SEO Checklist for E-Commerce Companies to Drive More Traffic

The growth in smartphone usage, coupled with higher bandwidth speeds, has led to high growth in the e-commerce industry. It has led several entrepreneurs to have their online shops to increase their revenues. According to Statista, global online sales is slated to be 22% of all retail sales by 2023. Moreover, over 2.14 billion people would be making online purchases in 2021.

It is also necessary for e-commerce companies to understand that they must have a robust marketing plan to showcase their website. To ensure a higher rank for your website, you must carry out a series of activities regularly. These include building links to your ecommerce store, optimizing the content, improving the loading time, and using the right alt text. This article will discuss in detail a comprehensive e-commerce SEO checklist.

Responsive website

Google – the search engine of choice, has been using mobile-first indexing since July 2019. Most of the audience will be using their smartphones. It is necessary to ensure that the visitors on smartphones have a similar experience that they would have on a desktop. The search engines bots must find it easy to access and render the content.

You must ensure that the content is the same across the mobile and desktop site. The page load speed of the mobile site must be checked too. A responsive site improves the number of time visitors will stay on the site, leading to better conversions. Your search rankings are affected by the traffic on the site and positive reviews that require your site to be responsive.

Use an SSL certificate

As you have an e-commerce site, you must adhere to the PCI-DSS guidelines that require you to have proper security apparatus to prevent data breaches. Given that your website will store a vast amount of client information, you must install an SSL certificate. It is critical to point out that search engines prefer secure websites and provide some weightage during search results.

If you want your consumers’ highest security and trust on your e-commerce site, we suggest that you go for an EV SSL certificate. Moreover, web browsers also flag non-HTTPS sites as “Not Secure”. Such warnings can drive visitors away from your site.

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Decrease the page load time!

As an initial step, you must check the time being taken to load the website. How would you like it if you had to wait for a long time for the web page to load? You would move away from the site, right! Studies also correlate this behavior and show that sites that load within 5 seconds have 70% longer sessions. You can use free tools to check the website speed.

Some of the best ways to optimize site speed are reducing redirects and uploading videos from an external source. The other development resources like CAA, HTML and JavaScript must be minified too. If you are using a CMS, you must delete the unnecessary plug-ins. Always check the website speed regularly with free tools like GTMetrix, Google Pagespeed Insights, YSlow, etc.

Conduct keyword research!

When you try to search for information on the internet, you use specific search terms. Your audience will come across your website in the same way. As an e-commerce site, you must target your website’s transactional keywords and use them optimally across the website.

You must understand which keywords will be suitable for your business. The ones with the highest search volume may be highly competitive, and you may not have the necessary resources. You must know your limitations and have the right balance of long-tail and short-tail keywords. The competitiveness of each keyword must be considered too.

There are several keyword tools like Google Adwords Keyword Planner, Moz, Ahrefs, etc., to help you. You can also use specialized software to check the keywords being used by your competition.

Creating engaging content

One of the best ways to draw visitors to your site is to create related and engaging content. It is these breadcrumbs that will ensure you have a steady stream of visitors to your site. The site can use blogs to draw users to the site and ensure that the site’s workflows can help you embark with the visitors on the buyer’s journey.

The product pages must be optimized with the relevant keywords, and the product description must detail the benefits of the product. The icon of the cart must be visible too. Also, have the social sharing buttons on the site that will help you share the pages of their liking. The web pages must have good content to enhance the quality of the website.

Optimize the meta tags!

When you create title tags, most of you make the mistake of creating them only for search engines. The title can be understood easily by visitors to allow them to visit your site. The meta title of the page must include the primary keyword that is relevant to that web page. However, you must also prevent keyword stuffing in the meta tags to avoid being penalized by search engines.

It is essential to ensure that your images have a tag associated with them as well. The image tag helps search engines to understand more about the image. The H1 title is unique, and you can use the primary keyword. You must ensure that the URL of the page is short and can be understood by visitors and the search engine alike.

Using rich snippets

The latest SEO best practices suggest that you use structured data for your e-commerce site. A structured schema can help you provide additional information about the website. It can lead to higher conversion rates, better SERP results and lower bounce rates. Markup tags can be implemented too for your site to allow search engines to display your site better.

Some of the better ones that can be part of your eCommerce SEO checklist are the ratings and reviews on the product page results. The availability and the pricing are the other options available to you. It can also show the best products and special offers along with the events coming up in future. Using rich snippets will not show results immediately, but it may take a fortnight to deliver results.

Improved crawling and indexing

While there may be technicalities involved, search engines’ crawling and indexing are critical parts of SEO. You could have ranking issues during keyword search if the search engines are not crawling the site as desired. Proper checks must be done to ensure Google is indexing your site correctly. Always confirm the sitemap is in order as it acts as a map of your website for the search engines’ crawlers.

The site must be registered with Google Search Console, and your sitemap must be in XML format. The Search Console can help you identify any crawl errors. Any internal and external broken links must also be fixed. It can be found using the site audit report.

Setting up Google Analytics

Strategies can be created only if you have proper insights about the visitors coming to your website. It would be best to use Google Analytics and other similar websites to understand how visitors interact with your website. You must add a tracking code that will allow you to view data and have insights into the site traffic.

Other activities to be done.

Being an e-commerce site, you must spend equal attention on your social media pages. Pay attention to whether your website is connecting to the social media pages. Also, create directory listings for your website and enlist the site on Google My Business. The website must have a proper structure and the ideal workflows for more conversions.

Creating backlinks from other sites is also an effective way to build SEO juice. It helps to increase the trust and authority levels of your website for the search engine crawler. You can do guest blogs or take the help of an influencer to create backlinks. Also, look out for websites that link to your competition as they can provide you with some suggestions to start.

Conclusion

Your e-commerce store must adhere to the white-hat SEO practices to improve search rankings and hence eyeball share. It starts by ensuring that you install an EV SSL certificate to enthuse trust for your audience. You must have an eCommerce SEO checklist that will help you keep track of all your activities. We have discussed the actions that can help you to enhance your audience outreach.

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