In business world, having a beautiful designed with good products on your E-commerce website is not enough to succeed. A new company finds it challenging to compete with the countless number of internet stores. To stand out from the rest and attract customers, you must be visible on the most significant place: the search engine. The solution for this problem is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We can improve the E-commerce site visibility in search engine result, attract customers and boost the sale through SEO. This blog will describe how SEO helps improving E-commerce website for better and why it is crucial.
To begin with, we must need to know first about E-commerce SEO before going through the explanation.
Before SEO were implemented, many stores used to rely on social medias and paid ads to make themselves known more on many search engines. Big businesses also spend large money for advertising agencies to help running their store’s ads on social medias. At first, it brings great result which increases both the customers and sale numbers for their stores. However, people start ignoring ads on social medias over time, resulting losing more than millions for advertising services.
To resolve this, E-commerce SEO are introduced, focusing on optimizing the online stores to arrive first on search engine. This method doesn’t require recurring money, only continuous efforts. When your stores rank high on search page, you can make sale automatically without spending any expense for it.
How SEO helps improving E-commerce website?
By implementing SEO in the stores, it enhances your E-commerce sites with many benefits as follow:
1. Increase Organic Traffic to your store
One of the most significant advantages of SEO is how it increases the Organic Traffic to your E-commerce site. By Organic, it means that visitors find and going to your website by search engine result instead of going through a paid ads on social media.
· Higher Ranking on search result page: Your site appears first on search result by optimizing keywords and phrases related to common search words. Appearing at first page means high visibility, your site receives more clicks and visits from potential customers.
· Target Traffics: SEO helps attract visitors who are interested on the product or service from your stores. Those visitors usually becoming customer because they already had an interest on your store’s product or service.
Benefits: with higher visibility on search result page, more visits from potential customer to the E-commerce site leads to more sale without the cost of paid advertising.
2. Enhance user experience (UX)
SEO isn’t limited to keywords and search engine, it also optimizes the website for better user experience.
· Improved Site Structure: Optimizing your website’s content to make it easy for both search engine and users to navigate. This includes using clear headings, descriptive URLs and a logical site hierarchy.
· Faster Loading Speed: Some search engines, especially Google, consider loading page speed is a ranking factor. By improving your site to load quickly not only helps ranking high but also reduces bounce rate, keeps user engaged.
Benefits: Better user experience can lead to higher customer satisfaction, longer visit durations and increase chances of conversion.
3. Builds Brand Credibility and Trust
Search engines and visitors alike are more likely to trust on your brand’s credibility and dependability by a well-optimized E-commerce website.
· Authoritative Content: You can show the authority of your brand by creating high-quality content which answers user’s questions and solves their problem. Not only this improves the SEO scores of your site but also build trust with your customers.
· Positive User Reviews: By having satisfied customers leave their reviews about your product or service improve your E-commerce site’s reputation. Search engine can impact the website’s rankings and conversion rate based on customer’s reviews of the website.
Benefits: With higher credibility and positive brand image of your digital store, you will gain more loyal customers.
An e-commerce website can attract more visitors with the help of SEO. Additionally, there will be a higher likelihood of converting visitors into paying customers.
· Optimized Product Pages: Optimizing your product page with relevant keywords, clear descriptions, high-quality images, customer reviews can make it easier for customers to navigate in the site.
· Local SEO: Local SEO may help e-commerce companies with physical stores attract foot visitors by promoting your store in Google Maps and local search results. In particular, this matters for "near me" searches.
Benefits: You can improve your sale and have a better return on investment (ROI) by improving conversion rate of the site.
5. Provide long -term benefits
SEO provide long-term benefits for your business over time while paid advertising’s benefits stop when not spending money for it.
· Sustainable Traffic: Your website will continue to draw organic visitors for free if it starts to rank highly for relevant keywords. Long-term, SEO becomes a cost-effective technique because of this.
· Continuous Improvement: With the help of SEO, you can continue to improve and adapt your business strategy based on changing algorithms, user behavior, market trends.
Benefits: Ensuring sustained traffic growth, long-term visibility, and continuous improvements are necessary to keep your e-commerce firm viable and competitive.
In summary, we can see that SEO is a powerful tool that significantly improve your E-commerce business’s success. There are many benefits we can gain from using SEO in the digital store. From increasing organic traffic to the website, enhancing user experience (UX) to building brand credibility and improving conversion rate.
Instead of paying for paid advertising services, we can invest on SEO to attract visitors and converse into loyal customer. This leads to long-term growth and success for the E-commerce business.
You can significantly improve your e-commerce website's visibility, user experience, and overall performance in search engine rankings by following the guidelines below.
Essential SEO practices
1. Site Structure and Navigation
A well-organized site structure is crucial for e-commerce websites. For instance, Amazon uses a clear hierarchical structure with categories like Electronics, Books, and Clothing, making it easy for users to find products. Implementing breadcrumb navigation helps users and search engines understand the site structure. Ensure your URLs are clean and descriptive that include keywords relevant to page content, such as www.example.com/electronics/laptops.
2. Mobile Optimization
With the rise of mobile shopping, having a mobile-friendly site is non-negotiable. Etsy excels in this area with its responsive design that adapts seamlessly across devices. Mobile Page Speed is as important as desktop page speed. Make sure to optimize images, leverage browser caching, and minimize JavaScript to improve mobile page load times.
3. Page Speed Optimization
Page speed can make or break an e-commerce site. Please work with an SEO specialist to optimize images without losing quality, minifies CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute content globally, reducing latency.
4. On-Page SEO
Craft unique and compelling title tags and meta descriptions for each page. You can use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure content and includes relevant keywords. Do not forget to provide descriptive alt text for all images as it will improve accessibility and SEO.
5. Schema Markup
Implementing product schema by providing search engines with detailed information about your products which helps it understand your products better. Best Buy uses review schema to display product ratings and reviews in search results, which enhance visibility and click-through rates significantly.
Now that we've covered the essential technical SEO practices, let’s explore more advanced techniques that can take your e-commerce site to the next level. These advanced strategies require a bit more technical know-how but can yield significant results in terms of site performance, international reach, and overall search engine visibility.
Advanced Technical SEO
1. Site Speed and Performance
Advanced caching techniques, such as server-side caching with tools like Varnish or Redis, can significantly boost site speed. Shopify uses lazy loading to load images and videos only when they are about to enter the viewport, improving performance. Implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) can also enhance mobile page load times.
2. International SEO
For e-commerce sites targeting multiple countries, like eBay, using hreflang tags indicates language and regional targeting for different versions of your site. Geo-targeting in Google Search Console helps target specific countries effectively.
3. Advanced Schema Markup
Rich snippets for products, reviews, and FAQs can enhance search result listings. Netflix optimizes its site to appear in the Knowledge Graph by providing detailed and structured information about its media offerings.
4. Technical Audits and Monitoring
Conduct regular technical SEO audits using tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to identify and fix issues. Additionally, analyzing server log files helps understand how search engines are crawling your site and identify any crawl errors. Alibaba regularly performs these audits to maintain its vast e-commerce platform.
5. Security
Ensuring your site is secure by implementing HTTPS is crucial. Also, regular security audits helps protect your site from vulnerabilities, ensuring a safe shopping experience for users.
Remember, SEO is not just about ticking boxes; it's about creating a seamless, enjoyable experience for your users. So, get cracking and watch your e-commerce site soar!
If you have a need to apply SEO for your E-commerce store but do not know where to start, Dicom Interactive can provide you a service for it.
About Dicom Interactive
Dicom Interactive is one of the top boutique software development with offices located in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam and Melbourne – Australia, with over 15 years experience in the business.
We have been working on a variety of projects across the continents, with focus on education, transportation, entertainment, game, healthcare, insurance, food & beverage, automobile, and travel industry. We can help you achieve your online marketing objectives such as improving web rankings, traffic, and conversions… You can check for our Service and Portfolio here
If you need help with any of these aspects, you can contact us for a free consultation on defining your scope as well as the required workforce for your project.