6 Tips to Ensure Your eCommerce SEO Is Optimized

How to Optimize Your eCommerce Site for Search Engines

Six ways to improve your eCommerce SEO

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is incredibly important for your business. SEO strategies affect your search engine ranking, which has a direct impact on how many people visit your page. Tools like Screaming Frog and Moz can be used to emulate an indexer and help you find and fix issues or improve content on your eCommerce website to make it more search engine friendly. Here are six easy ways to optimize your eCommerce site for search engines.

Incorporate Unique Meta Data

One way to help with SEO Optimization for your eCommerce website is to ensure that all of your products, categories, and other specific resources have unique meta data. Meta data are data that describes other data, in this case, your webpage content. Meta data tells search engines what your page is about. Some examples are meta titles, tags, URLs, meta descriptions, and keywords. Search engines use your meta data to determine if your page is what a visitor is looking for. Internet searchers then see your page’s meta title and description in the search engine result pages (SERPs) and read that to determine if they'd like to click on the link to go to your webpage. To get that click-through, you need to have unique content that catches the searcher’s eye and is relevant to their search.

Include Indexable Tags and Data

Another tip for SEO is to have indexable alt tags and meta data for all of your media files, including images, PDFs, and videos. Most media files can't be indexed by search engines if they don’t have tags or meta data to go with them. This means that content wouldn’t be able to give the search engine any relevant information about your webpage or products. Adding the right alt tags and meta data to media files is an easy way to improve your SEO.

Configure Canonicalization

Canonicalization refers to selecting one preferred or standard URL for a webpage. This is imperitive if you have multiple pages with very similar or duplicate content, and you want search engines to favor one over the other (and you don't want to redirect one page to the other for some reason). If you don't give it a canonical URL to favor, then the search engine will choose for you or it may not display either page. In addition, if there are two different URLs for one page, half your traffic could be directed through one URL while the other is directed through a second URL. Instead of combining the number of visitors like your BI tools might, the search engine would view it as two separate pages and count them separately. This would basically cut your site visitors in half according to search engines, which would not help your ranking. To avoid this, you need to canonicalize you website by selecting your preferred URL addresses for search engines to use.

Handling Menu Structure and Navigation

Search engines usually place more weight on primary menu and navigation items. This means that you need to carefully select the right items and word them appropriately. Other relevant, but less important links can be included in the footer or a secondary page, like a site map page. This helps ensure that search engines index the most important and relevant content first.

Have Unique, Industry-Specific Content

One of the top SEO tips for every website, eCommerce or not, is to have rich and unique content. If your eCommerce site sells to a specific industry, then your content should reflect that and focus on that industry. There are numerous types of unique content that can be created, including manuals, articles, interviews, reviews, technical resources, and FAQs. The unique content not only gives search engines more data to index, it also provides your customers with valuable information. Having valuable resources can establish you as a trusted and knowledgeable player in your field, which will greatly increase your likelihood of closing a sale and boosting your search engine ranking.

Categories and Subcategories Need Their Own Landing Pages

Categories and subcategories provide you with the opportunity to present more focused and richer content. To make sure that search engines index these pages, they need to have their own unique content and landing pages. This will give your categories, products and product data greater value and optimize them for search engines.