June 04, 2021
If you have an e-commerce website for your business, its success rides on almost every aspect if this online store and its functioningthat includes number of purchases, reviews and even things like visitor count (number of users visiting or opening and viewing your website) and bounce rate (number of visitors leaving your website without purchases or doing any call to action).
To make it successful, it is important to keep bringing in more and more visitors. With more visitors, the chances of bouncing and leaving increase too, but do the probabilities of successful purchases and positive reviews. To cut down the negatives, you will obviously need to consider working on impressing them with your brand’s features, offers and so on.
Firstly, to bring in site visitors, the website needs to rankand appear on top in search engine results, (or at least in the first page of results) without which the chances of drawing in any prospects are slim. Many internet users bank on only the results that appear on the first page of search results, and more so when it is an e-commerce store, as these results are touted to be the most accurate as well as best recommended by the trusted search engines.
To rank your e-commerce on top of search engines, some SEO-best practices need to be followed. These are as follows:
1. Use the right keywords
It is important to use the primarywords and phrases related to your business that searchers might enter into search engines, so that when they search about it, your website will be among the ones suggested by the search engine. Also, take care to keep your product information always updated. This would not only be valuable for the shoppers, but can help include more keywords on your page and improve the website’s rankings.
2. Avoid complicated URLs
The address or link using which your website can be accessed on the web is called a URL. It can contain the brand name, page name, etc along with www and followed by .com/net/org and so on.
SEO standards have suggested that URL needs to be very clear and non-cluttered, and contain keywords relevant to the content on the corresponding page.
Cluttered URLs (something like) -http://www.nameofwebsite.com/xyz?=4y27/product?=788899/main.com
cannot be understood easily by search engines, and create confusion.
The URL needs to be clear like this – http://www. nameofwebsite.com/main-page-name/sub-page-name.com
If such a link is sent to someone they may even understand it better than a cluttered URL and it could create a sort of comfort instantly.
3. Avoid duplicate content
It is always good practice to include as much information as possible about products on your e-commerce store, and avoid duplicating any product descriptions from other sources.
And if your store sells retail products instead of your own, and you sell products produced by other companies online, you probably received product descriptions directly from the manufacturer.
Search engine algorithms are being designed to penalize more and more (e-commerce) websites for duplicating product copies. So, to avoid affecting your website’s rankings, you need to create unique descriptions for all products. This can be time-consuming and somewhat difficult – especially if number of products are too many – but it can help with your search engine ranking and also set you apart from your competitors.
4. Make content SEO friendly but user-friendly too
To make the product information relevant to both shoppers and search engines, you need make sure the necessary details (like sizes, measurements, colours, prices, etc) are easy to find andread. If your website visitors are from various differentregions ion the world, you could also think about including measurements in standard, metric, or other relevant scales.
All these steps can ensure that more and more people visit your web site. And to keep them from bouncing off or quitting immediately once they visit the page you will have to work on improving your website design if required, and modifying or working on better content and including other things that will pique their interest. But before you get on this, it is crucial to make sure you have done all the aforementioned SEO steps correctly, so that you become easily and clearly visible to all your target audience.