10 SEO Tips for eCommerce Businesses

Once you’ve taken the time to build a great eCommerce site, you need to get it seen! SEO is one of the most effective ways of doing just that, but small eCommerce businesses often have a hard time getting started. Here are some tips to help:

Research Keywords Efficiently

Keywords are what crawlers look for to match search queries with high-quality results – you need to do keyword research to understand how many searches different keywords get per month and the competition for those keywords – check out a keyword planner to help.

Don’t Duplicate

If you have two versions of the same content on your site, search engines will penalize you, as duplicating is a practice that was part of black-hat SEO techniques. Make sure that your product descriptions are completely unique to your site – don’t just use the manufacturer’s copy.

Optimize Images

Your product pages should have images, and make sure you fill in an image’s ALT text with a description of the image, so you can drive traffic through image searches too.

Audit Your Site

An SEO audit analyzes how well your SEO is doing – it’s that simple. What’s more, companies like magecloud.agency offer audits for free. Make use of audits every few months to monitor your progress and performance.

Avoid Broken Links

Broken links are links that lead to a 404 error page and they are picked up by crawlers. Broken links can impact your rating, as they suggest that your site isn’t doing its due diligence properly; search engines therefore infer that it is less trustworthy, which is a key metric they use when choosing a site’s position on the SERP.

Improve Your Navigation

Improving your site’s navigation means making it clear and easy. You’ll find clear benefits in improving a site’s navigation on the user-side, but it’s also great for SEO, as it helps bots crawl your website. You should make it easy to find all the products you offer, so make sure everything is simple and clear and don’t forget your robots.txt!

Have you Looked at Title Tags?

Title tags are in your HTML – what you type in your H1 title will be the heading that displays itself on the SERP and will be what search engine users see. Keywords in your title tags are extra-important, so make sure they clearly outline the content of the page and explain what you offer.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions show up underneath the header on the SERP, so you shouldn’t undervalue their importance. The difference between a good and bad meta description will reveal itself in terms of click-through. Make sure your description is clear, convincing, and summed up in 160 characters max.

Site Speed

Site speed is really important: if your site is slow, searchers will click away from your site before looking at your product. This is monitored by search engines, which deduce that these sites offer limited value to their viewers and therefore feature them lower on the SERP.

Backlinks

Backlinks are created when a website links to your eCommerce site. They are great when they come from authoritative sources, as search engines detect that your site is providing quality content that provides so much value that other sites want to direct viewers there.