How to optimize your E-Commerce website to be on top of SERPs of Google

Ever wonder why someone selling online stuff is so bothered about questions like “How to improve the rank of my eCommerce website” or “How to increase website ranking on Google”.

Well, 33% of the top search engine result on Google get 33% of the traffic, second position gets 18% and the remainder is shared between the following results. In fact, the volume of traffic that web pages listed on the third position and below begins to degrade.

So the ultimate fact: Being the top search engine result is a matter of survival for online businesses that rely on organic traffic. Especially eCommerce stores which want to sell more customers who search and find products.

So, how to make an eCommerce website blaze its way to the top of the SERPs and make it stay there?

Turns out there are some straightforward ways that SEO professionals live by to make any website rank higher. It should work fine with any eCommerce website as well.

Begin with the heading tags

Any website has a definite heading tag hierarchy. It usually extends from Heading 1 to Heading 6. But, an eCommerce website is not any average website. It is in fact an online storefront. So, the layout, the heading tags and what those heading tags convey is totally different from a normal website.

Here is how you can fix the heading tags of various pages of an eCommerce website.

Homepage:

H1: Business name

H2: Meta description with the relevant keyword that the store wants to rank for.

Category page:

H1: Category title.

H2: Titles of products listed.

Product page:

H1: Product name.

H2: Long description of the product with the keyword included in it

CMS page:

H1: Title of the CMS page.

H2: If text has multiple headings, whose headings should be H2.

Also, don’t forget to include meta descriptions for each of these pages.

Do it right with canonical tags

In short form, a canonical tag is an HTML attribute. It tells the search bot how much search value or link juice is to be assigned for that particular page. Canonical tags are most important for online retailers who have thousands of individual product detail pages, all of which they want to rank higher on the search engine ranking.

Using canonical tag prevents search bots from reading the page content as duplicate. For instance, assume that there are two product pages:

www.onlinestore.com/product-yellow/

www.onlinestore.com/product-black/

You can use a canonical tag to avoid the bot from flagging the identical content in both the pages as duplicate content.

Keep page loading speed to a bare minimum

Page loading speed is the time taken by a website to serve the content to its visitor. For an eCommerce store the page would include components like the text, ad banners, product images description and so on.

The same components which makes your page richer and full of context can also drag down its loading speed. A slower page loading speed means a poor customer experience which results in higher bounce rate. And, bounce rate means your website will be ranked below other websites. To avoid that situation keep your page loading speed to a bare minimum with the help of page loading speed optimization techniques. This is very important for your website to load quickly. If you need a way to test your website speed, use a free tool like Pingdom.

Find the right keywords

Keywords are the search phrases that your customers or prospective customers use to find your website. So finding the most relative and closest search terms is necessary to keep your organic traffic up and running.

You can find the right keywords for your online store based on several factors like:

• Common search terms for each product
• Using tools like AdWords Keyword Planner, SEMRush, Google Trends, etc.

Once you find the right keywords that has relatively higher search volume and reasonable competition, sprinkle those keywords throughout the content to make your pages SEO-friendly.

Attach Alt tags to images

An alt tag, also known as “alt attribute” and “alt description,” is an HTML attribute that is applied to images. These alt tags give search bots a text alternative to ‘read the images’. In other words, search engine bots cannot see your product images, but, they can read their alt tags, based on which they will rank the specific page. So, even if your product page does not get ranked for its text, the images have a chance of showing up in image searches.

Install a SSL certificate

Security is now counted as a strong ranking signal. There is no skipping it. In fact, web browsers like Google Chrome have started labeling websites without the HTTPS prefix as insecure. An insecure website is something that majority of the users stand away from.

So, the only remedy to this is to install a SSL certificate on your website. The certificate will encrypt the information that your website sends out and receives, ensuring complete security at all times. It will also help curtail cart abandonment at checkout page where most customers skip paying due to security concerns. There is also the added advantage of better SEO ranking.

Conclusion

SEO can do wonders to an eCommerce business. If done right. It can attract customers to the store like a strong magnet pulling strips of iron. But, making that magnet powerful is not an easy task. There is some ground work that needs to be done. Some of which are detailed above. Hope this helps you rank your online store better!

The post How to optimize your E-Commerce website to be on top of SERPs of Google appeared first on TheMarketingblog.

from TheMarketingblog http://www.themarketingblog.co.uk/2018/09/how-to-optimize-your-e-commerce-website-to-be-on-top-of-serps-of-google/