Ecommerce Search Engine Optimisation Basics

So you want to understand the fundamentals of the Google algorithm, and get your company at the top of the Google search results, in the best position possible to target your customers with your online ads, and grow your small business to the moon?

Well let’s get into some important, time dependent, SEO tips, including user experience, mobile first, video, blogs, and more.

Keyword Research for Ecommerce

Understanding your target market will help you brainstorm ideas as to what they might search for. This can help you form a master keyword list to start digging into.

From there you can merge your list with what your competitor’s pages rank for in Google, and you can do this by adding the url into Ahrefs or a similar keyword research tool.

Once you have your keywords, you want to use proper keyword mapping to decide if they should be assigned to a product page, category page, blog page, local landing page, etc.

On-Page SEO for Ecommerce

Proper on-page SEO is essential to ranking in Google, and without it you won’t rank for anything meaningful. The most important elements for on-page SEO are:

1. Page Title / Web Page Meta Title – this is the text that displays as the big blue link in search engines, and displays at the top of your browser window.
2. URL – this is the text string after the website name, and multiple words should be connected with dashes, like: seo-consultant-uk
3. H1 / Header – this is the main title on the page itself, and tells Google the topic of the page.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

The search engine results pages (SERPs) have changes a lot over the last few years, with a number of rich features of different formats now occupying really important real estate. The Video carousels, news carousels (for AMP pages), Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, and Knowledge Panels, offer websites new and exciting ways of getting their content in front of users.

Blogs for Ecommerce

Blogging is a great way to increase the traffic of your website, but only if you pick the right keywords to blog about, and you structure your site in such as way that it doesn’t create meaningless content that gets you penalised by the Panda algorithm.

The key here is to answer the users question or need, and then offer the logical next step (ideally through your website).

Ecommerce SEO Best Practices – User Experience

SEO best practices involve, at the core, thinking about what the user really wants (User Experience Analysis). This is because Google’s #1 goal is to satisfy the searcher, and so if you do this with all of your website pages, you will be setup for success moving forward, no matter what Google algorithm update comes you way.

Link Building for Ecommerce

Link building is still a core part of SEO, and is widely regarded as the most important ranking factor by multiple external sources. Links should be relevant to the site they’re going to, ie if you sell mobile phones, a logical link would be from a blog about mobile apps or new mobile devices.

The best way to acquire good links is to produce interesting and newsworthy current affairs content connected with your industry, and bloggers are always after new information, and if it’s unique enough it should get coverage.

Other Online Marketing for Ecommerce

There are lots of other forms of online marketing and digital marketing that a company can do to generate traffic to their website or offer page.

Social Media Marketing for Ecommerce

Social media marketing on websites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can help to generate visitors quickly, and cheaply. Paid social media advertising is one of the fastest ways companies can test their offer to their target market. Organic reach has lowered for most platforms, making paid advertising the only viable way to generate traffic from social media.

Email Marketing for Ecommerce

Email marketing can help to generate extra revenue from new and potential customers. Open rates are lower than they used to be, but you can still generate good results if you nurture your list well with relevant and useful information.

Pay Per Click Advertising for Ecommerce

Pay per click advertising is a bidding system where you pay for a click from a potential customer. Google Adwords is the most prominent platform for bidding on keywords.

Video Marketing for Ecommerce

Video marketing helps to engage customers who may otherwise ignore your message. Video generates much better engagement rates, and can help to explain complicated topics more simply. Youtube is the main platform for online video, which also offers SEO value.

Digital Marketing Analysis Reports for Ecommerce Websites

I can offer full digital marketing analysis reports to help you understand how your competitors are marketing their companies online, where the gaps are, where you should avoid, and which publications your target markets are present on.

For more information on this you can contact me.

SEO Tips for Ecommerce

SEO tips are easy to come by, and they can be useful to help you get started. However some tips, without context, can actually make your website worse if not implemented correctly.

Mobile SEO – Mobile First Indexing

Now Google uses a mobile first index, the mobile version of your ecommerce website should have all of the on page optimisation signals that your desktop version does, otherwise Google will ignore them.

Why not hire an Ecommerce SEO company / marketing agency?

As an SEO expert, I can offer you better value for money than a large company or agency, as I don’t have the same overheads such as large offices, lots of staff, payroll, enterprise management software, etc.

This means that more of your money is spend on the actual SEO work, and so you generate better results, faster. It also makes me more agile, as I can adapt my processes as I go, to keep on top of Google algorithm changes. By working personally with so many websites, I have hands on knowledge of exactly what goes on during SEO projects.