In such a crowded online market, the importance of SEO in 2022 is an absolute no-brainer! Businesses are starting to understand how much organic traffic and revenue is available to their businesses, but there are different types of online businesses with different goals. For ecommerce businesses, the idea is to improve your visibility to improve the volume of intent-driven customers to the website so that you can make more conversions and improve your organic revenue. So the question still stands – what is an ecommerce SEO strategy and how does it differ from typical SEO?
What Makes Ecommerce SEO Different?
Ecommerce SEO is fundamentally similar to typical SEO strategies, but it has a few more specific techniques to target retail customers and assists them in purchasing your products. Ecommerce SEO focuses more on category pages, product pages, product images and rich snippets using schema code to highlight online reviews.
Unlike Ecommerce SEO, typical SEO is for lead generation and service based websites and you can find out some benefits of SEO in some of our other articles.
Some of the fundamentals in Ecommerce SEO also include:
- Navigation
- Internal Links
- Avoiding Clutter
- Creating Unique Content
- Including On Page Optimisations
- Specific Keyword Research
So if you were to reach out to an ecommerce SEO agency or provider, what areas should you be focusing on for ecommerce SEO?
Optimise for Products and Categories, Not Keywords
With traditional service websites, your SEO strategy might focus on optimising your website and creating content around specific keywords. For example, a plumber might try to optimise their website for searches like “leaky pipe repairs” or “plumbing services australia”.
While this approach works for service based websites, it isn’t relevant for an ecommerce website and would do little to nothing to improve keyword rankings. Don’t get us wrong, ranking for high volume, general search terms like “online hat shop” is great, but it is also very important to target your products and categories that have high intent and will end up in a conversions. You could dedicate your resources to spend time propping up your rankings for keyword clusters around your product offering to ensure you produce the best possible SEO results.
Basically, this means getting specific – for eCommerce SEO, that means optimising for the specific products and categories you offer. Optimising for specific products and product categories is the key when creating SEO strategies for eCommerce websites as it is way more time-efficient, but a lot of potential buyers are Googling for specific things they’re looking to buy, typing in specific products or product categories.
You want your site to be optimised for these searches!
Content Marketing Is Still Key
Content marketing is at the heart of many modern SEO strategies. And that includes eCommerce SEO as well.
Just like any other website, an ongoing stream of high-quality, original, and most importantly, optimised content is the key to getting your site to rank higher. Good content:
- Improves your credibility and domain authority
- Increases the number of potential landing pages
- Helps you rank for the search terms you want to be found for
Many eCommerce SEO tutorials focus on things like optimising product descriptions and updating your meta tags. While they are important and essential on page factors for your website to rank, many eCommerce businesses end up overlooking the power that content marketing and the copy on their website.
This in turn gives eCommerce businesses that do use content marketing within their ecommerce SEO service a massive advantage.
Think About What Your Customers Want To Know
Most Ecommerce sites have listings for each of their products, complete with pictures as well as specs and features. A lot of them stop there. The thing is, product information isn’t the only type of information customers are looking for.
Say you run an online store that sells hair products. Naturally, a lot of your customers are going to be searching for specific types of products – however, that isn’t all. Whether it’s how to use specific products, styling tips or advice for how to deal with certain types of hair, it’s important to also consider what your customers want to know when you perform keyword research.
While it’s important to optimise for specific items and product categories, it’s equally important that you optimise your website to give potential customers the information that they want. Think outside the box and provide unique and valuable content within your content marketing, provide top notch links and make your website as desirable as possible to your end user.
All of the above is a good starting point for understanding your ecommerce SEO strategy and building on this can help your ecommerce business become more profitable in the future.
If you need help with your ecommerce SEO strategy, you can contact us today to discuss more!
