8 Best Ways to Audit and Improve Your Ecommerce Website’s SEO
According to a recent study, almost one-third of eCommerce traffic comes from organic searches worldwide. This means if your eCommerce website isn’t optimized for SEO, you might be losing out on a substantial fraction of your potential traffic. Even though a few SEO elements are not entirely within your control, there are still several things you can do to enhance your site’s SEO.
This blog will discuss eight ways for auditing and improving your eCommerce website’s SEO. So, without wasting another second, let’s dive straight into the details.
- Using Canonical Tags in Your Filtered Pages
Most eCommerce websites have their products filtered according to different categories such as size, fit, color, etc.
In case your eCommerce site has too many filtered pages, you should place canonical tags on those pages in order to avoid duplicate content.
If your website has duplicate content, ranking your page in search results can become a challenge for you since your own pages will end up competing against each other to acquire the top spot in the SERPs.
When you use canonical tags in your filtered pages, you inform the web crawler that this is the primary page you want to rank in the search results.
Doing so not only helps you avoid the problem of duplicate content but also duplicate Google penalties.
- Optimize Meta Description for Each Page
Do all your web pages have unique meta descriptions?
Having a unique and relevant meta description for all of your web pages improves the chances of users clicking on your URL.
We all know that Google treats CTR (click-through rate) as a crucial ranking factor, which means if you don’t optimize your meta descriptions for every page, you are actually putting your SEO rankings at risk.
Nevertheless, if your eCommerce website has tons of pages, putting this step into practice might come across as a significant challenge to you. In such cases, preferably, you should start by optimizing meta descriptions for those web pages that are generating the most revenue and then go down in descending order.
- Keyword Placement
You should strictly refrain from stuffing your web pages with target keywords, but you might want to incorporate them strategically throughout your page to inform the search engine about the keywords you’re targeting.
The best practice is to place some of your target keywords in the title, URL, description, and alt image text.
- Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb navigation helps users navigate through a website seamlessly and also helps sort your website in a well-structured way.
Moreover, breadcrumbs not just simplify things for your site visitors but also makes it easier for the web crawlers to understand your pages better, which might also help improve your page’s rankings in the SERPs.
Additionally, when you do this, you will notice that Google is displaying your breadcrumbs trails in place of the permalink of your page in the search results page, which is yet another sign that the search engine itself gives prominence to breadcrumbs for SEO.
However, while implementing this type of navigation, you don’t have to make things overly complicated. All you need to do is stick to good practice standards like utilizing breadcrumb trails only when it seems logical to do so and moving from the highest to the lowest level.
- Optimize Your Ecommerce Website for Sitelinks
Sometimes while browsing the internet, you must have encountered a search result with a couple of links displayed below it. These are called sitelinks, which are intended to help the visitors navigate the particular website smoothly.
However, Google clearly states that if your site structure enables the search engine’s algorithm to find good sitelinks, only then will they show sitelinks for your search results to help visitors find what they are searching for quickly and thus save them some time.
That said, it is evident that sitelinks can help boost your CTR while helping the visitors navigate to your pages relevant to their interest quickly.
In addition to all this, sitelinks also increases your website’s credibility since Google does not display sitelinks for a site that is not reliable or well optimized.
So, if the search engine giant itself trusts your site enough to let it take up such a broad space in the SERPs, you can kind of consider it as a green light from Google.
Or at least, you can presume that Google does not consider your website as dodgy or unreliable.
Even though it isn’t entirely in your hands to decide whether or not the sitelinks appear for your eCommerce website, you can indeed take the following steps to improve your odds for the same.
- Implement breadcrumb navigation
- Add a sitelink search box
- Structure your site appropriately
- Make sure your internal links use anchor text
- Do Your Product Pages Have Reviews?
Having reviews on your product pages can be beneficial for your eCommerce website in numerous ways.
First things first, reviews provide vital information to users and, therefore, helps them in making better-informed buying decisions.
Moreover, your web page can display a star rating in the SERPs, which will distinguish your search result from the others and thus, increase your click-through rate.
You may also want to take a look at the documentation from Google Search Central to understand the best ways to structure your page in order to maximize the probabilities of your site showing review snippets in the SERPs.
- Website Speed Optimization
Being an eCommerce website owner, chances are that you have already heard of how crucial it is to optimize your site speed.
However, with Google’s announcement regarding the page loading speed becoming a ranking factor in the upcoming months, it has become more vital now than ever to optimize your site speed as early as possible.
If reports are to be believed, more than 80% of eCommerce websites don’t satisfy the page experience standards laid out by Google.
Although if we look at the bright side of the situation, this can be a golden opportunity for you to win a competitive edge over others by improving your page experience and meeting those standards.
Here a few measures you can take to increase your page speed:
- Choose the right hosting service
- Implement lazy loading so that the images only load when the visitors scroll down the page
- Discard large components on your page
Google’s PageSpeed Insights can help you find out what large components are slowing down your page’s loading speed.
- Do You Have Informative Content on Your Website?
Last but not least, it is always a smart idea to create blogs around keywords your target users are looking up.
As per a recent study conducted in the US, a good majority of customers agreed that they feel more confident about buying products online from the recommendations they read in blog posts.
Furthermore, it is no secret that blogs work like a charm when it comes to driving organic traffic to your site. Therefore, it is crystal-clear that blogging for your eCommerce website can do wonders for your business in numerous ways, including:
- Establish trust with your target audience by offering valuable content
- Position your brand as a thought leader and expert in your industry by publishing informational content regularly
- Original, relevant, and high-quality blog content on your website will boost your SEO ranking
Nevertheless, you must understand that a blog you posted today, no matter how great it is, will not start yielding significant results from tomorrow. Think of blogging as a long-term investment that will gradually help your eCommerce website drive more traffic, build authority, and gain the trust of your loyal audience in your niche or industry in the long run. Even though it takes some time, the end results will be worth all the effort and wait.
Wrapping It Up
Improving your eCommerce website’s SEO is seldom an easy and quick process ever. And this becomes all the more so true when your site has hundreds and thousands of pages that need optimization. In such a case, this might seem a bit of a struggle. The wisest thing to do here is to start by optimizing your top-performing pages that generate the most revenue and traffic at the moment and then, as your time and efforts permit, move down in the order. While your SEO efforts won’t yield results immediately, you will be glad you did it when they start doing so. So don’t wait any longer. Go ahead, keep the tips discussed above in mind and start optimizing your pages right away.