Total retail e-commerce sales worldwide account for $6.33 billion in 2024 and are expected to surpass the $8 billion mark in 2027. In comparison, in 2014 this figure was only $1.336 billion, which means that more and more people online shopping and that the web has become the perfect medium for retailers.
If the Internet is now a crucial means of sales, search engines are its main marketing engine. According to the Digital Report 2023, 43.4% of users go online to research brands and products. In most cases, your search starts with search engines like Google and others. Meaning, if you don’t optimize your e-commerce brand for them today, you might be missing out on a lot of potential traffic, and therefore leads and deals.
If you want your brand to thrive and outperform the competition, you need to embrace SEO for eCommerce as soon as possible. First, you should focus on optimizing your product pages because they play the biggest role in your conversions.
Understanding eCommerce SEO
Simply put, eCommerce SEO is a set of practices and tools aimed at improving your site and its content to meet search engine best practices to increase your positions on search engine results pages (SERPs) and get noticed by potential buyers.
Why is SEO important for eCommerce you may ask? When managed correctly, eCommerce search engine optimization can provide you with a host of benefits, including:
Product visibility — When you optimize your product pages, you increase their likelihood of appearing high in the SERPs. As a result, your items will be more visible to potential customers searching for similar items.Organic traffic — Numerous studies confirm that only a small percentage of users go past the first page of the SERPs. That is, almost all the amount of web traffic falls on the sites that occupy the first positions. So when you leverage on-page and off-page SEO optimization efficiently, you can significantly increase your organic traffic.Knowledge of the brand — Finally, when your products become more visible and your site receives more traffic, this will inevitably lead to greater brand awareness because more people will notice you in the top positions of the SERPs and take an eye on your business.
From these important benefits, you can receive many other benefits such as more leads, more conversions and a more prosperous business.
Now, why should you focus your SEO strategy on product pages in particular? To answer this question, let’s consider the typical e-commerce funnel:
Top of Funnel (TOFU) — Awareness Middle of Funnel (MOFU) — Consideration Bottom of Funnel (BOFU) — Intent/Purchase
Your product pages are at the center of the conversion funnel, where potential customers consider different options and brands. Respectively, it is crucial that they find your brand at this stage so that you have a chance to convert them. That’s why eCommerce SEO should start with product pages, and we’re about to tell you how to get it right!
Keyword research for product pages
Begin your efforts with in-depth keyword research because keywords are what your potential buyers use to find you on the web. Your task at this stage is to find high-intent search queries related to your products.
To do this, follow these steps:
Choose an intuitive and accurate keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner. Make a list of topics that align with your products. For example, if you own a shoe store, related terms might include “shoes,” “women’s shoes,” “athletics,” etc. Enter these related terms into your research tool to allow it to crawl the web and give you a list of potential eCommerce SEO keywords. Analyze and choose appropriate keywords based on relevance, search volume and competition. Also, be sure to select keywords that match the intent of your product pages, for example, “buy women’s shoes.”
Professional advice: If you’re not sure where to start your research, don’t hesitate to use professional keyword research services. For example, you can try NinjaReports — a innovative SEO platform which offers a complete set of tools and solutions to help you improve your SEO and be successful. In this toolbox, you’ll find many useful options, including keyword research and ranking tracking, the competitor keyword research tool, and more!
On-page optimization techniques
After identifying your target electronic commerce SEO keywords, you should move on to on-page optimization.
Here’s how to get on-page optimization right:
Optimize product titles — Use concise and descriptive titles that speak to your ideal customer. Strategically integrate your target keywords into your titles to rank for them.Prepare informative descriptions — Describe your products in a highly informative and persuasive way, addressing customer needs and concerns and emphasizing your most important selling points. Feel free to add social proof or use sensory language to grab the attention of potential customers. Also, integrate target keywords into your descriptions.Optimize your images — Make sure your product pages include high-quality, eye-catching images that can sell you your products. To get the most out of your SEO efforts, optimize images with descriptive filenames and alt tags, which can also include keywords. And don’t forget to optimize the file size.Implement structured data tagging — Schema markup allows search engine bots to crawl your site and better understand its content. Respectively, it can help you achieve higher rankings, visibility and click-through rates. To implement the markup manually, go to Schema.org and explore the code vocabulary to write your own code and then paste it into your website.
Technical optimization for product pages
Although often overlooked by beginners, technical optimization affects your rankings just as much as the keywords you use or the content you provide.
Here are the basic SEO strategies for small ecommerce businesses that will help you learn about search engine technology best practices:
Create a responsive design and test it on mobile to ensure an optimal user experience. Optimize your site’s loading speed – it has to be 2.5 seconds or less Improve your URL structures for clarity and include targeted keywords. Use canonical tags to let search engines know that there is a master copy of a given page and thus avoid duplicate content. Audit your site’s current performance to detect and eliminate any crawl errors.
Optimizing user experience and conversion rate
The overall experience users get on your website spans a whole host of ranking factors, including navigation, site structure, content readability, and more. Also, a positive User experience (UX) can improve dwell time, bounce rate and user trust, which can serve as positive signals for search engines. Therefore, UX prototyping and optimization is another must-have element of your SEO strategy.
To improve the user experience, follow these tips:
Implement intuitive and clear navigation and take advantage of user-friendly page layouts. Develop clear and eye-catching calls to action (CTAs) and place them strategically on your site. Create a simple and time-efficient checkout process to reduce the number of potential friction points and minimize cart abandonment.
Follow up and iterate
Finally, the last of our eCommerce SEO tips is to continuously monitor, measure and improve your strategy.
Take advantage of reliable tools to track your key metrics like visits, clicks, conversions, and more. Use the insights you get through analytics to fine-tune your tactics and get better results.
Also, don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors and key industry trends. This will help you make more informed decisions and outshine other brands!
conclusion
Product pages always play a crucial role in e-commerce. They can make your potential customers want to buy from you or look elsewhere for the products they need. Also, in this highly competitive niche, there is a high chance that your products will go unnoticed. Especially if they are not seen at the top of the SERPs. And that’s why it’s absolutely crucial to optimize them.
Now you have all the information and tips you need to research keywords, develop compelling SEO content strategies, and otherwise optimize your product pages. Make this your number one priority in 2024 and let your business shine!
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