IMPORTANCE OF SEO FOR ECOMMERCE
If your business in the last year has felt the need to move online because of the current climate, you may have heard of or been concerned with SEO for your new eCommerce website. So what is SEO for eCommerce websites and why is it important? Let’s look at what SEO for eCommerce looks like and what it means for you. If you’re completely new to the concept of SEO, take a look at our blog about what SEO is and what SEO works. But for now, we’ll go over what SEO looks like for your eCommerce website.
SEO FOR ECOMMERCE WEBSITES
There is a difference in the approach of SEO for an eCommerce website compared to a brochure website, there is more to consider and the type of user that visits it may act differently as well. The biggest and obvious difference is the product page. For an eCommerce website, the product pages and category pages need to be optimised for both performance and user experience. Everyone has experienced both great and terrible eCommerce SEO, you may have even stopped trying to use a website that performed really poorly and happily returned to a website that does it truly well. There are a number of factors to consider when looking at SEO for an eCommerce site, from the design of the layout and what information is given on the product page, down to the page load speed and optimization of images to best display the product. Amazon has a great example of site speed turning into profit; with every 100ms improvement, they saw a 1% increase in sales.
The first step for anyone looking to get some SEO for their eCommerce website done is research; research what your audience is searching for, how they are doing it, and what your competition is doing. Use existing data from your current website visitors through tools like Google Analytics. Questions such as “do I get more visitors from desktop or mobile” or “what time of day do I get the most visits” can easily be answered using such tools. But you need to find the right keywords first, focusing on the wrong keywords will lose your progress, time, and money!
Once you know what the right keywords are what people are searching for related to your product, you can now look into the competition for those keywords and compare their; website, service, product, price, etc. to your own. Once you’ve compiled this and some technical SEO data (like domain authority and number of backlinks) in your lists or spreadsheet, you can look for opportunities to improve your website to outrank the competition. This may highlight some issues that your website has; be it the load time, the structure of the website or maybe it doesn’t look good on mobile? Whatever it is, you will have a list of changes that need to be implemented to make your website just what your audience is looking for.
ECOMMERCE SEO AGENCY
After these processes, you can then start on the on-page SEO, building links, writing blog and page content and then re-review for further changes and improvements. If this all sounds like a lot to take on and learn how to do correctly, an SEO agency is your next best option. Utilising the professional skillset of an agency to take care of your eCommerce website grants you the opportunity to focus on the other areas of your business. Working with the right SEO agency instead of going inhouse with working on your website and SEO means you get the professional-grade work, regular updates on the progress and most importantly an increase in sales!
If you want to know more about what you can do for your eCommerce website or if you want to discuss how we can get your business more sales, get in touch with the 427 team today.