Ecommerce SEO for your Online Store

Ecommerce sites and marketplaces are one of the best ways to sell your products online. Whether you’re selling directly to customers, or through a third-party platform like Amazon or eBay, ecommerce is an effective way for businesses to reach new audiences. Unfortunately, many ecommerce sites fail to attract visitors, let alone drive sales. This is because most ecommerce stores focus on their products rather than their visitors. Without a solid ecommerce SEO strategy that takes into account user intent and other search engines, your store will have a hard time attracting visitors and getting them to buy your products. In this blog post, we’ll go over some of the most important aspects of ecommerce SEO that you need to keep in mind if you want your store to succeed.

Why Does Ecommerce SEO Matter?

The first question on everyone’s mind when discussing ecommerce SEO is: why does it matter? The short answer is that online shopping is growing every year, and ecommerce stores are trying to get a piece of the pie. Over the last few years, ecommerce has gone from being a small part of the overall retail market to a significant part of it. According to statistics from eMarketer, ecommerce sales are projected to grow to $4,000,000,000,000 by 2022! That’s a lot of money, and a lot of business for ecommerce stores. What’s more, Amazon alone is projected to account for more than half of that ecommerce revenue in 2022. In other words, ecommerce is big business, and it’s only getting bigger.

Product Pages Are Still One of the Most Important Elements in SEO

Many ecommerce stores have moved away from product-focused pages and towards category-focused pages. The logic behind this is that customers usually visit a given product category by browsing for products like theirs. For example, if you’re looking for a coffee machine, you might browse for coffee machines under the ‘home and garden’ category. You wouldn’t likely type ‘coffee machine’ into the search bar. This has led many ecommerce stores to abandon product pages completely. Instead, they’ve opted to write category-focused pages that include products, along with their prices and other relevant details. However, this is a mistake: product pages are still one of the most important parts of SEO. What’s more, product pages can actually help create category-focused pages. For example, if you’re writing a product page for a coffee machine, you could include information related to how much it costs, where it can be used, general features, etc. This information could easily be reused on a category-focused page.

Managing User Expectation With Good Copywriting

Copywriting is an often-overlooked part of SEO for ecommerce stores. With many ecommerce stores creating category-focused pages and moving away from product pages, it’s easy to forget about the importance of copywriting. However, good copywriting can go a long way in managing your user’s expectations. In other words, if you can manage to make your customers expect to find the information they’re looking for on your pages, you’re already off to a good start. For example, let’s say that a customer is looking for espresso machines. If you’re selling espresso machines on your ecommerce store, you must write your product pages in a way that lets the customer know they’re in the right place. This could be as simple as including keywords related to espresso machines on your product pages, but it also means knowing what a potential customer is looking for. If your potential customers are looking for espresso machines that are easy to clean, it’s important that you include that information on your product pages.

Keywords and Product Descriptions

Keywords are an important part of SEO for any site. However, with many ecommerce stores opting to write category-focused pages, keywords are often forgotten. However, this is an easy mistake to make. After all, product pages used to be the place where keywords resided. Now, they’ve been moved to category-focused pages; where do keywords go if they’re not on product pages anymore? Well, they can go anywhere. However, many ecommerce stores opt to use the product description area as a place to put keywords. This is an easy mistake to make, but it’s also a mistake that can be easily fixed. Instead of shoving keywords into your product descriptions, try to focus on your customers. What do they need? What do they want? What problems do they have? These are the questions you should be asking if you want to optimize your product descriptions with keywords.

Shopping Cart Awareness With Browsing Awareness

One of the most important aspects of SEO for ecommerce stores is boosting shopping cart awareness. This means that you want to make sure that potential customers know where to go once they’ve browsed your products and that they know how to add products to their cart. This could mean using clear and prominent call-to-actions on your product pages that let customers know they can add the product they’re looking at to their cart. It could also mean making sure that your cart page is optimized. This includes pages like your cart summary and your cart contents. It also includes other features like one-click checkout, shopping basket notifications, and more.

Summary

Ecommerce SEO is very different from regular SEO. Instead of focusing on keywords and links, you need to focus on usability and user experience. This means that you need to make sure that your ecommerce store is easy to navigate, that it loads quickly, and that it is designed to answer your potential customers’ questions. A poorly designed ecommerce store will turn away potential customers. With a few adjustments to your ecommerce store and SEO strategy, you can make sure that your store is getting enough customers to stay afloat.