Adapting your SEO strategy to support your e-commerce site can be a daunting process. This is particularly true for companies that are just beginning to venture into e-commerce. Consistently achieving high rankings on search engines is vitally important to the success of your e-commerce business.
High rankings equal more traffic, which, in turn, results in larger sales and a higher bottom line. But staying on top of the rapidly shifting algorithms search engines use to rank websites can seem nearly impossible at times. In this article we’ll go over some basic tips that can help your company effectively transition your SEO strategy to better support your e-commerce goals.
Adopting some of these basic guidelines can help ensure that traffic to your site, and consequently sales, don’t dip as search engine algorithms change.
Use a Platform That Integrates SEO
While this tip may be obvious, many companies still attempt to implement effective SEO in-house. Although there are varying degrees of success with this, it is important for many companies seeking to expand their e-commerce site to build their SEO strategy around a flexible platform that incorporates a robust SEO functionality into its framework.
By using a platform to streamline your SEO efforts, you are able to better focus on two other areas of e-commerce that matter: your products and your customers. Platforms that integrate SEO have the inherent advantage of being able to apply seamless changes across the framework of your site to adapt to changing search engine algorithms.
Additionally, a platform that incorporates support for SEO will allow you the flexibility to make quick and effective adjustments to your landing pages and internal linking so that you continually rank high on search engines.
Create Smart Landing Pages
Creating smart landing pages for your products should be an integral part of your SEO strategy. Your platform should be flexible enough to allow you to create landing pages based on the products that your customers are searching for.
These landing pages will then be crawled and picked up by search engines, resulting in higher rankings and more traffic. Ensure that your landing pages can be created dynamically, so that you can quickly and effectively adapt to both your customer’s changing shopping patterns and changes to search engine algorithms.
Make Your E-Commerce Site Mobile-Friendly
Although ensuring that your site can be accessed easily and quickly from both mobile and desktop devices should be a cornerstone of your e-commerce strategy, many companies fail to account for mobile accessibility in their SEO efforts.
Having responsive pages that load quickly on mobile devices will result in higher rankings on search engine results. When designing or making improvements to your e-commerce site, make sure that each page is optimized for mobile.
Prioritize User Experience
Adapting your site design to enhance user experience should also be a cornerstone of your SEO strategy. Ensure that your site is easily navigable and searchable. Include robust search and autocomplete functionality that will allow your customers to easily find the products they’re looking for.
Also implement intelligent structuring into your site, and verify that search queries end up where they are intended to go. Focus on curating quality content over quantity. Lastly, respond to feedback from customers, whether it be through direct feedback or analysis of usage patterns, to ensure that your site is structured and designed for optimal usability.
Don’t Forget About Security
Utilizing SSL or HTTPS security on your site is a necessity in todays e-commerce world. Not only will your customers feel more secure, but your rankings on search engines will also be positively impacted. Failure to use SSL or HTTPS on your website will result in search engines labelling your site as “not secure,” which will impact both your rankings and the traffic generated to your site.
Ensure that your SEO strategy includes shoring up any security vulnerabilities on your site, and verify that your site is utilizing SSL or HTTPS. Your customers will appreciate it, and your rankings will improve.
For more help improving your SEO strategy to better support e-commerce, watch our webinar How to Get the SEO-Driven Revenue You’re Missing.
