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We take a look at basic search engine optimization (SEO) practices every new eCommerce retailer should know about.

If you’re in the midst of building a new eCommerce business, search engine optimization may be the furthest thing from your mind. As understandable as that is, search is a major contributor of traffic to eCommerce stores. If your store isn’t search-engine friendly, you’ll miss out on a lot of potential sales.

Search engine optimization is a complex practice, especially where eCommerce is concerned, but once you have the basics in place, it’s largely a matter of refinement and ensuring you continue to follow best practices.

Let’s have a look at the bare minimum of work you should do to set your site up for the SERPS. I’m going to assume you’ve already chosen an SEO-friendly eCommerce platform like Magento and performance-optimized hosting capable of offering the low-latency shopping experience modern eCommerce customers demand.

Keyword Research

Keywords and key phrases give search engines the information they need to link the content on your page to search queries. To oversimplify enormously, if your page doesn’t have a reference to “red shoes” on it, there’s no way for Google to understand that you sell red shoes.

Choosing keywords and key phrases to use for product pages and categories may seem like common sense, but if you want to maximize your advantage, you should choose keywords that are closest to the queries that searchers enter into Google (although the search engines have become much smarter at figuring out what searchers mean).

Keyword competition is another issue. It wouldn’t be smart to base your entire keyword strategy around the phrase “red shoes” because there are many hundreds of eCommerce stores competing for that phrase. As a new store owner, you’re at something of a disadvantage where popular keywords are concerned.

The trick is to be as relevant and precise as possible while matching user queries. Long tail keywords like “red velvet kitten heel boots” are more precise, less competitive, and likely to better capture users with an intent to buy.

There are many tools to help you choose better keywords, with Google’s Keyword Planner and Moz’s Keyword Explorer being among the best.

Check Out The Competition

There’s nothing wrong with taking a close look at what your competition are doing with regard to on-page copy and category organization. These are the sites against which you will be competing for positions on the SERPS, so pay close attention to the top-ranking stores in your niche.

Use the competition for inspiration, but don’t copy them directly, and certainly don’t plagiarize their copy — doing so will have the opposite of the desired effect.

Product Page Copy

Product page copy — the words that describe your products — should be at the heart of your SEO efforts. Using your keyword research, write unique, original, and descriptive copy. Focus on writing for the shopper, not for the search engine crawlers, but include your chosen keywords and phrases. Pay particular attention to headings and page titles.

You might be tempted to cut corners here and use product descriptions from manufacturers, but it’s likely that many other eCommerce stores are doing the same thing. If your copy isn’t unique, search engines can’t discriminate between your product page and those of other stores. Writing your own on-page copy also gives you an opportunity to establish the branding and character of your business.

Avoid keyword stuffing. Keywords are important, but if you write stilted and unnatural copy stuffed with repetitions and variations of your keywords, Google won’t look kindly on you.

In addition to product copy, each page should have a unique title and meta description that contains your keywords. The title is part of an HTML document’s head section. It looks like this:

<title> Red Velvet Kitten Heel Boots</title>

Title tag content should be less than 60 characters.

The meta description is also part of the page’s head section, and it should contain a descriptive snippet of text less than 160 characters. Both title tags and meta descriptions are used to populate search results, so spend some time making them unique and appealing.

If you’re a Magento user, setting up titles and meta descriptions is straightforward.

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Canonical Links

eCommerce stores often have problems with duplicate content, which can harm search engine performance. Even if you don’t deliberately or accidentally create duplicate content, search engine crawlers consider every link pointing to the same to be  duplicate page. Let’s say you have the same product in two categories, each each with a link to the same page. If the URL includes the category the shopper used to navigate to the product – as it does in many cases — that may look like duplicate content to Google.

Canonical links indicate which of the possible duplicates Google should consider the real page. This guide from Magento details how to setup canonical links.

Blog

Blogging may not be high on your list of priorities, but it’s an excellent way to increase the number and variation of pages you have in the search index. If you only have product descriptions to play with, you deny yourself some of the most powerful benefits content can bring to your store.

I advise store owners to regularly publish relevant blog posts to build an audience, increase sharing on social media, and attract incoming links.

Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center is a tool that allows eCommerce retailers to upload a feed of their product catalogue to Google so it can be used on Google Shopping, within shopping search results, and elsewhere.

Google has comprehensive documentation that explains how to add a product feed. Magento users can take advantage of Simple Google Shopping, an extension that streamlines the process.

In Conclusion

Search engine optimization is an important part of modern eCommerce. If you don’t spend time making your store friendly to Google and other search engines, you’re denying your business the benefits of search referrals. I’ve covered only the bare minimum here — I’ve said nothing about link building, for example — but by implementing these steps, you put your store in a good position for future optimization.

 

About Graeme Caldwell — Graeme works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook and check out their tech/hosting blog, https://www.nexcess.net/.

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