Total retail e-commerce sales worldwide account for $6.330 billion in 2024 and are predicted to cross the point of $8 billion in 2027. For comparison, in 2014, this number was only $1,336 billion, which means that more and more people are shopping online, and the web has become the perfect medium for retailers.
If the internet is now a crucial sales medium, search engines are its primary driving force marketing-wise. According to the Digital 2023 report, 43.4% of users go online to research brands and products. In most cases, their research begins with search engines like Google and others. That is, if you don’t optimize your e-commerce brand for them today, you might be losing plenty of potential traffic and, hence, leads and deals.
If you want to make your brand thrive and outshine the competition, you must adopt SEO for e-commerce ASAP. First of all, you must focus on the optimization of your product pages because they play the largest role in your conversions.
Understanding E-commerce SEO
In a nutshell, e-commerce SEO is a set of practices and tools aimed at enhancing your site and its content to meet search engines’ best practices in order to boost your positions in result pages (SERPs) and get noticed by potential buyers.
Why SEO is important for e-commerce, you may wonder? When handled right, e-commerce search engine optimization can offer you a wealth of benefits, such as:
- Product visibility — When you optimize your product pages, you boost their likelihood of appearing high in SERPs. As a result, your items will become more visible to prospects seeking similar items.
- Organic traffic — Numerous studies confirm that only a few percent of users go past the first page in SERPs. That is, nearly all amount of web traffic falls on sites that take the first positions. Thus, when you leverage SEO on-page and off-page optimization efficiently, you can significantly boost your organic traffic.
- Brand awareness — Lastly, when your goods become more visible, and your site receives more traffic, this will inevitably mean greater brand awareness because more people will notice you in the first positions in SERPs and lay an eye on your business.
Based on these major benefits, you’ll be able to receive many other perks, such as a larger number of leads, greater conversions, and more thriving business.
Now, why do you have to focus your SEO strategy on product pages in particular? To answer this question, let’s consider the typical e-commerce conversion funnel:
- Top of the funnel (TOFU) — Awareness
- Middle of the funnel (MOFU) — Consideration
- Bottom of the funnel (BOFU) — Intent/Purchase
Your product pages fall right into the middle of the funnel, where prospects consider different options and brands. Respectively, it’s crucial that they find your brand at this stage so that you have a chance to convert them. That’s why SEO for e-commerce should start with your product pages, and we’re about to tell you how to get it right!
Keyword Research for Product Pages
Begin your efforts with in-depth niche keyword research because keywords are what your potential buyers use to find you on the web. Your task at this stage is to find high-intent search queries related to your products.
To do this, follow these steps:
- Pick an intuitive and accurate keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner.
- Make a list of topics that align with your products. For example, if you own a shoe store, related terms can include “shoes,” “women’s shoes,” “sports shoes,” etc.
- Insert these related terms into your research tool to let it analyze the web and give you a list of potential e-commerce SEO keywords.
- Analyze and pick suitable keywords based on relevance, search volume, and competition. Also, make sure to select keywords that match the intent of your product pages, for example, “buy women’s shoes.”
Pro tip: If you aren’t sure where to begin your research, don’t hesitate to use professional keyword research services. For example, you can try NinjaReports — an innovative SEO platform that offers a complete set of tools and solutions to help you level up your SEO and succeed. In this toolbox, you’ll find lots of handy options, including keyword research and rank tracker, competitor keyword research tool, and much more!
On-Page Optimization Techniques
After you identify your target e-commerce SEO keywords, you should move on to on-page optimization.
Here’s how to do on-page optimization right:
- Optimize product titles — Use concise and descriptive titles that speak to your ideal customer. Strategically integrate target keywords in your titles to rank high for them.
- Craft informative descriptions — Describe your products in a very informative and persuasive manner, addressing customer needs and concerns and emphasizing your top selling points. Don’t hesitate to add social proof or use sensory language to drive prospects’ attention. Also, integrate target keywords in your descriptions.
- Optimize your images — Make sure your product pages include high-quality and attention-grabbing images that can sell your products for you. To make the most out of your SEO efforts, optimize images with descriptive filenames and alt tags, which can also include keywords. And don’t forget to optimize file sizes.
- Implement structured data markup — Schema markup enables search engines’ bots to crawl your site and understand its content better. Respectively, it can help you achieve higher rankings, visibility, and click-through rates. To implement markup manually, go to Schema.org and explore the vocabulary of codes to write your own code and then paste it on your website.
Technical Optimization for Product Pages
Although it’s often overlooked by beginners, technical optimization affects your rankings no less than the keywords you use or the content you provide.
Here are the core SEO strategies for small businesses in e-commerce that will help you meet search engines’ tech best practices:
- Create a responsive design and test it on mobile to ensure optimal user experience.
- Optimize the loading speed of your site — it must be 2.5 seconds or less.
- Improve your URL structures to make them clear and integrate target keywords into them.
- Use canonical tags to let search engines know that there is a master copy of a particular page and, thus, avoid duplicate content.
- Audit your site’s current performance to detect and eliminate any crawl errors.
User Experience and Conversion Rate Optimization
The overall experience users gain on your website spans a whole range of ranking factors, including navigation, site structure, content readability, and more. Besides, a positive user experience (UX) can improve your dwell time, bounce rate, and user trust, which all can serve as positive signals for search engines. Hence, UX prototyping and optimization are another must-have elements of your SEO strategy.
To boost user experience, follow these tips:
- Implement intuitive and clear navigation and leverage user-friendly page layouts.
- Develop clear and attention-grabbing calls-to-action (CTAs) and place them strategically throughout your site.
- Create a straightforward and time-efficient checkout process to reduce the number of potential friction points and minimize cart abandonment.
Monitoring and Iteration
Finally, the last one of our e-commerce SEO tips is to continuously monitor, measure, and improve your strategy.
Leverage reliable tools to track your key metrics, such as visits, clicks, conversions, etc. Use the insights you gain through analysis to fine-tune your tactic and achieve greater results.
On top of that, don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors and key industry trends. This will help you make more informed decisions and outshine other brands!
Conclusion
Product pages always play a crucial part in e-commerce. They can either make your prospects want to buy from you or seek the products they need elsewhere. What’s more, in this highly competitive niche, there is a good chance that your products will remain unnoticed. Especially if they aren’t seen at the top of SERPs. And that’s why it’s absolutely crucial to optimize them.
Now, you have all the information and tips you need to research keywords, develop compelling SEO content strategies, and otherwise optimize your product pages. Make this your number-one priority in 2024, and let your business shine!
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