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TOP 9 SEO Tips for Ecommerce Websites

January 14, 2016 - 4  min reading time - by Emma Labrador
Home > SEO Thoughts > TOP 9 SEO Tips for Ecommerce Websites

If you are selling products online, your website needs to be easily found by your customers or prospects. This means appearing in the first positions of Google’ SERPs. It would be a real disaster to have the best products and website if you cannot reach your audience.
This is where SEO can help you. It will help you rank higher in the SERPs and make your website be visible by your target. The more traffic you get, the more likely you are to make conversions.
Our article delivers 10 tricks to help you optimize your ecommerce website for SEO and boost your sales.

1# Set up efficient keywords

Finding the right keywords is the key to rank your ecommerce website. Take the time to do some in-depth keyword researches to pick the ones that suit your activity. Long-tail keywords can really help you rank high on specific niches where your competitors are not already. Those keywords can really attract the kind of traffic you are looking for and increase your conversion rate. Think in terms of user queries. People are quite specific and type conversational queries where they are looking for something. You need to think your keywords in terms of user’s search intents.

2# Use strategic keywords in anchor text

Using anchor text to boost your SEO is a good solution. Your ecommerce website is for sure full of links pointing to your pages and you need to optimize your anchor to maximize their potential. You need to make them looks natural with anchors like “here” but you can also use strategic keywords you want to rank for. Obviously, you must not use the same keywords for all your anchor texts in order to avoid being penalized by Google. Including important keyword links in your product descriptions can also lead the visitors to similar products pages you want to push.

3# Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content can seriously be an enemy when it comes to ecommerce website. Ecommerce websites particularly meet this issue because they deal with a lot of product descriptions. And these descriptions are often given by a seller – seller which can distributes those products to different websites. It results that ecommerce websites display product descriptions that appear on many websites. Also, filter and category options can lead to duplicate content issues because those filters create different URLs with the same content. To know how to fix these issues you can refer to our article on the subject.

4# Write compelling product descriptions

Like compelling headlines, catchy product descriptions have a great impact on your conversion rate. That’s why you should avoid using manufacturer’s product descriptions. Keep them unique and appealing with relevant keywords to make them more Google friendly.

5# Optimize your product images

Ecommerce stores relies on images. They are a sale’s triggering factor. Your images must be highly qualitative, compelling and unique. But having great images is not enough especially if you want bots to find them. Images have a great SEO potential as Google Images’ search results can drive a lot of traffic back to your website.
Make sure you filled out the ALT tag, a description where you can add valuable and unique keywords.

6# Optimize your URL for search engines crawls

URLs are more important for your SEO than they seem to be. Optimized URLs can really help search engines’ bots to find and crawl your website and know what it is about. Proper URLs structures then also ease your website indexation.
On the other hand, efficient URLs can inform your visitors what you page is going to be about and improve their experience. Moreover, a good user experience keeps your audience longer on your website. It represents additional chances to convert them into customers.
Don’t only think your SEO for search engines but also in terms of user experience!

7# Watch if traffic is converting into sales

While growing your traffic is a thing, converting these visits into sales is another. You need to check if your regular visitors are turning into paid customers. Google Analytics is a good help to analyze your traffic and spot points of improvements. You can thus determine from where you traffic comes from, the devices used, the personas most likely to convert, conversions generated through SEO, etc.

8# Improve usability

Make your site navigation easy. The worse mistake would be to not offer a clear navigation path. Don’t forget to link to your product pages from your home page and to offer relevant landing pages. This will also help bots to crawl your website.

9# Avoid broken links

You want to offer the best experience possible to your visitors. Clicking on a specific page and landing on a “Page 404 Not Found” is surely not the result you were expecting. That’s why having broken links is a terrible idea. You should then run regular crawls to detect whether you have 404 issues. Having a lot of them can be a disaster for your business.

Emma Labrador See all their articles
Emma was the Head of Communication & Marketing at Oncrawl for over seven years. She contributed articles about SEO and search engine updates.
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