If you sell goods or services online, you likely have an e-commerce website. This website is the home of your products and services, but it is also the online “face†of your business and so you should optimise it so it can provide the best experience possible. However, for those who are not in the know about search engine optimisation, it can be a confusing process. When you are performing e-commerce SEO there are certain steps you will need to take.
Start by ensuring that your website can be called and indexed, be sure to use your business name or brand in the website title, and remember to have accurate meta descriptions and titles for all products. If this is a little too much to take in, below we give a simple checklist to follow.Â
Start With Your SEO Title
You might not think it means much, but page and product titles have a significant role to play in the success of your e-commerce SEO strategy. You will need to create a unique, interesting, and searchable title for each page that will keep the search engines and your consumers happy. The title should be fewer than 60 characters in length and should have proper keyword placements. This will help to improve your search engine rankings and online visibility.Â
Ensure Your Website Is Crawlable
Search engines have robots which crawl websites in order to understand their content and index them, which means that a necessary component of your e-commerce SEO strategy is to ensure that your website is crawlable. If your website cannot be crawled, it cannot be ranked, which means that your products cannot be ranked. Your site’s indexability, crawlability, speed, content, and schema must all be correctly set up.Â
Always Optimise Images
Having high-quality images on your website of your products is important to drive more traffic (especially due to how visual consumers are) but you must remember to also optimise these images by providing the correct alt-text (image description) and include keywords in this description. You must also reduce the size of all images as much as possible, so they load quickly on mobile devices and slower computers, and so they can be shown easily on Google search results.Â
Resolve All Errors
An e-commerce SEO strategy needs to address any and all issues, such as 404 errors, 301 redirects, empty meta descriptions, and titles that are too long or not using the correct wording. Search engines are not able to crawl these broken pages, which could lead to some content or products not being ranked by search engines or not being shown in results. Make sure to regularly audit your website to find these errors and fix them as soon as you can.Â
Improve Page Load Speed
An important SEO factor to consider for your ecommerce website is the page load speed, as this can have an impact on your search engine optimisation efforts. To improve your page load speed, you can reduce redirects, optimise images by compressing them, minifying HTTP requests, and deactivating unnecessary plugins. You will also need to improve the page load speed for mobile devices, as this is where many people will be browsing your e-commerce website.Â
Make It Mobile-First
For almost 90 percent of websites now, Google is now using mobile-first indexing to rank the website based on the content of your mobile website instead of your desktop version. You will need to include mobile-first optimisation in your e-commerce SEO strategy and ensure that you have visible, detailed content on your mobile website in order to rank on search engines. Ask your website development company to build you a responsive e-commerce website in order to achieve these goals.Â
Keep Site Structure Simple
In order to boost your SEO efforts and make sure there are no issues, you should keep your website structure simple, for both search engines and consumers. You should implement internal linking between related products, have an intuitive buyer journey mapped out, and have the correct page names for each page. A simple site structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website.Â
Final Words
Having an e-commerce website means more than simply loading products. You need to optimise it by looking at SEO titles and ensuring they are the correct length, assessing the crawlability of your website, and correctly naming and compressing your images. You should also resolve all possible errors you have found, and try to improve the page load speed for all pages.Â
If you would like a professionally designed, developed, and optimised e-commerce website, speak to the NetMechanic team today to find out how we can help you.Â
