For any eCommerce business, being able to reach more potential customers is essential. After all, customers are the foundation of any business’s success, and without these customers, no business can survive.
It makes sense, then, that eCommerce businesses should focus on making it easy for visitors to find their business online, so they can capitalise on that customer base and make more sales.
But how do you make sure your business is visible to potential customers?
The answer lies within SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the key to optimising any website, making it easier for potential customers to find products and services online. When implemented correctly, it can boost your eCommerce site higher up in organic search results (or SERPs) and attract potential customers to your website.
But if you’ve never considered SEO before, it can seem a daunting prospect.
There are basic principles of SEO that every eCommerce business should keep in mind to power up their website and reach more customers.
1. Keyword Research is Essential
First things first, you need to know what your potential customers are searching for.
Keyword research is essential for any SEO strategy, as it allows you to identify the words and phrases that potential customers are using when searching for products or services online. By understanding which search terms people use, you can create content around these terms and focus on optimising your website for those phrases.
That way, when people search for these terms, your website will be more visible, and you’ll be able to attract them to your site.
Integrating keywords into content can help your site appear higher in search results, enabling more potential customers to find you. However, keyword stuffing – using too many keywords in a piece of content – should be avoided, as it can have a negative impact on your SEO and may even result in penalties from Google.
You should aim to use keywords in a natural way within your content, as this will make it more engaging for readers and encourage them to stay on your website.
How to Carry Out Effective Keyword Research
To get started, you’ll need to have a clear understanding of what your target market is searching for and how they use the language when searching for products.
To do this, you can use keyword research tools, like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, to identify the words that potential customers are typing into search engines.
These tools will help you find related keywords, as well as give you an idea of how popular each keyword is and how difficult it would be to rank for them – all invaluable information when devising your SEO strategy.
Curate a list of keywords that are relevant to your business and create content that focuses on these keywords. This will make it easier for potential customers to find you when searching for products or services online.
2. Optimise and Organise Your Site’s Architecture
For SEO to be effective, your site needs to be well structured and organised. This means having a clear site structure for the navigation of your website and making sure all pages are easily accessible to search engine crawlers.
Website architecture refers to the way in which a website is constructed and how its pages are organised. It involves making sure every web page on your site is easily accessible and well-structured, enabling search engine crawlers to find them quickly and accurately.
Organising your site’s architecture in this way makes it easy for search engine crawlers to quickly access all of your content and helps to boost your SEO.
You should also make sure that your site is well-structured and organised in terms of navigation. This means ensuring that links are clearly visible from one page to the next, and that pages have descriptive titles so that search engine crawlers can easily understand what they are about.
It’s important to make sure that all of the pages on your website are SEO-friendly by using descriptive page titles, including keywords in headings and content, and optimising images with alt tags.
By ensuring that your site is well organised and optimised, you’ll be more likely to rank higher in the search engines.
3. Make Use of Internal Linking
Internal linking is an important part of SEO, as it helps provide a better user experience for visitors and also gives search engine crawlers an easier way to navigate through your website.
Internal links help search engine crawlers find the information they are looking for, which in turn helps increase your site’s visibility in the search engine results pages.
When creating internal links, it’s important to make sure that you link to relevant pages on your website. This will help ensure that visitors stay on your site for longer and are more likely to convert into customers.
Don’t just link to any page on your website; instead, try to use descriptive anchor texts that are related to the page you’re linking to. This will help search engine crawlers understand what the link is about and make it easier for them to find the relevant information.
Internal links also allow visitors to explore other parts of your site and discover more of the content you have to offer, which in turn can help increase your overall traffic.
Nowadays, if people can’t easily find what they’re looking for on your website, they’ll simply leave and look elsewhere. Internal linking is one of the best ways to make sure that visitors can easily find what they are looking for on your site, and encourage them to explore other areas that they might not have otherwise seen.
4. Only Generate High-Quality Content
Quality content is one of the basic SEO principles for success. Search engines, like Google, place great importance on the quality of your content, and if it’s not up to standard, it could have a big impact on your ranking in the search results.
High-quality content should be relevant to your business, useful for visitors and engaging. This means ensuring that all of the content on your website is well-written, informative and interesting.
Creating quality content is not just about creating well-written blog posts and articles; it’s also about making sure that all of the content on your website is relevant to what you’re trying to achieve.
Google’s advice is to “create content for people, not for search engines” – this means making sure that you create content that people actually want to read, not just content that’s designed to get search engine traffic.
Make sure that the topics you cover are related to your business and provide useful or interesting information for your visitors. This will not only help with SEO but also encourage visitors to remain on your site for longer and explore other areas, which can then lead to more conversions.
Duplicate content should also be avoided, as it can often lead to problems with search engine algorithms. Duplicate content confuses crawlers and makes it difficult for them to index your website accurately, so make sure that all of the content on your site is unique and original.
And it’s important to ensure that all of the content on your website is up-to-date; out-of-date content can have a negative effect on SEO as search engines won’t view it as relevant. Try to focus on producing evergreen content that will remain relevant for a long period of time.
Take Advantage of AI Tools When it Comes to Content Writing
If used correctly, AI writing tools can be powerful for creating high-quality content that is optimised for SEO.
AI-powered content writing tools can help you create SEO-friendly content quickly and easily by analysing your input and suggesting changes that will improve the quality of your content.
These tools can also analyse keywords, helping you to identify the best ones to use in your content to ensure it’s optimised for search engines.
Not only can AI writing tools help to create SEO-friendly content, but they can also speed up the process of creating content. This means that you can spend more time focusing on other elements of your SEO strategy and spend less time worrying about creating content.
AI content tools are great when used correctly, but it’s important to remember that nothing will ever beat the human touch. Make sure that you always manually check your content before publishing to ensure it meets the highest standards of quality and accuracy.
5. Start Link Building
Link building is an essential part of SEO that involves getting other websites to link back to yours. It’s a great way to increase your visibility, build trust with search engines, and improve your ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Link building can be done by creating content such as blog posts or articles that provide readers with value and include links to your website.
It can help boost traffic by increasing the number of visitors who click on the links leading back to your site, as well as improving rankings since search engines consider this type of linking when determining where pages should appear on their results pages.
6. Watch Your Page Load-Speed
Page load speed is an important factor for SEO success as it affects how quickly search engines can index your website and is a key ranking signal used by Google.
If your page load time is slow, then your website will take longer to be indexed and ranked, which makes it more difficult to achieve good rankings in the SERPs.
Plus, potential customers don’t want to wait around for websites to load, so slow page speeds can also negatively impact user experience.
To ensure a faster page speed, try using caching plugins and optimising images for web. You can use a tool such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights to measure your website’s performance and get recommendations on how you can improve it.
7. Don’t Forget to Optimise Your Images
Images are often forgotten when it comes to SEO, but giving your images effective Alt tags and filenames can help search engine crawlers to better understand your content.
Alt tags (also known as Alt Text) are pieces of HTML code that provide a brief description of an image, allowing search engine crawlers to understand what the image is about. Alt text should be short and concise yet accurately describe the content of the image.
Optimising images for SEO involves more than just including Alt text. You should also choose descriptive filenames for your images and compress them to reduce their file size. This will help to improve the performance of your website, which is another important principle of SEO success.
Only use images relevant to the content, and ensure that you don’t use images that are too large, as this can slow down your page load speed.
8. Create a Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Site
More people than ever before are using their mobile phones to shop online, so it’s essential that your eCommerce site is optimised for mobile devices.
In fact, “as of Q3 in 2020, an average of 55.4% of consumers worldwide” used their mobile to make an online purchase, with the percentage of consumers in the UK alone being 46.5%. If you’re not making it easy for these shoppers to browse and buy your products on their mobiles, you’re missing out on a huge potential market.
Creating a mobile-friendly and responsive website means that the layout of your eCommerce site will automatically adjust depending on the device that someone is viewing it on.
This not only improves the user experience but also helps your SEO efforts, as Google now favours websites that are optimised for mobile.
9. Take Advantage of Analytical Tools
Analytical tools are essential for monitoring your SEO efforts and understanding how visitors interact with your website. If you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, then you won’t be able to power up your eCommerce site to its fullest potential.
Analytical tools can provide invaluable insights into your eCommerce site’s performance. They can show you the number of visitors your website is getting, where they’re coming from, and which pages they’re viewing.
This type of information is critical to understanding how well your SEO efforts are working and where you can make improvements. After all, if you don’t know what needs to be improved, then it’s impossible to make the changes that will help your website to rank higher in organic search results.
Most Popular Analytics Tools
There are many tools available to help with monitoring and analysing your website’s performance. Some of the most popular include:
- Google Analytics
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs Keyword Explorer
- Moz Analytics/Pro
It’s best to try and test out a few different tools to find the one that best fits into your workflow and strategy.
Key Takeaways: Make Sure You’re Clued Up on These 9 Principles of SEO
If you want your eCommerce site to appear high up in the search engine rankings, then it’s essential that you understand the basic principles of SEO.
It might seem like a lot to take on board, but investing time into SEO now can have huge rewards in the future.
An SEO agency can help you with this process if you don’t have the time or resources to do it yourself. The team at Neural Edge specialise in eCommerce SEO and have considerable experience helping businesses power up their websites.
From keyword research and content creation to technical SEO, we can provide the support and guidance that you need to help your eCommerce website reach its full potential. Get in touch with us today to find out more.
FAQs
What is eCommerce SEO?
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is vital for eCommerce websites as it enables them to be found more easily on search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Without SEO, customers are less likely to discover your eCommerce site and the products or services you offer.
What are the benefits of SEO?
SEO helps to increase organic visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), which in turn can create more website traffic and sales. SEO also helps to improve the user experience of your website, making it easier for customers to find what they are looking for.
Additionally, SEO can help you build trust and credibility with your customers.
What are the two main points of SEO?
There are two main parts of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO focuses on the content and structure of your website, such as the HTML code, meta tags, headings, titles, images and content.
Off-page SEO focuses on external factors such as building links that point to your website and creating a strong social media presence. Both are necessary for effective SEO strategies.
What is the most important factor in SEO?
The most important factor in SEO is keyword research. This involves finding out which keywords your target audience is using to search for products and services related to your business.
Once you have identified the most relevant and popular keywords, you can then use them to optimise your content and ensure that it is visible to potential customers.
