Retail and Ecommerce SEO Tips

No longer do we all do our shopping in supermarkets or down the high street, the landscape has changed massively over the last decade or two. Nowadays most of us will head online to one of the many ecommerce or online retail sites to make a purchase. If you run such a business then our SEO and PPC services for online retail and ecommerce can help. There are also various SEO tips which can improve your site’s power, performance and rankings.   

Research

Research is essential action for any ecommerce or online retailer to undertake before building up their SEO. There are two main areas which should be focused on to help create an effective strategy for your business.  

Keyword Targeting

Keywords are essential for improving search engine rankings and driving traffic to your ecommerce site. When researching keywords, consider their relevancy, search volume and ranking difficulty. For new businesses and SMEs, it is advisable to target long tail and local (where appropriate) keywords that aren’t too competitive. For common, high search volume phrases it will take a long time to begin ranking for these.  

Pick certain keywords for your home and product pages, avoiding multiple pages trying to rank for the same one. When creating the content, ensure these keywords are relevant to the brand or product and fit in naturally without engaging in keyword stuffing, as this can lead to search engines detecting such a tactic and ignoring your site.  

Competitors

Reviewing keywords, domain and page authorities of your competitors will provide a good idea of where you stand in the ecommerce market and what is achievable in the short and long term. Taking a look at their site, seeing what works well, the layout and more can give good inspiration for improving yours.  

Look at where their links are coming from by using Open Site Explorer or another similar tool to devise a strategy for getting similar and better links through outreach. It’s no good just copying though, think of ways to make your ecommerce or online retail site unique. 

Optimising Your Ecommerce Site

When you’ve done plenty of research and have a plan in place, there are certain ways you will need to optimise your site. In terms of the content you will need to insert the relevant keywords across various locations such as: 

• Every page title 
• H1 and further subheadings 
• Within the product description/blog post copy 

• Title tags and meta description 
• URLs 

With every one of these areas, it must still read naturally and the keywords should fit in without any issues. For meta descriptions, these need to be persuasive too and not too long, with between 150 and 160 the optimal length.  

To further optimise your site, focus on the site structure, internal linking and usability. The last one is especially important for ecommerce sites, as if customers find it hard to navigate and find what they are looking for they will go to one of your competitors. Make sure everything is clear and easy to use, testing it out before going live.   

Build Links Effectively

Natural links will occur if your ecommerce site is full of useful content, though it can take time. Link quality is important for improving your site’s performance and power, so seek these out, whether through blogger outreach, existing mentions or other strategies. It is important you monitor all links, as you can get penalised by Google should there be a lot of bad links pointing towards your site, so deal with these if many occur.  

Contact us here at WMG for further information and help creating a strong SEO strategy for your ecommerce or online retail business.