INCREASE YOUR SALES WITH ECOMMERCE SEO

Are you not happy with your online presence? With our ecommerce SEO services and experienced team of experts, your website will rank higher in search results. Be more visible, drive potential customers to your online store and stay ahead of the competition.

iCEA Group International offers SEO for retailers who want to remain competitive. Take advantage of knowledge and experience of our SEO specialists and expand the total market reach of your products. Just remember: only effective SEO strategy and quality content will get you to the top of Google.

Surely, you did not set up your eCommerce store to brood in the attic but rather sell the products your business offers. However, Google, which processes over 3.5 billion daily searches, awards 67.60% of the total clicks to websites ranking in the top five positions on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Web FX discloses that more than 75% of the users do not stroll past the first SERP, and hence, 91% of sites on the internet do not receive any traffic.

SEO company specializing in eCommerce SEO

These astounding facts pose the urgent need to focus on getting higher visibility and ranking to eke out sales and traffic on the eCommerce site. The goal can be solely acquired by eCommerce SEO, which involves tweaking certain factors related to site and content to grab more organic traffic and conversions. eCommerce SEO meaning is misinterpreted when used synonymously with keyword research, which is a part of the more extensive process. The optimization process for eCommerce involves various maneuvers and expertise in UX/UI, Videography, JavaScript, Creative Design, Content Development, PR, and so much more.

To accomplish the eCommerce SEO fruitfully, it is pragmatic to solicit professional eCommerce SEO services. Large businesses, as they revel in tremendous sales and growth, fork out more than $65 billion into search engine optimization of their sites, according to Web FX. A paid search option may seem enticing on the surface to gain traffic and rankings. However, sustainable progress and quality traffic are solely the repercussions of consistent SEO for eCommerce websites. Therefore, it is high time you discard the notion of SEO as a field limited to eCommerce keyword research and find an eCommerce SEO company to do that for you. Instead of implementing the incomplete knowledge you grasped from the SEO eCommerce website, you can invest that time into improving and innovating your products.

eCommerce SEO – What is it?

eCommerce SEO is a process of applying relevant strategies to optimize the website and content of an eCommerce store to boost its visibility and rankings. A higher ranking in search engine results promises more visitors and potential clients to the online store, thereby perking up the sales and revenue of the business. When done well, optimization facilitates the business’s visibility in the search results and thus gets more clicks. According to Serpwatch, more than 67% of the search engine clicks are grabbed exclusively by the top five results. Therefore, it is an urgent need to invest in eCommerce SEO 2022 to reach the target customers and get your business to those coveted positions in search engine results.

How to do eCommerce SEO?

So, your business offers quality products to the customers, but still, you cannot sell them on your eCommerce store. The catch, here, lies in the management and optimization of your eCommerce store and not your product as you would think. A site that is not optimized does not appear on the Search Engine Results Page, which implies that people don’t find your business in the first place when they search for products or services you specialize in. Here is the best eCommerce SEO strategy to support you in the optimization process of your online shop and see it thriving:

• Appropriate keyword research: How well you accomplish this step would determine your eCommerce store’s profitability, traffic and sales. Whenever doing keyword research, you should prioritize checking the CPC, search volume, and user intent for a specific keyword. Long-tail keywords are highly recommended, as they match most with the user intent, thereby augmenting your store’s traffic and conversion rates. Take your time in doing keyword research rather than rushing to etch the content with less profitable ones.
• Establish a navigable website structure: Simplify the taxonomy of your eCommerce site as it makes the site highly navigable, and your customers easily discover the products they want on your site. A thumb rule states that each product page should be merely three or fewer clicks away from the site’s homepage. SWEOR discloses that 88% of the customers shopping online never revert to the site that offered a poor user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to make some efforts to enhance the site’s navigation and ease of use.
• Curate unique descriptions for each product: There are zillions of products in one category that may just differ based on size or colour but share most of the similarities. In such a scenario, it appears a daunting task to create a unique product description for each product. And if you throw the same content into the description of every product, your site will confront duplicity issues. There is no way around it except to present compelling, informative, and unique product descriptions. An ideal product description has more than 1000 words, with the target keyword used 3-5 times, and precisely articulates the details and features of the product.
• Consider on-page SEO: On-page SEO in the eCommerce arena concerns the optimization of category and product pages. Although on-page SEO practices are generally the same for every site, yet, eCommerce SEO considers some extra factors. To achieve the on-page SEO of your site, focus on the following practices:
  • Optimize metadata
  • Integrate Schema Markup
  • Focus on internal linking
  • Add product descriptions and use LSI keywords too
  • Create keyword-rich and precise URLs

Further, favour adding relevant and quality product images and infographics to enjoy the best results of on-page optimization.

• Enhance the site speed: Low site loading speed puts off 70% of the visitors to the webpage, as a survey conducted by Trinity reveals, who then dodge reverting to the site in future owing to bad user experience. Therefore, optimize the speed of your site such that it loads in under 3 seconds. Otherwise, it will experience a bounce rate of 38%, according to Pingdom, negatively impacting your traffic, ranking, and sales. The main reason for poor site speed is heavy images, so try to reduce the file size of your product images without compromising on their quality.
• Ensure site security: Instances of hacking and other cyberattacks are burgeoning daily, which places importance on ensuring the security of the sites. eCommerce SEO platforms handle a lot of data, including their customers’ confidential credentials. You can fortify the security of your website by integrating SSL certificates on your site. Further, Google declared SSL as a ranking factor in 2014. Think with Google indicates that 70% of the visitors prefer visiting HTTPS-enabled sites. Therefore, consider getting an SSL certificate for your eCommerce store to add a layer of security to your site.
• Focus on high-quality backlinks: According to Serpwatch, 90.63% of the pages do not receive any traffic from Google, the primary reason being the absence of backlinks in about 66.31% of those pages. While the top results on the search results pages bogart more than 35000 backlinks, according to Backlinko. Hence, you can grasp the significance of quality backlinks in your content. While creating outbound links, one should retain that these links should be sourced from an authentic site, as in the process, you are referred by another site. Therefore, that site’s credibility will influence your eCommerce store’s traffic and visibility, which means your business would bear the brunt of the trick you use to gain low-grade backlinks to your site.

The aspiration of dominating the arena can solely be achieved through eCommerce SEO product pages which aim to enhance the visibility of traffic and conversions on the e-commerce store.

What's the difference in SEO between service and eCommerce sites?

While the fundamentals of SEO are fairly the same for all the sites, eCommerce site optimization differs in certain aspects. It additionally involves product pages and category optimization to drive sales and organic traffic to the online store. Let’s parse through the differences in the process of Regular SEO and eCommerce SEO:

The standard strategies for accomplishing regular or normal SEO involve the following:

• In-depth keyword research
• Optimization of Static pages like FAQ, About Us, Contact, and so forth
• URL and permalinks optimization
• XML sitemap submission
• Site speed, mobile responsiveness, and uptime optimization
• Off-site optimization
• Optimizing robots.txt file.

The typical procedure of eCommerce SEO involves the following strategies:

• Proper keyword research
• Homepage optimization
• Streamlining the eCommerce site structure
• Product page optimization
• Category page optimization
• Employing mobile-responsive website
• Enhance the page load speed
• Get high-quality backlinks
• Technical SEO
• Local SEO
• Adding rich snippets

Despite the similarities, both types of eCommerce SEO require different SEO professionals to carry out the process efficiently. You can reach out to white label e-commerce SEO companies to avail of professional SEO facilities for your e-commerce store.

Are product pages important for the eCommerce SEO process?

Your e-commerce store’s product pages are where your customers will decide whether to shop from you or shun the cart. Hence, you may safely call them the driver of sales and revenue for a business. Despite their significance, business owners rarely give a hoot to product pages, and they remain utterly neglected. Most optimization endeavours focus on checkout page optimization and the phases after adding the product to the cart. If only the owners knew the weight of optimizing product pages, they would have rushed to optimize them.

Product pages fundamentally comprise descriptions of your products and clean and precise images of the product. An ideal one serves to blarney the potential customers into shopping at your e-commerce store that their product readily addresses their issue. Now that you have become acquainted with eCommerce product pages, we shall walk you through the gains of curating a useful product page on the e-commerce store. Let’s dive in!

• Supports website optimization: Site optimization includes tweaking the factors like mobile responsiveness, page load speed, uptime management, and others. Google regards these elements to rank the pages in SERPs and, when optimized well, enhance the user experience to a great extent. If your site takes more than 3 seconds to show up, you will possibly lose 53% of the mobile customers from your e-commerce store, according to WebsiteSetup. Therefore, it is necessary to check that your site is optimized in order to expect higher visibility, traffic, and conversions. A well-optimized site is ranked higher by Google and other search engines, thereby augmenting the possibility of getting more clicks and traffic. This is because 67% of the search engine’s traffic is grabbed by the top five results in the SERPs, as per Serpwatch. Employ profitable and pertinent search words in your product page content to attract new users to your online shop.
• Assists in brand building: Undoubtedly, a well-presented product page is a potential trigger in facilitating the lead generation, brand building, and thus, sales. The more quality you infuse into your product pages, the help customers in knowing the worth of the product for them and the competitiveness of the price, and the more they support your business. You can generate worthy insights and figures for your product description from tech tools like Counterfeit, Wersel Data-Hub, Price Intelligence, and Product Recommendations. When forging a product page, you may focus on adding a product video as well, in addition to engaging content and pictures. This helps customers by providing more exposure to the detailing of your product and thus, launches a connection with the product, which can result in a sale, and you grab a customer for life.
• Generates big leads: Although the product pages are left ignored by some eCommerce store owners, this is where your customer spends the majority of the time. Thus, it is sensible to strive to add allure to the pages by including sharp photos of the products from different angles with interesting information about the product. Content that best delineates the item’s parameters is appreciated by the customers and factors in the purchase decision. Further, the page’s design should be easy to follow and navigable to ensure a good user experience. If your visitor gets lost and does not find anything riveting at your store, you may lose more than 38% of your site’s traffic, according to FitSmallBusiness, due to poor user experience. Hence, invest some time into creating well-articulated product pages on your store, as it can convert the visitor into potential shoppers. This would further boost the traffic and visibility of the business in search engine results immensely.

The role and importance of eCommerce product pages extend way beyond driving customers, as it lays forth the social proof, presents the benefits and features of the product, familiarizes the customers and builds and maintains credibility in the shopper-seller relationship.

Do online shops need blog posts for visibility?

You should not be hemming and hawing about including a blog in your eCommerce store. Why? Well, TechClient demonstrates that integrating a blog into your website raises the chances of ranking better in SERPs by 434% and raises 55% more visitors to the platform. While HubSpot utters data that reveals the potential of blogging on an eCommerce store is bringing more than 67% of leads to the platform. And that’s what you covet, right? This doesn’t end here.

Maintaining a blog is a chore that requires a lot of attention, upkeep, dedication, and time from your side. Nonetheless, it deserves that! Here are some advantages of having a blog on an eCommerce store to convince you further regarding the utility of blog posts for your website!

• Amass organic traffic: According to ImForza, more than 70% of the web traffic comes from organic searches. Of these searches, 67.60% of the clicks are relished by the top five results on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), according to Serpwatch. Blogging is an integral part of an ongoing site SEO as it involves strategizing with target keywords. Hence, the reason why blog posts stand vital for enhancing the visibility and traffic of online stores.
• Enhance SEO of the site: A super-grade blog establishes the site’s authority and builds brand awareness, instills trust between you and your customers, and up the store’s rankings in SERPs. Blog renders the widest space to perform SEO, where on-page SEO techniques are exploited to capitalize on profitable keywords. Posting optimized content on your blog, although it demands effort from you, working on it consistently will provide fortuitous consequences in the form of more quality traffic, higher sales, and more visibility.
• Connect with consumers: Most shoppers read about the product on blogs before making a purchase. This also builds credibility and connection with the visitors and potential customers coming to your site. To take this aspect to the next level with a blog, strive to curate high-quality, in-depth content regarding your services, business and products that adds value to the audience. Adopt an amiable, personal and unique writing style for your blog posts. Another tip is to enable comments on the posts and ensure that you professionally respond to them.
• Get inbound links: Inbound links refer to hyperlinks that drive your audience back to your site, thereby increasing domain authority. The higher the quality of backlinks used, the higher the search engine ranks a site in SERPs. Having an adorable, informative, and qualitative blog opens the gateway for 97% more inbound links, according to HubSpot.
• Reach the target audience: Whenever a user searching for your products gets to SERP and finds detailed content about the item they want to buy. 70% of those users will click the result to probe the topic, learn about the business and make an impression of it, according to DemandMetric. Therefore, maintaining an optimized blog section blog not only increases credibility but rather visibility and wider outreach to the target audience.
• Better lead generation: As a blog enhances the rankings of a website, it directly aids in bringing more organic traffic to the eCommerce store and is very economical compared to PPC. Your site’s traffic increases gradually, thereby driving more potential customers to the site, which generates more leads, sales, and conversions. So, your business flies!
• Brand building: Narrate your business’s success story on your blog, post trending news about the business or products related to your site and display your services and products to gain a wider sweep of the target customers. Posting engaging, high-quality, and informative content will make the visitors want to revert to your site, thereby improving brand loyalty. If your business is involved in charity programs and community services, do emphasize them on the platform, as customers back the businesses with larger and noble purposes.

You have to curate quality content for your visitors. Search Engine Journal presents data from a 2014 survey held by Dynata studied 1000 customers from the UK and revealed the following:

• One in every four consumers purchased stuff corresponding to what they perused a month ago.
• 845 customers bought products as per the description they read in blogs.
• Over 46% of consumers research the product they want before purchasing it.

And so, you can get how instrumental a blog can be in ameliorating your search engine rankings and garnering more sales.

What are the best platforms for eCommerce SEO?

With the decision of opening an eCommerce store, you get a facer “where should I start it? What is the best eCommerce platform from an SEO point of view?” And so forth. The worries about the search engine optimization facility in the space are relevant and should be addressed. This is because, according to HubSpot, 70-80% of the users on search engines prefer organic search results.

The sole tactic to get high-quality organic traffic is to improve your site’s rankings on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs). Relying on PPC for traffic and sales does not do much good to the eCommerce store unless you have a credible site that ranks well.

Just as you command in your search bar about the best eCommerce SEO platforms, the web hurls a blizzard of choices rendering it tough for you to decide. Nonetheless, here we have gleaned the best eCommerce spaces that are supportive of search engine optimization (SEO). Dig in!

• WooCommerce: WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin that transforms a regular site into an eCommerce store. If you are acquainted with WordPress, this can be the right choice. As regards search engine optimization, we know that WordPress is famous for it. Apart from certain in-built SEO facilities such as URL customization, 301 redirects, blogging, text editing, and mobile responsiveness, the platform also avails SEO plugins. These countless plugins allow you to extend the SEO abilities of the store further to help you rank higher in SERPs. Since WooCommerce is an open-source platform, you can customize it how you want your business to look and perform. However, certain cons might get in your way while working on WooCommerce. For instance, the platform comes with a steep learning curve, so if you are unfamiliar with WordPress, you may whine at some point when dealing with the technical stuff. Further, before integrating into the platform, the plugins are to be downloaded and installed, which takes a lot of time. When choosing and adding a plugin, one must ascertain that it is compatible with other plugins already running.
• Magento: This eCommerce SEO platform allows dealings and businesses effortlessly in its highly customizable space. Currently, over 1.2% of the eCommerce sites are powered by Magento, according to Website Builder. It allows for tweaks in coding to optimize the site and is SEO-friendly for sure, thereby promising you a chance to improve the rankings and drive organic traffic sales.
• Shopify: Shopify is another popular closed source eCommerce platform next to WooCommerce. Over 1.7 million merchants employ Shopify to run an online store, according to Shopify Unite. The best part about this platform is that you do not have to get your hands dirty on the development side of it, as it is all tweaked and managed by the Shopify developers. For SEO, you get thousands of applications to stretch the SEO abilities of the store further. If you know jack squat about coding or look at it with contempt, then Shopify is the thing.
• Squarespace: This eCommerce platform is famous for its attractive templates that can be customized as one pleases. Squarespace avails a compliant facility for blogging, which, as you know, directly influences the rankings and amount of traffic you get on your site. HubSpot in 2020 revealed that blog content creation is the priority of over 55% of the marketers on eCommerce platforms. Therefore, Squarespace allows you to capitalize on blogging to drive more traffic and give a boost to your business. Squarespace is SEO supportive in its mobile responsiveness while discouraging SEO at the same time in its low usability. The platform is not encouraged for building behemoth websites as it lacks good navigation features.

Web FX discloses that over 75% of the search engine users do not scroll past the first search results page, accounting for 91% of webpages on the internet never seeing any organic traffic. Hence, one can estimate the pressing need to make it to the top slots in SERPs to enjoy higher visibility, better quality traffic, and more sales on your eCommerce store. You can choose any eCommerce SEO platform to create an online store. However, if you are still over the fence, it is better to consult an SEO expert and convey your business goals and requirements to get the best advice on which platform to select.

WooCommerce SEO

Internal links carry less weight than backlinks, although they are much more excited and concentrated. But ideally, this should not shift the focus from the eCommerce SEO best practices of internal linking. Google, the dominant search engine, announces that the number of internal links hinting at a certain page indicates its importance to search engines, thereby magnifying its authority.

In his tweet, John Mueller, a search advocate at Google, says that anchor text with relevance delivers more context for the search engine to understand what the content is all about. In layman’s terms, internal linking refers to the act of linking one web page to another page, product, gallery, post, or event on the same domain. These are different than external links and backlinks. Here, external links are created to link the content on a different site, while backlinks are slightly sophisticated links generated via link building process to fortify the domain’s authority and credibility. External and internal links are minted by oneself on the site, whereas backlinks require other sites to refer to your content. Here’s how internal linking can improve your WooCommerce SEO tremendously.

The SEO practice enhances the site structure, thereby improving its navigability and usability, which promises a better user experience when the visitor comes to your eCommerce store. Redirecting the users to other high-quality posts or products on the site further ensures longer dwell time which is noticed by the search engine and considered for ranking it in SERPs. The best way to implement internal linking is to link less-worthy pages of your site into important ones. This would ensure the passage of link juice to these subpages, uplifting their rankings too. Here’s another crucial pointer, if you dodge internal linking altogether, your site would not be crawled or indexed by the search engine, which means it would never show up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You might have got it well now about the internal stand linking takes in the SEO process.

Squarespace SEO

According to Ninja Outreach, people rarely count internal links despite the stats which reveal that they encourage the site’s organic traffic by a whopping 40%. The role of internal links in boosting Squarespace SEO too sees no less significance when they are used to link one page to another page, product, event, gallery, or other things on the same site. This best SEO practice has several benefits, which ultimately help increase the traffic, ranking and sales on your Squarespace store. What are the benefits, by the way, I hear you ask? Well, here goes the list!

• Upgrade user experience: Internal linking boosts user experience by enhancing the navigability and usability of the site. This directly impacts the organic traffic and sales of your Squarespace platform. According to Intechnic, facilitating user experience raises Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) by more than 80%. Therefore, one can endeavour to improve this factor by uplifting the user experience on their Squarespace store.
• Boosts webpage authority: While trying to rank a webpage of your site on the search engine, internally link that page to other web pages. This signals to Google that the particular page is more important than others on the domain. Now, you can use this page, which receives an impressive amount of organic traffic, to pass the link juice to other pages on the Squarespace site. Hence, internal links gradually work to enhance rankings for the overall website as they increase the relevancy of the results shown to users on the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).
• Assist in crawling and indexing: Search engine bots find it easier to crawl and index pages with internal links as they can effortlessly pass to other pages following those links. These links hint the crawlers to other parts of your website and consider the whole map, including your older, new, and other updated content for indexing.
• Anchor text keyword improves SEO: It is recommended to integrate the right keyword into the anchor text such that it appears seamless and readable. Do not simply stuff the anchor text with keywords; rather, pose them systematically to acquire maximum search engine optimization (SEO) advantages.

Shopify SEO

Backlinks are hyped, no doubt. However, they deserve all the hype they get. Google considers the amount and quality of backlinks as a potential ranking factor that must be focused on by the e-commerce store owners. But here’s the catch. In eCommerce SEO best practices, you cannot neglect the importance of internal linking. It is high time that you discard the notion that only backlinks fillip your Shopify store, although it does play an immense role.

To simply put it, internal links are the hyperlink text that connects a webpage with another of the same site/ store. Unlike backlinks, internal links on Shopify are created by oneself to refer the users to another page on the same domain. This practice is integral to on-page SEO, where you can interlink descriptions, product pages, blog articles, and navigation bar. The intensive internal linking of product pages further raises the SEO and rankings of the Shopify store to a stellar extent in search engines.

Tips for creating internal links for your Shopify mart:

• Select and incorporate proper keywords when forging internal and external links in your anchor text. Anchor text should feel seamless and smart enough to urge the user to visit the page being referred there.
• Do not overuse the search terms and avert from generating redundant internal links on the Shopify store. Prefer to use keywords in the anchor text for the best results in SEO.
• While creating internal links, you may use the title tag tool of your Shopify store.
• When interlinking the titles, pick the anchor text that depicts your content in the best possible manner.

To most store owners on Shopify, internal linking seems tedious (it might be!), but it is not pragmatic to see it with such a disregard. The right Shopify theme can make interlinking easier, thereby upping your endeavours for better SEO, more quality traffic, and higher conversions.

Can your eCommerce be optimized for both local and national organic results?

You can optimize your eCommerce store to appear local as well as national search results. This is possible by leveraging your eCommerce store’s organic and local SEO. Accomplishing this well will get you to the prominent Search Engine Results Page positions for the target keywords in the local context.

How can you improve the local SEO rankings of your eCommerce store?

The potential of local SEO does entice a business owner to home in on the best practices. Most e-commerce store owners do not put separate endeavours to enhance local SEO and national SEO. Rather, they merge both. Local SEO focuses on target keywords like “best SEO services near me,” while organic SEO aims to rank for search terms such as “best SEO services for eCommerce”.

Local SEO employs citations that involve one’s NAP, i.e., name, address, and phone number, to set up the geographical location of your business and up the rankings of your store in snack pack results in the SERPs. In case your business exclusively serves local customers, capitalize on local SEO, whereas if the services extend to a national level, consider doing organic SEO.

Here is an eCommerce SEO guide for you to boost your local SEO rankings:

• Make a Google My Business Profile: To get higher ranks and thereby more visibility in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), you cannot discard the role of Google listing optimization. However, to accomplish this, you need to create a Google My Business account, where you will be asked to enter your business details. Once done with this step, your business starts to show in Google Search Knowledge Panel, Google Maps, and Google Search local results.
• Garner reviews & ratings from satisfied customers: Glowing reviews and ratings vouch for your business. The survey conducted by Bright Local in 2017 showed that 85% of consumers believe reviews as much as they would accept personal suggestions. The same site further discloses that over 98% of users occasionally peruse the reviews for local businesses. Posing reviews on your site optimizes the Google My Business profile and endorses the consumers to shop from your online store. Ask for reviews from your customers via email or text after the purchase and reply to the reviews you get on the platform ethically.
• Consider voice search optimization: By 2020, more than half (50%) of the searches made on search engines will be accomplished by voice, as indicated by BingDigital. Thus, it is vital to act and optimize your site and content futuristically. Incorporate keywords used by your audience when doing voice searches rather than the ones they type for regular searches. Most voice searches are questions starting with who, what, when, how, and where. Hence, count on the user intent and optimize your e-commerce store for voice searches to improve your local SEO.
• Start a blog for posting local events/ news stories: Starting a blog and maintaining it needs a lot of guts, time, and consistency. However, creating blog posts not only extends the space for doing more SEO on the site but also provides more context to the search engine for understanding your business. You can publish informative articles about your products and services or relay local news related to your business and more to facilitate your customers. CSA showed in a study that over 81% of shoppers conduct online research before heading to purchase the product. So, pose a fun and quality blog and win their hearts!
• Mobile site optimization: Over two-thirds of users browse and purchase on mobile devices, and this trend will only increase in the coming times, according to Millimetric.ai. Acquisio also reveals an astounding figure when it demonstrates that more than 75% of local searches end up in visits to brick-and-mortar stores. Further mobile responsiveness is a potential ranking factor considered by Google. Therefore, as an e-commerce store, you must optimize your store for mobile devices to ace the local SEO game.
• Maximize local keywords: Do proper keyword research before scurrying into curating a piece. Choose keywords used by the target audience to get the best results. You may glean profitable relevant keywords using Google’s Keyword Planner, where you can filter them based on your preferred location. Once you get a handsome list of potential search terms, strategically rig them into your content, metadata, URL slug, product descriptions, and so forth. However, remember not to overdo it.
• Register on online business directories: Recording your business NAP (name, address, phone number) into online business directories such as MapQuest, Yellow Pages, Foursquare, and others is proven to enhance your local SEO. Make sure that the listing and details of the business are the same through every platform. Your business listing should comprise a business name, phone number and address, a detailed business description, and an outbound link to your website.
• Get high-quality backlinks: According to Backlinko, a specific page in the first few positions of the SERP owns more than 35,000 backlinks. This is more than enough to highlight the vitality of backlinks in improving a site’s rankings and amassing a higher amount of quality traffic. However, do not try to fleece the search engine by using deceptive strategies to get backlinks, as it may subsequently lead to penalization of the platform.
• Curate individual webpage for each service/ product: Curating a unique web page for every product and service of your business seems a chore. However, if you decide not to bunch them together, it can seriously boost the local SEO of your e-commerce store. While lumping the pages into a single exhaustive one blurs the authority of your brand, and thus, Google degrades the rankings in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Local SEO is no different than organic SEO except that the efforts are more directed toward achieving higher rankings in a geographical area. According to 99Firms, 97% of users searching online seek local businesses, while 28% of those local searches generally end up in a purchase in-store or online. A solid local eCommerce SEO strategy paves the way for a business to outrank the competitors in the same field. Hence, it is pragmatic to consider investing in local SEO, grab better ranks and organic traffic and boost sales.

Optimizing category pages – Best practices

Just imagine the scenario where you hit a physical store and try to find items, but the store is not sorted at all, nor is there any signage to guide you. The most likely repercussion of this would be your instant exit from the place in frustration. While in a well-ordered shop where everything is arranged in practical classes, you describe the stuff you want to purchase in no time and return with satisfaction. Category pages on eCommerce sites are no different than grouping similar products on the shelf of brick-and-mortar stores.

They render orders to the items on the platform, making the mart easy to navigate and locate products for customers. Sound category pages not only enhance the user experience and satisfaction but are also appreciated by the search engine. On the flip side, if a site has low navigability, it makes it difficult for the consumers to use it, which is why they waste no further second in abandoning the cart and swearing not to revert to the store. Kinsta affirms the need to consider this factor in the e-commerce context, as it reveals that 70% of online buyers desert their shopping carts because of poor user experience.

Another study presented by Jill Kocher Brown at the SMX West 2020 SEO forum was conducted to find out what performed better in terms of SEO rankings-product pages or category pages. After analyzing thirty top e-commerce platforms for 25 billion keywords, the results were astounding and in favour of category pages. Ecommerce category pages performed stellar for over 19% ranking keywords, grabbed 413% more traffic, and have the potential for driving 32% more traffic compared to product pages.

So, we can gauge the importance of optimizing category pages on e-commerce stores. These pages are optimized for broad keywords with intensely high search volume as opposed to particular products on the site. This emerges as a challenge and an opportunity for the business to grab quality traffic and improve its rankings. It is tough yet deserving at the same time to strive to rank for these broad search terms.

Nonetheless, here are six eCommerce SEO tips to help you optimize the category pages of your online store like a pro.

• Get the right keyword: Start with proper keyword research, so you may discover the relevant keywords your customers use to find your products. Ignoring diligence in this part would spoil the other steps, and it would get you nowhere. You should incorporate those search words that are asked by your audience from the search engine to keep your store and their search aligned. When done acceptably, it can facilitate increasing visibility and garnering more organic traffic to your e-commerce store.
• Integrate the target keyword on-page: Strategically place the keyword you are targeting in the metadata and content of your category pages. This would ensure the facility for the search engines and visitors to understand the point of your category pages. Remember not to stuff the content with the search term, as it directly impacts the SEO of your store and may even bring about penalization. You should include the target keyword in the following places:
  • Meta Description
  • URL slugs
  • Heading tags
  • Product Description/ Names
  • Image Alt Tags
  • Page Title
• In all your product images and titles, infuse descriptive text that includes your target keyword and fashion them in a way such that it attracts visitors.
• Incorporate relevant content: Google swears to provide relevant answers to its users and, therefore, employs content quality and relevancy as one of the ranking factors. Sloppy content is not only a turn-off for the visitors but search engines too. You may face the issue of less content while creating category pages, but it needs to be tackled. While creating the category pages, add appropriate and plenty of information, add FAQs related to the category, and more. This would give you a space to optimize the content for the target keyword further and for the search engine to grasp it.
• Use the filters: Page filters are another great thing you can do to your e-commerce store. They also enhance user experience and support search engines in rendering more context to make sense of your category pages. Use filters to streamline the navigation of the products on your site by using their words.
• Create internal links between categories: Internal linking is an SEO best practice where one web page is linked to the other via a hyperlink on the same website. Make sure you exploit elucidative anchor text while creating internal links, such as if you want to create a link to the Shopify SEO page, you will use the hyperlink text “Shopify SEO”. The practice of internal linking supports boosting the authority of the category pages for the keywords you targeted.
• Consider product schema markup: Schema markup offers extra bits of information about your content on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), such as timing/ place of the event, product price, reviews, ratings, cooking time, and more. There is a markup to integrate Product schema or Breadcrumb. Here, Breadcrumb provides the precise location of the product on your site and simplifies the site navigation for the users. Whereas Product schema displays reviews, availability of the product, and costs, which can positively affect the click-through rates of your category page.

There you are! So, this is how you can optimize your category pages by following simple eCommerce SEO strategies and inviting fortune to your site by increasing its visibility and mustering higher traffic.