Running a successful online business involves user-friendly website design, effective marketing, and online visibility, and that means understanding some SEO basics for ecommerce. Search engine optimization (SEO) helps drive traffic to your website so more prospective buyers have a chance to view your products. SEO is a crucial component of running a competitive business online.
Many business owners aren’t familiar with SEO basics and are intimidated by the deluge of SEO-related information available. Luckily, transforming your website to include SEO is easy once you break down the process into steps. Here is our guide on the SEO basics you need to run your ecommerce business.
What is SEO for Ecommerce?
First things first, let’s talk more in-depth about how SEO functions for most websites. SEO increases your overall visibility based on search engine results. For example, let’s say you sell textbooks online. Most consumers turn to Google if they are curious about a product, so the search results for “textbooks” are optimized based on keywords, popularity, and relevance. This is why boosting your SEO helps funnel more traffic to your website—you’re helping the search engine recognize your relevance!
Optimization Strategies
Keywords
Search engines function by recognizing key words and filtering results based on keyword relevance. Choosing representative keywords is an essential part of streamlining your website.
- Start by selecting keywords for headlines, page titles, meta description, and image descriptions. These should be your “primary keywords,” i.e., the keywords that reflect your mission, product, or company with the most accuracy.
- Utilize website copy to distribute secondary keywords. Blog posts and product pages are a great way to add more contextual keywords to your site.
- Research keywords to find words that have a high search volume (AKA popularity) with consumers. Then, you can calculate the cost of pay-per-click advertising for that word, based on its popularity. This will help you refine your pool of words to choose words that are popular, while avoiding words that are over-used.
Product Pages
Your product pages need to be informative, accessible, and aesthetically pleasing. Spend time updating your product pages to improve SEO and overall user experience while navigating your website.
- Start by updating your product descriptions to utilize keywords more effectively. Product descriptions should be evocative, helpful, and concise. Analyze competitor’s product pages to gauge how other companies are utilizing keywords in their copy.
- Optimize the images used in your product pages. Images are an essential part of SEO and drastically impact the visual appeal of a webpage. Use images that are relevant, high-quality, and unique. Avoid over-crowding your page with too many images or using poor quality images. Make sure to name your images with relevant keywords that relate to your products. This will help them appear on a Google image search.
Homepage SEO
Your homepage needs to be just as streamlined as individual product pages. Homepage SEO includes elements like:
- Homepage title tag.
- Homepage meta description.
- Homepage content.
The title tag and meta description are typically the most essential elements that include keywords. Other homepage content is often more descriptive and includes secondary keywords. To capture audience attention, highlight your products and positive reviews.
De-clutter Your Site
In ecommerce, there’s nothing more unpleasant than trying to wade through a cluttered website. Keep your website as simple as possible to streamline your customer’s experience and prioritize SEO. Start by keeping copy clear, concise, and descriptive. We recommend paying attention to your internal linking structure, which helps customers navigate to different pages within your site. For example, it should be extremely easy to access product pages from the website’s homepage.
You can also declutter your site by restructuring your content hierarchy. Focus on utilizing subcategories to organize content. For instance, if you have a clothing company, you may utilize the tab “women’s clothing” and under that category have further categories like “dresses” or “sweaters.” This helps customers navigate your site and find the products they are looking for more easily.
Streamline the SEO on Your Ecommerce Site with Digitbridge
Digitbridge is cloud-based, ecommerce operation[PZ1] platform designed to simplify the way you run your business. The PIM (Product Information Management) functionalities in Digitbridge can help to increase your efficiency dramatically during your content creation, including SEO, process for your website and product detail pages. Digitbridge’s easy-to-use platform also provides ERP & WMS capabilities for all aspects of your business including, finances, supply chain, customer service and warehouse management. Digitbridge is a dynamic, fully cloud-based platform that offers an all-inclusive approach so you can run your business anywhere, anytime to any selling channels at minimum running cost. Interested in optimizing the way you do business? Contact us today to get started.
