizes results based on a user’s previous interactions and popular searches. When implemented correctly, this gives the users a feeling of easy discovery.

Filters

While filters are not necessarily part of search, a good set of filters make up for deficiencies in search capability by enabling the user to further refine the search for the exact product manually. Displaying the right set of filters can sometimes be hard especially for stores selling multiple categories of products that require different sets of filters. Planning early for filters and having the right attributes in products for filters can make this task easier.

Direct Links

Users can also land up directly on a category page or a product page when clicking through from marketing links on the internet. When users land on a page this way, it’s important to make sure that your marketing links all lead to pages with relevant results and not to your home page or a generic page. For example, if a user is searching for “Green T-Shirt” and you land the user on a page with all T-shirts, there’s a high likelihood that the user will leave the page not wanting to sift through everything.

Improve Product Page

Product detail pages (or PDP in short) is another page that can make or break conversions. Once the customer has located a product, this is the page where the decision to add it to the cart is made. Following are few optimization guidelines

High Quality Images

Product images are the first things that customers look at when opening a product detail page. Having great images keeps the customer on the page and interact further with the page until a decision to add the product to cart is made. Having crisp, large product images and videos with the ability to zoom, pan, rotate, etc. is one of the best investments a store can make to increase conversion.

Technologies like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (AR/VR) can provide even better visualizations for higher value products to give the customers more confidence in what they are buying.

How Sales Copy helps in eCommerce Coversion Optimization

Well-written sales copy can evoke the right emotion and nudge the customer towards making the decision to add to cart. Best of brands create a brand voice ahead of time and create content using that voice to appeal to their ideal customer persona. Considering the tone and language of your content and how it represents your brand will enable you to appeal better to your target customers.

Complete Information

While the sale copy evokes the right emotions, product pages that lack enough information about the product often don’t convert well, especially for certain product categories. For example, furniture stores have to consistently display dimensions, weight, etc. in order for customers to make the right decision.

Call to Action

Having “Add to Cart” displayed prominently at eye level is known to increase conversion rate. Although a single button is ideal in terms of reducing clutter, some stores like Amazon have benefited from having another “Buy Now” option that speeds the checkout process. A/B testing can determine what works best for your store.

Psychological Triggers

Psychological research has identified several triggers that can nudge customers closer to wanting a product. Following are a few that have been used successfully by many eCommerce retailers

Trust

Including things like social proof, customer reviews, secure and transaction badges can achieve increased trust. This has the effect of reducing friction by eliminating the question of trustworthiness from the customers’ mind and is especially important for brands that don’t have significant name recognition.

Urgency

Urgency is known to impact purchase decisions and can be triggered through limited time offers.

Scarcity

Scarcity refers to text like “Only 2 available” that signifies that a product might sell out if the customer doesn’t buy now

Improve Checkout

Making checkout as frictionless as possible while addressing any final concerns in the customers’ mind reduces abandoned carts where the customers decides not to buy after adding items to cart. Following are a few aspects to consider

Payments

Payment issues cause a significant amount of cart abandonment because a customer is unable to make a payment.

Payment Methods

Enabling as many payment methods as possible will ensure that customers are able to pay using their method of choice. Following are some common payment methods that can be enabled on a site. When picking a payment gateway, stores should make sure they are able to support all or most of these methods

Credit Cards/Debit Cards: The most preferred method to complete an online purchase.
Prepaid Cards: An alternative for credit/debit cards.
Bank Transfer: Although this method is not used much, it’s sometimes useful when the product value is higher.
E-wallets: When platforms provide you with their own payment solutions (PayPal, Cash App, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo etc.)
Digital currencies: Cryptocurrencies are slowly being accepted on many platforms since they allow international payments with ease and reduced documentation.

Fraud Prevention

Fraud prevention sometimes clashes with ease of payment and makes payment harder and sometimes rejects payments that are not fraudulent. Stores must determine the right balance between fraud detection and ease of payment. Fraud detection services like that are used by a large amount of customers are able to use aggregated data from all the stores they serve to better detect fraud with minimal false positives. Stores should consider if such a service is right for them

Trust

Although we discussed trust on the product page, it is more important to display trust badges to assure the customer that payments made through the platform are safe at the checkout stage.

Return Policies

Customer friendly return policies that are prominently displayed further assures the customer that they can buy without the fear of being stuck with a product they don’t want. Free and easy returns cost your store money, but in almost all but the lowest value products, it’s usually a net positive. As in all the aspects of conversion optimization, stores can experiment with a few policies to see if there is an opportunity to reduce cost without affecting conversion.

Checkout our previous blog about heatmaps and how they impact conversion optimization.

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