GUIDE TO BUILDING SEO FRIENDLY E-COMMERCE WEBSITE IN 2020

What people usually do when they need to find some information? Of course, they google it. The same goes for online shopping. When someone wants to buy or just compare prices for a certain product, Internet users simply open their devices to find necessary items online.

Although you can now hardly find a person, who doesn’t have a computer or a laptop, people still use mobile devices more often. Thus, 93% of all internet activity starts with a search query. This number is for you if you doubt the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) for your website.

Why SEO matters for eCommerce websites

Before we move on, let’s come to grips with what SEO really is and why you should bother to implement it. Search Engine Optimization is increasing the website traffic by improving the ranking in a web search engine. It is achieved by implementing the keywords to match the customers’ search queries. In terms of eCommerce, SEO involves writing detailed, clear and relatable product descriptions with big attractive images and clients’ reviews to make the buying decisions easier.

The competition in the e-commerce industry is incredibly tough. Considering this fact, it is close to impossible to reach the highest rankings on Google or whatever search engine people use. Let us be clear, the absence of SEO may result in the absence of website visibility.

Statistics related to responsive and SEO friendly e-commerce websites

Our e-commerce development team has collected some figures you need to see before building your SEO strategy.

• About three out of four queries stop within the first page of search engine results.
• 79% of mobile devices users have bought something online using their smartphone in the last half a year.
• Nearly 40% of all eCommerce purchases during the holiday season were made via mobile devices.
• 83% of smartphone users highlight the importance of a seamless experience across various devices.

As you can see, mobile-friendly e-commerce websites are more likely to rank higher, as the customers prefer them to non-responsive sites.

Common SEO mistakes and challenges for e-commerce websites

You should bear in mind that SEO optimization of e-commerce websites is a task more difficult compared to blogs or corporate websites with a couple of pages. This is due to a big number of product pages in e-store may become a bottleneck for a successful search engine optimization.

For instance, the absence of product reviews may distract the customers on the grounds that nearly 70% of online shoppers read and believe product rankings from people, who have already bought an item. Lack of precise product description may lead to placing your website at the bottom of search results. Another mistake e-commerce business owners sometimes make is not considering the search demand while optimizing product pages, or using non-unique titles.

The essential elements of SEO-friendly sites

Here is a list of the common features that distinguish an SEO-friendly site. We recommend you to keep them in view when working on optimizing your website.

Meta descriptions and title tags tell search engines and users what your site is about. For making these two features work and attract more clicks, provide a concise and clear description of the site content, integrating the main keywords.

XML sitemap creation is of utmost importance in the view that it keeps the search engines up to date on all of your published pages.

SEO friendly URLs that are easy to locate can bring more customers to your e-shop.

Header tags, better used in the titles, point the search engines to a certain part of the text on the webpage to read first.

Steps to building an SEO friendly e-commerce website

1.Select the right CMS Platform

Here are some of the essential built-in features a good e-commerce platform should contain together with SEO-features: payment gateways integration, design and customization options, security properties, content management, online documents, and support.

2. Pick Reliable hosting & Trust Factors

In case you’re not a large site with a great number of pages and huge traffic figures, plenty of hosts will be good for you. It’s 2019, with the technical development we have now, hosting technology, performance, and site speed are on the high level and continue to improve.

3.Think of the Right Site architecture

You may ask why the organization and elements arrangement are important for e-commerce website SEO optimization. The response is simple – if it is easy for users and search engines to find all the pages of your website, you will get more clicks. The golden formula includes two main rules: keeping things simple plus keeping every page three (or less) clicks from your homepage.

4.Implement On-Page & Technical SEO

On-page SEO is mostly related to keyword usage. As for the technical SEO, it means the number of internal and external links on the webpage, page load speed, and page URL structure.

5. Make it all Mobile Friendly

Optimization for all devices enables access to a bigger number of target customers. Besides, search engines like Google prefer responsive design over separate mobile versions as the latter use different URLs and HTML.

Most SEO- friendly eCommerce platforms

While choosing the right e-commerce platform, we recommend you to consider to what extent it is compliant with SEO-standards.
We came up with four examples, outlining their SEO-friendliness.

WooCommerce’s ace in the hole is its high customization. Moreover, it is easily compatible with numerous WordPress SEO plugins, including Yoast SEO, All in one SEO pack, Google XML Sitemaps, and others.

Magento offers a variety of useful SEO features out of the box. Being the third popular eCommerce platform, Magento has a big community to share problems and find solutions. Advanced SEO Suite by Mirasvit, SEO Suite Ultimate, and Magento SEO Suite Pro extension v9.5.2 are among the most popular Magento SEO extensions.

A cloud-based platform Shopify was initially created for small online stores. But now large businesses can also use its benefits. Shopify offers a number of SEO-related Apps like Plug in SEO, Smart SEO, SEO Image Optimizer, etc.

Another cloud-based eCommerce platform BigCommerce has also SEO-features built-in. You can find Bigcommerce’s own app marketplace if you need additional SEO features included.

Tips on developing SEO-compliant eCommerce websites

Make a Research

There are three main ways of conducting keyword research. You may use Amazon search suggestions. It will help you to find out what people are usually interested in. Another variant is competitive research. Yes, you have to visit your competitors’ websites and look for the relevant keyword there. Pick the most frequent for your own e-store. And the third possible way is to use a specific tool, like Ahrefs that will define the appropriate keywords for you.

Choose Relevant Keywords

Right keywords choice is a halfway to successful SEO-friendly business, isn’t it? But how to know which words to use? Here are some of the tips. A lot of e-business owners focus on the keywords in the website context, disregarding other vital areas like title, description and alt tag. These should be taken to account to attract more clicks and visitors to your webpage.

Optimize All of Your Content

It is important to bear in mind that the quantity of the context on your web pages should be sufficient for improving the visibility for search engines. In addition, all the text (even that, included in “About us” or “Shopping cart” tabs) should contain keywords.

Clear Navigation

We have already discussed beneficial how it is for your business that the customers can easily use the website and search engines crawl it. You may use internal links for faster and more convenient navigation among different pages on your websites.

Ensure Your Site is Mobile Friendly

Yes, that should never be forgotten – if your website is not responsible, the chances are you will lose a huge amount of mobile users (whose share in the general traffic is more than a half, be the way). Take care of the load speed on different devices.

Final words

You need to realize that even following these steps cannot put your e-commerce website in the first place of Google ranking. However, it will positively impact visibility and definitely increase traffic. So many features to consider, starting from keywords choice and up to mobile optimization. The implementing of SEO may be a bit more difficult in practice, and SapientPro team can gladly give you a helping hand. Contact us to get more information, professional consultation or just to discuss the ideas you have.