7 Simple Ways to Boost Sales with Ecommerce SEO

Heading to the stores nearby just to run errands has been the thing of the past. After all, Amazon has literally ruled the ecommerce game recently. Shopping malls are used to make a huge sum for retail businesses and only a few had a retail presence on the web. Amazon also ruled the ecommerce industry during the peak seasons. By 2021, this ecommerce giant will have a lion's share of 50% in online sales. If this trend goes the same way, it will leave peanuts for the rest of survivors. 

Ecommerce is still accounting for just around 10% of retail business sales in the US. According to the recent Forrester data, over 71% of US customers will be using search engines to discover new brands, services and products. You are missing out a lot of sales if your website is not ranking in search engines. 

Your site should be well optimized for search engines to win over the competition like Wal-Mart, Amazon etc. The best Ecommerce SEO wellington company can help your offerings get found online and customers can easily make informed decisions. You can offer something they need to share with their followers and friends. 

Here are some of the key areas to focus on for improved results in ecommerce SEO. 

Timing is the key 

Online search is very vital for a customer, i.e. starting from engagement and purchase decision to product delivery. Optimizing an ecommerce site is not the only thing you need to do to rank in search engines. You also have to rank for service terms, key products and brands in Google if you are running an ecommerce business. Google always comes first before everything else in global reach. As a seller, you need to know what is important to be found on Google. 

Around 65% customers still use search engines to do online research even though they don’t buy online before deciding whether to buy a product in a traditional store or not. This concept is called Research Online, Buy Offline (ROBO). 

Considering and discovery mean a lot if you are dealing in appliances, apparel, electronics or autos. It doesn’t matter if a customer ultimately purchases from your store or at a retail location. If you have been selling online, you already know the benefits of being on the first page of search engines.

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Keyword Research

There is nothing better than ranking on the first page of search engines. But it is also very important to rank for the relevant results. This is where keyword research enters the game. It feels great to rank on the first page of Google for a competitive keyword. But you should look for long-tail keywords for low-ranking pages. First of all, you should consider the cons of using broad keywords. 

These types of keywords have a lot of competition and it can take a longer period than expected to rank for the same. They might cast a lot of a net to grab your target audience well. More than 70% traffic originates from long-tail keywords, according to the data released by Moz. 

The key here is to look for a sweet spot of keywords to drive conversion of your target customers while ranking. For you and your potential customers, it’s a win-win. If you don’t know where you can start, take a look at the keyword data of your competitors to know the right keywords to bid on. 

Create Quality Content 

Creating an informational blog is one of the keys to rank for target keywords. You can implement SEO in your content strategy through keyword research and frame topics that can directly answer the queries of your customers.  This way, you can proactively address the questions that buyers ask online. Blogs provide even more benefits than just higher search ranking. For websites, the conversion rate is around 6 times with content marketing than the websites not having it. 

Content urges your target customers to engage more with your brand and they will feel more involved with your brand. Around 70% of customers prefer blog posts to learn about your brand instead of advertisements. Provide your audience with consistent, relevant blogs to know you and your brand. Your blog content must be optimized well along with your site for SEO. 

You don’t have to worry if producing content is not natural for your ecommerce site. Videos also drive engagement more than content. Visitors are used to spending 2.6 times longer with the content that contains video. A lot of companies use SEO-optimized videos to grab traffic to their site. You can gain a lot of web traffic with videos receiving over 600,000 views. 

Organize your content 

Content structure is very vital for SEO and PPC. You cannot expect organic traffic if your content is not organized and is cluttered all over the website without proper structure. When it comes to crawl on a website, structure is the first thing search engines prefer. Simply speaking, you should keep the most vital content on the top of the website and put everything else from top level in a flow. 

Internal linking is another great strategy to refine the website structure and improves the chances to be found by target customers. Gain traction on SEO by adding links to your category and product pages in the posts from blog articles to bring your audience to the particular product pages. The long articles you curate related to trending topics are the cornerstone to drive conversion. 

You should also link back to your own content. When Google can better know the site structure, it also helps the visitors to get and share your content. They won’t enter your site if it is not visible to the visitors. Ecommerce sites shouldn’t be too deep to navigate. Anything more than three levels may lose on sales due to poor navigation. It is important for both blog and products. The deeper a visitor has to go, the higher the chances of them to go away forever. Keep your design as simple as possible. 

You should also keep the URLs easier while keeping the levels of your website low in terms of complexity. Your URLs must be readable and short enough. 

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Switch to HTTPS if you haven’t done it yet

Since 2014, Google has been considering HTTPS as a signal to rank your website. When it announced this update, the whole web development community couldn’t handle it. A lot of developers and site owners were in shock as their sites were more likely to be penalized in search results if they hadn’t had valid and secured SSL certificates.  

What’s more, a lot of web browsers started warning users that the sites they are visiting are not secure if they don’t have HTTPS protocol which asks sensitive data like credit cards or passwords. Recently, Google has announced that it will warn users about every site that is still using HTTP. It serves as a big red flag to the potential customers and it plays a huge part in affecting conversion rates. Currently, HTTPS is used by around 50% of top 10,000 websites worldwide. 

For security reasons and to give customers assurance that their information is secured and they are responsible site owners, a lot of ecommerce retailers have been using SSL certificates already. These days, Bigcommerce, Shopify, and other shopping carts are offering SSL certificates for free bundled with their plans. But you have to buy it individually if your website is self-hosted. You need to ask your hosting provider for more details to get an SSL certificate for your website. 

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Speed up Your Website 

Website performance is the key indicator of how well optimized it is. To gain the competitive edge in the market, 250 milliseconds can make or break your website’s presence, according to the head of AI, Harry Shum, Microsoft. Your customers will definitely abandon your site before even checking out your services or products, if your page loads slowly. 

Page speed has become the major consideration for ranking on mobile searches in 2018. Mobile optimization far outweighs investment to drive conversions and sales through better user experience. You can easily start testing for website speed. Page Speed Insights and other free tools are available to check mobile performance. 

Generate Authority 

Suppose there is no one in the forest and a tree falls, will anyone hear it falling? Of course no one can. In the same way, if you have a website live on the web and it has no authority links in other sites, will it ever let you know if it falls? You should consider this factor especially for ecommerce marketing. For any website on the internet, backlinks are important and have been considered as a key ranking signal in the long term. Influencer marketing is another important factor to build authority. It expands your reach with better ROI along with building credibility to your site. 

The Takeaway – Ecommerce SEO is not just an option anymore.

The SEO efforts you make for your ecommerce portal should really pay off with improved visibility and higher sales of your brands, products, and service. You will need to invest energy and time to see the rankings growing. Produce helpful and engaging content, take your time for keyword research, and optimize your site for search engines. All such factors create a reason for your target audience to come back to your site for more.