Top Strategies for Maintaining an SEO-Savvy Ecommerce Store

Optimizing your ecommerce website for SEO is crucial to ensure that your hard work pays off. Are you unsure where to start? Here are ten steps to help you optimize your online store for higher search visibility and increased organic traffic. For more information on the best SEO practices for ecommerce stores, read this article.

Before you open your storefront

1. Research Your Target Audience

Fear not if you are already managing your business. It's never too late to conduct research on your customers and target audience.

Focus on the needs of your audience and what they expect from your results to be in order to research them from an SEO perspective. You can ask the following questions:

Which pain points are they trying solve?

What happens to searches as customers move through the customer journey?

Which advice, entertainment and other top-funnel content is your target audience interested in (as long as it relates to your niche/offering)?

Which transactional searches are your customers making when they're ready for purchase?

Which language and message do they respond to?

What are their questions before they can make a purchase decision?

Do you have complementary products that you could offer on your website?

Which devices do they use?

These questions will allow you to tailor the content and offerings of your website as you plan and establish your business. It will help you to further define your strategy even if you are already in operation.

During the Setup Phase

2. Make adjustments to your technicals

Give your ecommerce website a quick overview before you go live. Make sure that the URL structure is SEO-friendly. Here are some examples:

Set up 301 redirects: When you move a page from your website, any person who clicked the original link will be able to reroute to the new page.

Enable Canonical Links: Search engines will be able to tell which page they should prioritize when they find multiple pages with the exact same content. This can happen naturally with faceted searches, pagination and other common needs.

Allow Search Engine-Friendly URLS to be Enabled: This allows you to add text to each page's URL in order to make it more relevant for both search engines and users.

3. Google Search Console and Google Analytics can be installed

Google Analytics, even if you use other paid analytics software is the best for tracking search data. It is important to install it as soon as possible in order to start collecting historical data immediately. Enable ecommerce tracking in your Analytics dashboard to see a user-friendly breakdown and conversion paths for top-performing products. You can also set up Search Console at the same time using the same account information to see more technical data about your site's performance and visibility.

4. Optimize your Meta Tags

Website title tags and meta description quickly and concisely communicate to Google (title tags), and searchers (meta Descriptions) what to expect from the page. Your site should naturally be populated with 3-5 well-researched, relevant keywords per page. It can be time-consuming, especially if there are many pages on your website. Therefore, it is a good idea to set realistic goals of optimizing a specific number of pages each month. Search engines are constantly crawling websites. This means that nothing is static. As time passes, new metadata will be added and indexed.

5. Add product images

Are you able to show the best features of each product that you sell by using multiple professional, attractive, and high-quality images. If so, wonderful. These are the next steps to optimize your images.

Each image should have an Alt text. If an image fails to load correctly, the Alt text will be displayed. This is a crucial point of accessibility for users with vision impairments and a great way Google can communicate the image's contents (search engines can't "see" it).

Compress your photos prior to upload to ensure your site loads quickly. Double-check your image sizes.

Allow users to zoom in on each photo for a better view.

You can mix lifestyle photos with static product photos.

After-Launch

6. Submit your Sitemap

Do you remember the Search Console account that was set up? Log in immediately after launching and submit your sitemap manually. Google will crawl your sitemap and index it as soon as possible. This allows them to begin ranking and weighing your content faster. Google will automatically crawl your website and build an index if you do not manually submit your sitemap. Manual submission is just a way to get started.

7. Write your On-Page Content

You could polish and write all your content before launch in a perfect world. However, it is best to break down on-page content into manageable monthly tasks. Before you launch, write all the content necessary to reach MVP (Minimum Viable Products) status. Then set a monthly goal to add more keyword-rich content on high-priority pages each month.

8. Keep your site content current

Search engines love new content and will often prioritise it based on the assumption of better user experience. These are some tips to help you keep your website content current.

Maintain a blog on your website: Keeping it up-to-date will keep customers satisfied, drive new traffic and increase revenue.

Add evergreen content to your website: This will allow you to be thought-leadership and help you capture more keyword searches from your target market.

Add FAQs to your website. Learn more about customers and what they want more of.

9. Design a Relationship-Building Strategy

Although on-site SEO can be a great starting point, the success of your website in establishing trust and popularity among the internet community is determined largely by its offsite strategy. Once your website's on-site SEO is done (content, meta data and all other aspects of the site), you can start to reach out to industry leaders and build connections. Blogs, industry influencers, media publications, and industry resources are all options. Quality over quantity is the goal; backlinks to spammy or low-quality websites will not help you and could lead to you being penalized.

10. Monitor Your Progress

You can monitor the progress of your website using the Google Analytics account that you created earlier. You can examine your overall traffic, organic traffic and top landing pages. Also, you can see which traffic sources are most popular and top-performing products. This will allow you to make informed decisions about the future of your SEO strategy.

Last Thoughts

You'll see Google serve your site to more people who are interested in what you have to offer over time. You'll see happier customers, higher revenues, and more profit as a result.