Did you know that the popularity of shopping online has skyrocketed in recent years? In fact, by 2023, it is anticipated that the global e-commerce market will have grown by 8.9%, with sales reaching $5.9 trillion (a number so large that it defies imagination).
Even though the growth rate slowed significantly from 2021 to 2022, it increased by 1.8% 2022. However, this is probably attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic since everyone resorted to internet shopping during the lockdowns that ensued, driving e-commerce growth rates to 16.8% by 2021.
Having an online storefront isn’t enough; you also need a plan to get people to your site and make it visible in search engines like Google. The answer lies in the use of search engine optimization for online stores. Any online business that wants to attract and keep clients must have an effective eCommerce SEO strategy. Search engine optimization (SEO) for online shops is a collection of methods for raising a site’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs).
What Is E-Commerce SEO?
E-commerce search engine optimization refers to the process of improving an online shop’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engine optimization entails a wide range of activities, including keyword research, optimizing product images and descriptions, constructing high-quality backlinks, increasing site speed and user experience, etc. In a nutshell, eCommerce SEO improves a website’s prominence in search engine rankings, which boosts the probability that visit the site and buy something. By using eCommerce SEO strategies, websites can increase their traffic and, ultimately, their sales.
Why E-Commerce SEO is Important For Your Business?
E-commerce enterprises, if they want to keep drawing in clients, need to give their full attention to search engine optimization (SEO). The risks of not having a plan or having a poor plan are fairly obvious; for example, the UBS predicts that between 40,000 and 50,000 U.S. retail stores will close within the next five years, a number that is down from the initial prediction of 80,000 stores but is still high.
This is the case even if the predicted rise in eCommerce sales from these stores from 2021-2026 is 18%. Why do you require an SEO strategy if online sales won’t be an issue?
The explanation is that competition will be strong since these stores will eventually abandon traditional storefronts in favor of an online presence. If your company is like one of these:
⦁ Clothing and jewelry
⦁ Home appliance and furnishing
⦁ Consumer electronics industries
If that happens, you may expect to see more competition everywhere, but especially online and in markets where shoppers are picking and choosing what they spend their money on. A major decline in sales, clients, and overall profitability is a real possibility if you don’t have a strategy or if you implement a bad plan.
Latest e-commerce SEO Strategies to Increase Your Sales
Here is a best practices checklist for your eCommerce SEO plan to make sure you don’t miss a thing:
Optimize Product Page
⦁ All of the product pages should focus on a single high-paying keyword.
⦁ Maintain a consistent and reasonable text structure across all of your product pages.
⦁ The page’s headings should be formatted as follows: H1 for the page’s title, H2 for sections, H3 for subsections, and paragraph content for the rest.
⦁ There should not be a single typo or grammatical error on any of your product pages.
Make Sure Your Product Images Have Alt Text
⦁ Add an alt tag on every image on every product page. This text should serve to describe the image, but the main keyword and its variants can also be included if desired.
⦁ The current recommendations for web accessibility should be used when marking up alt text.
⦁ If you want your alt text to have the greatest impact, you should be as specific as possible without sounding robotic.
Create Compelling Titles and Descriptions
⦁ There should be no more than 60 characters (including spaces and punctuation) in meta titles. If your title tag is too long, it will be truncated in Google’s search results.
⦁ If you want your meta description to look good in mobile and desktop search results, keep it around 160 characters. Meta descriptions can be longer or shorter than what you provided, or even completely different, due to Google’s dynamic adjustments based on the term used to search.
⦁ Each page’s meta title and meta description should emphasize the page’s primary keyword.
Take Page Load Time into Account
⦁ In order to keep visitors, your loading speed should be good on desktop as well as mobile browsers.
⦁ A website’s page rank can suffer if it waits a long time to load.
PageSpeed Insights can be used by web developers to evaluate a page’s loading speed. A satisfactory score is achieved if the loading time of the page is less than 2.5 seconds.
Go For A Mobile-Friendly Site
⦁ As of the beginning of the quarter of 2023, 58.3% of total website traffic was generated from mobiles. So, it is important that your site be mobile-friendly.
⦁ Mobile-friendliness is now a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. Reduced site rank due to site slowness.
⦁ If you want to know if your site is optimized for mobile users, Google offers a free smartphone-friendly site test tool.
Stability of Your URL Structure
⦁ Websites with well-organized URLs are easier for Google to crawl, resulting in a more complete index. Due to a lack of proper URL structure, websites may go unnoticed or be falsely identified as duplicates. eCommerce sites, which may contain thousands of pages, benefit greatly from well-organized URIs.
⦁ Simple URLs attract more users because they are easier for people to remember and use.
⦁ If your website is well-structured, you may make sure that each page is optimized for a different keyword.
Hire Professional Help
⦁ It has been proven that seeking professional help can speed up the optimization of your e-commerce business regardless of your niche.
⦁ You can also take a step to look for a professional like FalconSEO, who has a team of experts working on global businesses and ranking them on top.
This will not only take your business to new heights but also be time efficient. So, visit FalconSEO’s website and initiate the conversation!