Sales Stagnant? Turn to These 9 SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

Although traditionally, SEO has always been associated with building online traffic, I would argue that many SEO strategies also have a direct and indirect impact on revenue and profits.

By now, you probably already know what conversion rate optimization is, and how it turns existing visitors, or current traffic, into buyers.

CRO, however, is useless if you can’t lay the necessary foundation for it to work. And that’s where SEO comes in.

So again, back to my point: SEO can influence your ecommerce sales positively. In this article, I'm going to teach you a few pointers to help you do just that.

1. Optimize Your Internal Links

Internal links are critical to showing importance and strength between your site’s landing pages. They serve as connections between your landing pages, helping both search engine crawlers and users navigate their way through the site.

Solid internal linking plays a critical role in maximizing the visibility of your website’s most important landing pages. But more importantly, it gives structure to your:

• Product pages
• Service pages
• Contact pages

The goal here is to ensure these pages can be accessed through your site, and that they in turn, link with each other when it makes sense.

2. Reinforce Your Keyword Strategy

Although keywords are no longer as crucial a ranking signal as they once were a few Google algorithm updates ago, they still play an important role in helping your ecommerce site appear in search results.

Whenever a potential customer uses a search engine to look for a product or service you’re offering, you naturally want your site to appear in those results. As such, you want to use the right combination of keywords to ensure your ecommerce site’s success.

Use Keyword Planning Tools

Google's Keyword Planner and Bing’s Keyword Research Tools should be enough to help you find your niche’s most popular keywords. Initially, your keyword research will be a process of elimination. The goal here is to find relevant keywords with decent search volume—not too competitive, but not too low either.

Use Broad Match Keywords

If your ecommerce site sells highly competitive products, such as consumer electronics, using broad match keywords is a solid options.

Use “Local” Keywords to Your Advantage

Another solid option is to use keywords that target your immediate city or state. I’ve seen how many ecommerce sites underestimate their local target market, focusing their marketing on a nationwide or international level. I’ll talk about this more later.

3. Develop Content that Builds Trust

And this is where the lines between content marketing and SEO begin to blur.

From once referring to a series of highly technical strategies designed to increase search rankings, today’s brand of SEO now focuses on user experience, forming relationships, and answering potential customers’ questions they might have about your brand, and its products and services.

As such, it’s important to communicate well with your audience through great content. And if you ask me, that primarily depends on strong, original, and actionable content.

As marketers, many of us are all too eager to shock and awe the buyer—thank decades of traditional marketing for that. Don’t do this with your content. Avoid copy that’s too salesy and overstates your product's’ value, as this will only backfire when customer expectorations aren’t met.

In fact, you don’t even have to focus on creating content with the intent of selling your products. You can maintain a blog providing high-value content related to your products and services.

For example, B&H Photography, one of the country’s largest online vendors of cameras and photography accessories, has a high PR blog called Explora, which features articles, photography guides, product reviews, and podcasts created by industry experts and influencers.

And guess what? The site’s visitors and customers love the blog, which further proves my point: content should build trust.

4. Think Global, but Target Local

If you’re selling products on a global scale, or even on a nationwide level, it’s important to customize your portal and its branding message according to local tastes and preferences. The key is to find the sweet spot where people recognize your site as a global ecommerce brand, while still feeling that they’re at home when going through your home page, landing pages, and product pages.

In the example below, Amazon’s Canada home page offers an option for French speakers.

Source

There’s one caveat that should be mentioned with localization though. Completely localizing your site will be expensive, not to mention time consuming. And the larger your site, the more expensive the process will be, what with your entire product catalog, all your content, search results, buttons and images, and payment methods having to be accounted for.

As such, it’s important to decide what elements need to be localized depending on the ROI you get from a certain local market.

To do that, you can do any, or all of the following:

• A/B test localization options to see which generates more traffic
• Survey customers in the region
• Review competitor sites as the local level

Leverage Your Social Media Accounts

The interesting thing about social media and SEO is that on paper, it doesn’t really influence your ranking on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). According to Matt Cutts, the former head of the web.spam team over at Google, Google doesn’t use signals from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter followers for search ranking (however, this was as of 2014). Other posts have also pointed out the absence of hard data surrounding the effects of social signals on domain authority

So should you stop using Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for business? Absolutely not—that would be like shooting yourself in the foot. Social media may not have a direct impact on rankings, but it sure plays a huge role when forming relationships with your audience.

And remember how I mentioned that SEO is about forming relationships? Being active on social media and linking to your site is one way of doing just that. It builds your credibility and encourages your social media followers to visit your site for reasons such as:

• A new product
• A limited-time offer (Black Friday sale, Christmas deal, and so on)
• New content on your blog

6. Go Mobile

Online shopping habits have really changed in the last few years, especially with the continuing improvements of mobile devices. Although still behind traditional or desktop-based shopping, mobile ecommerce continues to gain momentum, this according to the 2016 Mobile 500.

Source

If you’ve yet to do so, you need to make your ecommerce site mobile-friendly. NOW. Landing pages and product pages not optimized for mobile are at a significant disadvantage, and you can bet they’ll get lower rankings in mobile search results, and ultimately, fewer views and conversions than their full potential may have garnered.

Mobile Friendliness Also a Ranking Signal

Google has also made it a point to remind marketers and business owners of the need for mobile optimization. On its support page:

“Starting April 21, 2015, Google Search will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in Google Search results. Users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results optimized for their devices.”

7. Make Product Descriptions Useful

I’ve seen far too many ecommerce sites that either have hastily copied-and-pasted product descriptions, or worse, no product descriptions at all. The first issue may cause Google to penalize your site, while the second turns potential customers off. Either way, it’s not good for your site.

And I can’t say I blame them. If you have thousands of product pages, it can be a huge hassle to create unique content for each one. But that’s just how Google wants things.

If you have duplicate product descriptions, as well as duplicate product page meta titles and meta descriptions, don’t be surprised if these pages rank lower. Duplicate content hurts.

To keep your SEO in top shape, while helping potential customers find information they need about your products, I would strongly advise you to create unique product descriptions.

8. Provide Review and Related Products Functionality

When online shopping, most customers tend to flit between pages when they can’t make a decision about which product to buy, or if they can’t find a certain product they’re interested in.

For the second problem, my earlier tip on internal linking should answer your questions, but to provide you with a concrete example, look at the image below.

Source

A ‘Related Products’ function on your product pages serves as a natural way to place internal links. Of course, you actually want the products on this section to be relevant to the main product on the page, or customers won’t find them the least bit useful.

As for convincing consumers to buy a product on your site, one of the best ways to do that is by setting up product reviews. According to Mintel flagship report American Lifestyles 2015:

“Seven in 10 Americans seek out opinions before making purchases. Of those who seek out advice, shoppers are equally likely to visit user review sites or independent review sites before making a purchase (70 percent), while 57 percent use social media networks for recommendations.”

And that is about as good a reason as any to add product reviews to each and every one of your site’s product pages. And again, take note, this SEO recommendation is all about building trust with your customers.

Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

No man is an island, and this is certainly true for SEO. I’ve seen many marketers make the mistake of just doing their own thing, checking how the SERPs respond to their SEO tweaks, but not once considering what the competition is doing.

Newsflash: SEO is all about spying on your competitors. That may seem like a underhanded way of marketing your site to increase sales, but it’s all part of business. You think Apple grew to become the company it is today without taking a few notes from their competitors?

Source – Google Alerts is a basic but effective tool to spy on competitor backlinks, mentions, and social activity

Pay attention to what your competition is doing. Check their site structure, their meta data, their content, their landing pages, their product pages—anything and everything considered a ranking signal by Google. See what’s working for them and do the same, and avoid the mistakes you know are hurting their traffic.

This terrific post on Kissmetrics provides a list of 25 tools to help you spy on your competition’s SEO.

Conclusion

Whenever your site doesn’t seem to be generating sales, or somehow, conversions tapered off all of a sudden, it’s always a good idea to check your SEO.

While its definition has indeed changed dramatically over the years, I believe that SEO, when applied consistently and correctly, is a cornerstone of a successful ecommerce site.

SEO maximizes your site’s online visibility, and protects your position, which will be crucial if you're in a competitive segment of the online marketplace. It’s not so much about trying the game the system, but more about doing things to build your credibility, winning consumer trust, and helping customers to learn about your brand and products.

What are your SEO hacks for ecommerce sites?