eCommerce SEO: 10 Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Store

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves incorporating techniques for making your website and content more appealing to Google (and other search engines), so they rank your web page(s) higher to be more accessible to prospective visitors. Improving your eCommerce SEO strategy will help increase organic traffic to your store. Couple these SEO tips with a solid CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategy, and you should see a substantial increase in sales.

Improve your eCommerce SEO with these tips, or develop an effective, long-term plan with professional help from an eCommerce SEO agency.  

1. Use The Right Keywords 

Including specific keywords throughout your website is a crucial part of any website’s SEO. Keywords should be included in title tags, meta descriptions, image alt texts, and product descriptions. Consider that a bonus tip–every page should have a title tag and meta description, every image a keyword-relevant file name and alt text, and every product a unique, targeted description.

Be thoughtful about which keywords you use. Conduct a keyword search to find out what people are searching for, and don’t be afraid to get specific, especially in product descriptions. There are various types of keywords, and you should try to target all of them where it makes sense:

• Product defining keywords
• Customer defining keywords
• Long-tail keywords
• Short-tail keywords
• Keywords targeting a location 
• Intent targeted keywords
• Short-term keywords
• Long-term keywords

2. Optimize Product Images

It is important to include accurate, relevant, high-quality images for all of your products to help entice potential buyers. The challenge is making sure your image is high-resolution while keeping the file size small enough to not interfere with your website’s loading times–ideally under 100 KB if possible.

It’s also important to add keyword-rich file names and alt-text to every image. This will alert Google to the subject matter of the image and improve your page’s ranking. 

3. Improve Your Site Architecture

Your store needs to be super easy to navigate. Almost as importantly, you should have a clear path of links from your store’s homepage to your product pages. Customers should ideally be able to reach a product in three clicks or less. This not only makes it easy for customers to reach the product they are looking for, but it also helps Google find all of your relevant pages. 

You should also make sure all of your pages are secure. Google’s crawlers prefer HTTPS web pages to HTTP pages, and it makes visitors more trusting of your site when they know their data is being transferred securely.

4. Make Sure Your Site is Optimized for Mobile Searches

56% of web traffic takes place on mobile devices. Since 2019, Google has been using mobile-first indexing, meaning the mobile version of your website gets crawled first. If you don’t plan to optimize your website for mobile browsing, you might as well neglect all of these eCommerce SEO tips altogether. 

Check your website on mobile to ensure everything looks correct and that all the information is the same as the desktop version. Look for things like:

• Image positioning and formatting
• Text legibility
• Mobile loading times
• On-page ads or banners that don’t work on mobile 

5. Fix Your URLs

The structure of your URLs might not matter much to your customers, but it does to search engine crawlers. Having clear, concise URLs for every page will help search engines know what the page is about, making it easier to index. 

Adding a keyword to your URL helps your ranking even more. A good URL should look something like this:

wesellshoes.com/running-shoes/brand-product-name-womens-running-shoe

6. Avoid Duplicate Content 

This goes hand-in-hand with including relevant, well-researched keywords as part of your on-page SEO. It can be tempting to copy and paste the same description for every product. However, creating unique, well-written content and product descriptions for every page will pay off in the long run. Plus, it allows you to target niche keywords specific to each product.

Duplicate content also messes with search engine indexing. The crawler won’t know which version to include or exclude in indices, ultimately harming both web pages.

7. Deal With Faceted URLs

Faceted navigation allows users to apply filters for various subcategories to narrow their search on product lists. This is a great tool for helping customers find what they are looking for, but it creates some SEO problems, namely, the issue of faceted URLs. 

When you apply multiple filters, you end up with thousands of unique URLs, which can get in the way of Google’s ability to find important pages, like subcategory pages. 

The easiest way to fix this issue is by adding a canonical link element to the <head> element of your web page, redirecting search engines toward a preferred URL when they crawl that web page. 

8. Links Matter

Take time to improve your website’s internal links and backlinks. Internal links connect pages within your website, while backlinks are links to your website from other sources. 

Include links between product pages, category pages, and blogs to help signal to Google which pages are important, and make an effort to get other websites to link back to your products, blogs, homepage, etc. 

You can get more backlinks by creating high-quality content, doing a guest spot on a podcast, or anything in between. Backlinks will help to make more people aware of your brand, and they will help improve your Google rankings if the links come from reputable sources.

9. Add Structured Data to Product Pages 

An easy way to improve your online store’s SEO is simply to add structured data to your web pages. Structured data provides information to search engines about a page and its content, making it easier to index. Here is a handy guide from Google offering instructions on how to add structured data to your website.  

10. Don’t Stop Tracking Results 

SEO isn’t a one-and-done protocol. You should consistently track your website’s analytics, implement A/B testing, and work towards improving weak points. Some important metrics to keep an eye on include the following:

• Volume of traffic
• Time spent on page
• Bounce rate 
• Keyword rankings
• Crawl errors

Generate More Traffic With an eCommerce SEO agency

If improving your eCommerce SEO strategy seems daunting and confusing, don’t stress. The key to a great SEO strategy is to continue tracking your progress and making changes as you go. But it’s important to remember that help is always available.

Consultus Digital is the leading eCommerce SEO agency in Toronto, Ontario. Our team of professional digital marketers can help you plan and implement an effective SEO strategy to increase traffic and meet your long-term goals. 
Get in touch to learn more about how our team can help you achieve long-last results.