SEO Tips for Every Ecommerce Site

1. Check your robots.txt:- Your robots.txt file has the ability to completely stop all organic traffic arriving to your site. So use it with carefully.

2. Set up structured data on product pages:- You can include as Reviews/Rating, Stock data
Price (incl. Currency), Name of Seller and Condition of Product etc.

3. Tweak Your Meta Descriptions for Increased CTR:- However, they can play a massive role in your CTR – so don’t pass them up lightly.

4. Set up Google Webmaster Tools (And actually look at it):- If you haven’t already got WMT set up, do it now.

5. Add reviews to your product pages:- Reviews act as social proof to your potential customers to give more assurance that the product is for them. Retailers often question that negative reviews may decrease sales, in reality most negative reviews can actually help sales as they are often left by people who bought the wrong product for their needs in the first place.

6. Re-optimise the title tags of your category pages:- It is compulsory to optimize your title according to your category pages. Focus to your main keywords in title tags.

7. Subscribe to key blogs to keep up to date with the latest SEO changes:- The best way to keep up to date with the changes in trends and algorithm updates from Google is to follow the best blogs in the industry.

8. Give structure to your blog – Create an editorial calendar :- Creating structure of your content plan with your blog is essential and an editorial calendar is the best place to start.

9. Add 300+ words of content to your category pages:- Content is the king so add more and more content to your category pages for the better traffic generation and to increase website crawl rate. Always use more than 300 words per pages will be better for high search engine visibility.

10. Map out your target keywords & landing pages:- Keyword mapping helps you plan out your keywords to prevent you accidentally optimizing two pages for the same keyword. It also allows you to find where you could create some additional categories that you could create to attract some extra long tail traffic.

11. Add ALT tags to your images :- Ecommerce sites have ridiculously high number of images it  need to optimize with alt tag.

12. Fix your 404 errors:-  404 errors will rarely negatively affect your rankings, Google says so. However, they do affect your users journey around your site. If someone lands on a 404 page or navigates to one, the chances are they will exit your site, and fast.

13. Re-word your product descriptions to sell the product better:- Creating product descriptions that not only sell the product but sell the lifestyle around the product.

14. Add internal links from your home page to your targeted categories / products:- Internal links can sometimes be more effective than external links. What page on your site gets crawled the most? Normally… the home page, it has the most links, often the most traffic, and is the basis of your company. Adding internal links on your homepage to deep pages in your structure will send crawlers deeper down your site and increase both crawlers visits to those pages as well as your users visits.

15. Start using breadcrumbs:- Breadcrumbs improve the user journey around your site as well as helps Google navigate around your site.

16. Add in some post-sale viral mechanics to boost social shares:-  Incorporating post-sale viral mechanics is rare but effective! The best examples of this include Amazon & Ebuyer.

17. Check & fix duplicate content issues on your product pages:-  Duplicate content is a major issue affecting many online retailers and many don’t even know it’s a problem. Product page duplications are the most common in ecommerce and can be caused in a few ways

(a). Multiple products that are the same just with a colour or size different
(b). Using the generic manufacturer description
(c). Copying someone else’s product description (or them copying you)

18. Learn how to deal with out of stock products:- Knowing how to deal with out of stock or distontinued products has been a bone of contention for a long time in E-commerce.

What they have:

(a). Clear “out of stock” message – the user knows the product is not available
(b). “Shop more” messages – clever internal linking and direction for the user.
(c). Related Products – Great from the users point of view, very helpful.

19. Create a detailed buying guide for a category on your site:- Design is crucial to creating a quality buying guide, it needs to be easily digestible and can utilise multiple forms of content from images, text, videos and more.

20. Geo Target your site in WMT:-  Launching international sites can be an extremely lucrative venture. Providing you can ship your products to those countries, launching additional sites geo-targeted to those countries can lead to a massive influx of traffic.

21. Add a relevant video to your product pages:-  Videos are a great selling tool, it can allow the user to see the product in real world situations and can sometimes lead to much higher conversions.

22. Speed up your site:- The faster the site the higher the conversion. There are many optimization techniques to improve your site, some include:

(a). Using images only at the size of your display (Gain this by compression of the images)
(b). Use JPEGs rather than PNGs
(c.) Utilising a CDN to host your images
(d). Leverage browser caching

23. Add social sharing buttons to your product pages:- Having social sharing buttons on your product pages are a pretty basic part of SEO techniques for an ecommerce site.

24. Change your site architecture:-  A flat site architecture doesn’t mean to have all your URLs like this:

(a). example.com/category
(b). example.com/sub-category
(c). example.com/another-sub-category

This allows Google to crawl your entire site much easier and much quicker, ensuring you get the maximum amount of indexation as possible and therefore rank for as many long tail keywords as you can.

25. Make your URLs SEO Friendly :-  URLs are a ranking signal, one of the 200+, and ensuring your keywords are present in the URL are key.

Example Urls:-

exampleshop.com/cat123
exampleshop.com/cat123/cat456
vs
exampleshop.com/home-decor
exampleshop.com/home-decor/cushions

26. Add related products to your product pages:- Related products combines some more internal linking (that I’ve been banging on about all through the article) as well as some extra useful up-selling & conversion increasing features.