Best SEO Practices for Ecommerce Websites

Managing a fully operational e-commerce website and its product inventory is one thing. But having a strong SEO strategy is entirely a different story.

Just like any other business website, keyword research and onsite optimisation processes are all part of the basic checklist. But if you seriously want to scale your website's performance within your niche, it may require you to take things many steps further to up your game. It requires plenty of hard work and quality time and only those who pay attention to the finer details and willing to spend time working things up at a granular level can hope for a highly optimised e-commerce website that brings in the right traffic and converts visitors into customers.

Safety first!

More traffic means more customers. More customers mean more sales. If you own an e-commerce website, you want to do things right from the start. You aren’t only taking care of your revenue, especially if it’s your bread-and-butter. Putting your customers’ data at risk is the last thing you want to happen. In any business, customers trust is paramount. Before they can be loyal customers, they need to have confidence in your brand. It makes a lot of sense to switch your site to HTTPS or be on it right from the start and ensure that your SSL certificate is correctly implemented. Make sure that your visitors are well-informed of the steps you have taken to put security on top of your priority and display security certifications on the relevant page on your website.

Optimise category pages

After securing your website, you can start optimizing. Begin optimisation by targeting keywords with high traffic potential for your category pages. Come up with at least a paragraph that describes the category to avoid a thin content violation. Your customers are introduced to your products through your category pages, so it is best practice to focus optimisation on these pages. You can focus on generating links to your category pages to further increase their ranking potential.

Optimise product pages

The best way to optimise product pages is by - first and foremost- adding unique product descriptions. Primarily, these product descriptions are meant to sell your product, before they were even elements of optimisation. Here are a few things you can do:

Write enticing product descriptions that tell a story.
Write with your brand personality in mind.
Device a format for your product descriptions to ensure consistency.
Add user-generated content such as social media mentions and product reviews to add unique content to your product pages and provide social signals.
Write unique title tags based on keyword research.
Add eye-catching calls to action such as Buy now or Free delivery
Device an organised way to cover the most important pages first

Simplify product pages with many variants

Product variants make it a little bit tricky to create unique product descriptions. Creating a generic description that changes only the name of the variant can get you into tons of duplicate content issues. The best approach to this is to provide options on the page that allows buyers to change the colour, size or model without having to change the URL.

If you are creating different pages for your product variants, you run the risk of these pages competing with each other. To address this, make sure to canonicalise your main product.

Include “purchase intent” keywords

Adding plenty of purchase intent keywords (such as “Buy <product>") will help a lot. Doing so will enable you to sift through serious buyers into your sales funnel.

Optimise your page with high-quality images

Users are visually-driven. Be sure to include just the right resolution of images to entice readers. If they are too large, images tend to slow down your page. Also, add alternative text to all images so they can be easily searched.

Deal with issues caused by search filters

Most e-commerce sites have search filters to help users find particular products very quickly. However, some filtering systems generate unique URLs for each type of search. In large websites with many products, this can lead to thousands of indexed pages with duplicate content issues. If the generated URLs resulted in a very high number of indexed pages, it is best to add a meta robots tag with parameters “noindex,follow” to the filtered pages. Pages will be dropped from the index.

Project the availability of out-of-stock items

One distinct characteristic of e-commerce websites is that there is a fast movement of inventory. This could lead to out-of-stock items on your online store (customers frown on this). However, removing those products’ pages can waste valuable traffic. Include a message that tells when the product will be back in stock and direct your visitors to alternative products. If a product has been phased out or will no longer be offered, remove the page and add a 301 redirect to the new product or relevant product available in place of it, or its category page.

Create seamless site architecture

Ease of navigation is essential. Aside from creating an excellent user experience, it helps Google crawl and index your site.

Ensure that good linking is practised: category pages have anchor text to the homepage and product pages to category pages.
Link product mentions on your blog to your product pages for continuity of the user’s journey.
Link new products to your homepage so they can be easily by Google and get found quickly by users.
Add breadcrumbs (text path normally located on top of the page) to show users where they are. If you practice neatly structured data on your site, the search engine will show your breadcrumbs on SERP. It helps users see how the page is positioned on your site and don’t get lost in the process. Nobody wants to get lost!

Keep URLs looking clean

In a large e-commerce site with many pages, URLs can get complicated. It’s easy to spot complicated URLs with vaguely purposed characters vs clean, thoughtfully structured URLs. Here are a few tips:

· Exclude parameters and make sure to remove nonsensical characters

· Stick to lower-case letters

· Choose hyphens over underscore

· Keep them short and understandable

Add schema markup to your product pages

Adding schema markup will enhance the appearance of product pages in SERPs which in turn, increases your click-throughs. Use the same template for all product pages. Add the schema markup to the template to produce consistent schema layout on all product pages. For product pages, it’s best to add product schema and review schema.

Monitor the results of your SEO efforts

It’s not enough to just sit after your SEO work is done. Because of the nature and scale of e-commerce sites, it is essential to continually monitor your results and analyse if something is not working. Some of the SEO practices must be done on a regular basis.

Identify broken links and error pages regularly and apply the most appropriate fix
Identify high-performing keywords and pages. Strategize for keywords and pages that do not perform well on organic search.
Perform A/B tests for keywords, product descriptions formats, images, etc