Optimizing your E-Commerce Website for SEO

Whether a company is big or small, there are innumerable tasks to keep up with in order to help boost an online presence and therefore bring in clients. Many focus their time on social media ads and paid ads on different platforms, often overlooking the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and its impact on client interaction. Boosting search engine rankings for a company’s profile or products has proven time and time again to be extraordinarily effective. In fact, according to Inc. : of all the marketing strategies, optimizing search engine rankings is the most effective for generating Return on Investment (ROI).

Enhancing website ranking is not an easy deed. In the algorithms of search engine platforms, many factors come together to pick and choose the most reliable and useful information for users. Not only is creating this presence in the rankings important, it is crucial to be one of the top sites listed on the search engine. A study done by Optify shows that number one ranking websites receive click-through rates (CTR) that average to about 36.4 percent, while number two rankings receive 12.5 percent, and number three averages to around 9.5 percent. For these reasons, it is vital to a company’s growth that search engine rankings be prioritized and optimized. Although this is not an easy task, there are certain ways that this can be done. In this article we discuss three key ways to boost your SEO to help your E-Commerce site reach its highest growth rate yet. 

Keyword Research

Keyword research is essentially finding the correct words and phrases that a consumer may look up in order to help bring a specific website or company up when searched. These keywords are a part of the algorithms that search engines use to bring content to users when they are looking for a product, service, or information. This plays a major role in ranking and in turn can yield major profits for E-Commerce companies with the right array of keywords.There are three key characteristics that will help in formulating the right keywords for the products or services being sold: relevancy, search volume, and difficulty of ranking. Relevance of keywords is how accurately the term or phrase is being used in correlation to a business. If the keywords that are being used on a website are not relevant to what is being sold, chances are that users will navigate away from the page. After relevance, search volume is the amount that people look up a keyword or phrase. The larger the search volume of the keyword, the more traffic the search receives and in turn a high ranking website receives. Lastly, E-Commerce companies looking to boost their SEO must take into account their keyword difficulty or competition. It is much harder to rank when there are many companies competing to be number one. With these three factors taken into account and the help of Google’s free SEO program Google Search Console a company can boost their online presence with the proper use of keywords.

Website Architecture

The two major rules to be followed with website architecture in the world of E-Commerce are: keep the site simple and accessible, and 2. Make sure every new page on the website is at three or fewer clicks away from the homepage. The set up and organization of a company’s website is of the utmost importance in regards to SEO, especially in the world of E-Commerce. It is likely that if a website is not well put together, users will navigate away and not make a purchase. Therefore, having a simple and clean online presence with makes navigation easier for both the user and the algorithms that are used to rank websites.

Technical SEO

Although basic structure and optimal keywords are significant factors that aid companies on the path of creating an excellent website that ranks well- there is also a technical aspect that needs to be spoken to. A major problem that causes a fault in technical SEO for many companies is the amount of pages that a website has. This is especially an issue in the E-Commerce marketplace because often times sellers have many products that are generously distributed among sometimes upwards of hundreds or thousands of pages. On the technical side, having this many pages means that often times the backlinks will not redirect to the same platform and therefore SEO will get cropped up instead of being a cohesive and more powerful entity. Since keywords and website organization are the main points focused on when companies work on web optimization, technical SEO can oftentimes be what makes or breaks a company ranking above competition.Luckily, there are many different tools that can be used in order to help clean up a website and make sure the technicalities are straightened out. An SEO audit must be conducted as a means of understanding the imperfections and in turn fixing any back end issues that may be causing lower ranking. To break this process down, Backlinko has created a 19 step SEO audit checklist that is updated frequently. By following these steps to conduct a technical audit and making an effort to clean up their websites, companies can be more confident in their optimization efforts in the long run.

Conclusion

In the end, search engines and consumers alike care about the easiest user interface with the most accuracy to what they had been looking for. Ranking number one is not a simple task in the slightest, but with the right tools and the right methods, the algorithms that put a company at the top can be better understood. Although these three methods are just a starting point, they can take a company a long way in the world of search engine optimization to ultimately bring in new clients and promote growth.