11 SEO Tips for Ecommerce Websites

Statistics show that almost 90% of potential ecommerce website customers use Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing when making purchases online. What is even more important is that the vast majority of the users don't make it off the first two pages of the search engine results before clicking. SEO is critical for anyone doing business online - search engine visibility and high organic search engine rankings are critical for the success of your ecommerce business.

Search engine optimization for ecommerce websites is often a problematic topic for most companies doing business online, a lot of ecommerce stores don't have an effective SEO strategy in place, they offer little to no useful content, often use manufacturer product descriptions. ecommerce websites usually face unique challenges, though a lot of common SEO best practices can be used when optimizing them. Here are some SEO tips that I’ve gathered while working on multiple search engine marketing projects, that will help your online business to rank and compete better in search engines:

Use search engine friendly urls - this a common factor that is often overlooked when switching to a new ecommerce platform. Small investment in the first stages of your ecommece store development process (e.g. to implement url rewriting) will save you a lot on the long run. Keep the URL uncluttered and use some relevant keywords, this will help customers find your products regardless of the platform you are using. Avoid session IDs in the url if possible.

Never use manufacturers products descriptions - probably you heard it a thousand times, but still a huge number of ecommerce stores use product descriptions provided by manufacturers and don't understand that others are already using those descriptions. So your content will be marked as duplicate by search engines and won't rank at all, or rank poorly for the product related keywords.

Internal linking - important but often overlooked search engine ranking factors like page depth and link quality. When using bad website information architecture, your e-commerce store could be loosing up to 20% of the search engine traffic. When designing internal linking structure of your ecommerce solution make sure you don't pass the same value to low importance and noisy pages of your website, when compared to important ones.

Content - yes, you've heard it already - content is the king, and when speaking about ecommerce websites it is even more true, because a lot of ecommerce stores lack unique product descriptions, unique page titles. You need to have a lot of unique SEO friendly content for your pages if you want to succeed for competitive keywords, also make sure you add some relevant content and descriptions for category and subcategory pages to get the most out of SEO efforts.

Backlink acquisition - this a controversial topic, so I would suggest two ways about approaching this:

If your online business is relatively new and you have only a couple unique backlinks, then link building should be one the major points in your SEO strategy, without a solid mass of backlinks it is impossible to compete for competitive keywords
If your website has enough authority and you have hundreds of thousand of links pointing back to your ecommerce website already, then I'd recommend to focus your SEO efforts on on-page optimization: see how you pass link value, check your information architecture, navigation, optimize all pages and images etc.

Image optimization - when searching for specific products you'll see that images are a part of SERP's, so it means you can increase quality traffic to your ecommerce website by optimizing images. Make sure you have unique alt text attributes for your images, the easiest way to do it would be to generate them automatically including product and brand name.

Focus on single keyword or keyword phrase - this is very important, because when targeting multiple keywords it is easy to overload the page with relevant keywords, in this case it can do more harm then good. While it is a good idea to target a couple keywords for the home page, I'd highly recommend targeting specific keyword or keyword phrase for product specific pages.

Sitemap - Create a good html sitemap not only useful for search engines but also for visitors. If your navigation heavy relies on JavaScript make sure you have an HTML based sitemap accessible from your footer so that search engines would be able to crawl all your website, I'd also recommend to include links to the most popular categories or pages in your footer as well. I've already mentioned the importance of your websites' information architecture.

Site speed - first of all you should make sure your website pages load fast because of the ultimate user experience and secondly of course because recently Google announced that website page load time became one of the 200+ factors in it's ranking algorithms.

Long tail keywords - basically long tail keywords means less competition and less competition means you can rank higher and faster. The easiest ways to convert a broad search keyword into a long tail keyword is to add more details. For example if you are selling "Dell laptops" (30 million results) your long tail keyword would look like "Dell Latitude E6500" (600k results), it is even better if you can get less then 100,000 search results for your long tail keyword -"buy Dell latitude E6500 online" ( 70k results). It should also be noted that usually long tail keywords have much higher conversion rates, so make sure this is included in your website SEO strategy.

On page seo optimization - one of the most important search engine ranking factors, here are the main focus areas:

Title tags - you must have unique, SEO friendly title tags for every page on your website;
Keyword density - the percentage a keyword appears on the page compared to the overall number of words on the page. Common best practice is to have a 2-7% density for targeted keyword on page;
Meta tags - meta descriptions tags should be unique for all your ecommerce store pages, meta keywords have low or no importance at all, but still it is considered of some value;
Text formatting - keywords should be emphasized in a natural way for the visitor and search engine spiders - use H1, H2, bold and italic formatting options;
Site structure - I've already mentioned the importance of your website structure and navigation for ranking
Internal links - two most important things to consider would be keyword rich anchors of your internal links and how well website content is interlinked (user and search engine friendly sitemap, footer links to most important pages with appropriate keywords as anchor text);

In large ecommerce projects putting SEO off until "later" can be a costly mistake, it is highly recommended to have SEO expert involved from the first stages of the project. Also an effective search engine marketing strategy shouldn't focus solely on SEO: social media, PPC and other paid advertisement campaigns should be used together to receive the best impact on your online business. SysIQ offers full set of marketing services, including SEO services for ecommerce websites, to help your business grow. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions in the comments section below.