5 Facts You Must Know About E-commerce SEO!

Gone are the days of driving to a mall and shopping for necessities and luxuries. Every little requirement is available at our doorstep via a small square or circle icon on our mobile phones. The digital revolution has not only made our lives convenient but has brought about a different sense of assurance that enables us to take care of multiple things in a single swipe.

E-commerce is one of the corollaries of this digital revolution. It is the act of buying and selling products online, hassle-free. Upon its introduction, there was a lot of speculation about creating an E-commerce website. A lot of us did not understand the mechanism and were skeptical about its success. Eventually, when a lot of us began seeing E-commerce as a lucrative market, we created platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, etc., to develop such websites quickly. Now, we live in times where the development of an E-commerce website happens at a combustible rate, but we’ve seen in previous blogs that building a website is just the beginning. The most important step that follows is Search Engine Optimization to enable traffic on your website. From an SEO perspective, there are various factors you need to keep in mind while building your E-commerce website. Here are a few:

1) Crawl Budget

Crawling is the process of fetching indexed web pages with similar keywords. Whenever you type your query in the search engine, it quickly crawls the indexed pages and shows the result. The time taken to crawl web pages in a given time frame is known as Crawl Budget. From an SEO perspective, to enable the crawler to rank the webpages of your e-commerce website, you must make sure to create a definitive sitemap. It must be a clear guide of your website and must not have too many redirect chains because they make it difficult to crawl the redirected webpage. Also, you might have to choose which web page must be indexed and which ones can be left out.

Pro Tips

• Make sure your XML sitemap is updated regularly.
• Fix broken Links.
• Prevent the indexation of useless content.
• Get rid of duplicate pages.
• Avoid long redirect chains.

2) Keyword Research

The three essential functions of Search Engine Optimization are Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking. The starting point of these functions is Keyword Mapping. Your E-commerce website will gain traffic only when the words you choose are in sync with the keywords assigned to that particular product. Let’s understand the working of keywords in general with the help of a small example.

If you have created informational content on a usage of a certain product, then the heading of the content must begin with how-to, the reason being that more often than not, people look for informational content with the how-to question.

Similarly, as someone who is creating an e-commerce website, you must perform thorough keyword research in the market that you wish to serve. General keywords like, buy, purchase, price, compare, value, etc., may come in handy. Also, niche-based keywords like, Apple, Samsung, etc., for an online mobile website, may come in handy.

Pro Tips

• Amazon Suggests can give you exact targeted keywords.
• The Rank tracker tool can mix keywords to see the most useful combination.

3) On-Page Optimization

We know that there are three major factors for an SEO to occur, that is, Indexing, Crawling, and Ranking. These three factors are the corollary of a process called Keyword research and mapping. We can influence those three essential steps of SEO by on-page optimization. It is a process of modulating the on-page factors to generate and enhance traffic on your webpage.

In the case of an e-commerce website, two pages must be thoroughly optimized, i.e., Product Page and Category Page, because these are two such pages that possess the power to generate and enhance revenue.

As having expertise in SEO consulting, you must understand the difference between “Yellow Soccer Shoes Size 8” and “Buy soccer shoes online.” The two searches are similar when we try to find the object, but the sense of urgency is different in both the sentences.

An ideal e-commerce website must have Title Tag, Description Tag, and Product and Category Description as a part of on-page optimizations.

Pro Tips

• Add modifiers to your title tags like Best, online, free shipping, cheap, deals, or review. For Example, The Best Soccer Shoes with free shipping.
• Use attractive words to boost product and category pages. For Example, overnight shipping, sale, free shipping, Guarantee, X% off, etc.
• Yellow Soccer Shoes: 30% off and overnight shipping on today’s order.
• You can make your description tags unique by including call-to-action phrases. For Example, Awesome selection at the lowest price, click here to see all our exclusive deals on, get overnight shipping on all products.

4) Structured Data

Schema codes are very useful and crucial to get in the good books of Google. There are a plethora of schema codes available, and you can choose product schema and review schema.

• First head over to your tool and choose product
• Find products page with reviews and ratings and start tagging for reviews and ratings.

Pro Tips

• Use google search console to cross-check whether or not the implementation of your schema is correct.
• If you have performed schema set up properly, “Rich Results” will appear under the enhancements at the sidebar.

5) Duplicate Content

Duplication is when similar content (based on keyword mapping) shows up in different locations of the internet. Such duplication could severely affect your ranking, and that is because the search engine gets confused between the similar contents and which one to rank. There are essentially two types of duplication that occurs in E-commerce,

Off-Site Duplication Of Content

Off-Site duplication is a very common thing nowadays. To put it in simple terms, it means that if you are selling a product online and the content that you’ve used it generic, your website will not achieve any ranking by the search engine crawlers. They do this to avoid unnecessary duplicate content and to show unique results only.

There are a few ways with the help of which you can resolve off-site duplication of content.

Write unique descriptions for every product
If you have a very large inventory, which is natural for any e-commerce setup, you must have a team of copywriters who are very eager to create a unique copy of every micro item you have. Unique content has higher chances of achieving a higher ranking.

Take advantage of user-generated content
Encourage your customers to write reviews on product pages as online reviews are the most valued assets nowadays. Give extra benefits or discounts to consumers who leave reviews on product pages.

Add a Q&A section for each product
Google supports FAQs now, which means you can make your product descriptions extraordinary by adding Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) to them.

On-Site Duplication Of Content

On-Site duplication of content has nothing to do with the content of your competitors. More often than not, there is duplication on your website,i.e., within the web pages. One way to resolve this issue is to make sure that CMS returns to only one URL for a particular product. This approach eliminates content duplication and ensures that your site’s Crawl Budget is used wisely.

Conclusion

E-commerce Website is the in-thing right now. Every business owner wishes to join this platform. As someone new to this platform, you must ensure that the above steps are adhered to and taken care of; Feel free to ping us in case of any query!

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com on March 2, 2020.