Firms are focusing on their SEO to make sure prospective customers on the internet can find their content and products online. Product pages, if optimised, can help in boosting not only sales but also customer engagement.
Learning strategies to help you improve SEO for your website can help prospective customers to find your services or products easily. This article is an excellent guide that discusses some SEO strategies you can employ to increase your sales.
Related: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Ecommerce SEO
1. Optimising Your Product Title
The title of your product is one of the most valuable parameters you can take advantage of since the first thing that people will see when they click on a search result. It’s also the most crucial part of your SEO strategy, so it needs to be optimised for both users and Google.
Do you want to increase your CTR as well as reduce your CPC? Optimise your product title by following these best practices:
- The title should contain target keywords relevant to your business.
- Use digits and not spelt out numbers, for instance, “10 Best SEO Practices.”
- Make the title short but descriptive; ensure it’s between 75 -100 characters.
- It has enough words to describe what your product does.
- Use symbols to make the title easy to read and remember.
- You can add your brand or store name in the title.
- Write titles in Upper Case.
You can use tools like Long Tail Pro or Keyword Planner to determine which keywords are most popular in your industry. You should then include these keywords in your title.
2. Optimising Your Meta Description
A meta description is a short description or snippet tag that summarises the page’s content. This description appears under the URL and the page title on SERP. The meta description is an opportunity to tell potential customers more about your product than its name.
Meta descriptions are crucial components for on-page SEO. This is one of the reasons you should understand the best strategies for optimising them to increase your product visibility. To optimise your meta description:
- Naturally include the market keyword making it relevant and specific.
- Ensure it is between 120 – 160 characters long. Why? Because on mobile devices, only 120characters will be displayed and only 158 on desktops.
- Use action-focused language.
- Gain users’ trust by including only what they will find. Do not deceive them!
- Create value by either providing a benefit or a solution
For example, if you sell dog food, you could write something like “100% natural chicken and rice formula for dogs with no artificial ingredients” as your meta description. This would help users understand the benefits of buying your product.
Don’ts While Writing Meta Descriptions
For better and optimised meta descriptions:
- Avoid keyword stuffing: Only include a keyword once in the meta description. Using the keyword nine times or more can lead to penalties.
- Avoid copy-pasting some of the web content to act as a meta description. Instead, endeavour to research and write unique meta descriptions for your page.
- Do not use a meta description for two or more posts or pages. Doing so will dilute the effect and confuse bots for search engines.
3. Optimising Your Headings
Writing good content for your website alone may not be sufficient to attract traffic from Google. One of the most efficient ways of optimising on-page SEO is through the effective use of H1-H6 heading tags.
Essentially, heading tags inform the reader of the type of content to find in the different sections of the page. They create structure within your website, simplifying things for the reader. Besides capturing your readers’ attention, great headings also get them to keep reading.
Therefore, if you can optimise your page’s headers, readers will enjoy your content, and Google will begin ranking your page higher in its search results.
To understand the weight these heading tags carry, you should look at them from a user experience perspective. A well-outlined document is easier to skim through than one with no proper headings.
Here is how to structure your H1-H4 headings:
H1 headings
H1 is the top tier in the heading hierarchy. An optimised page outline typically begins with only one H1 representing the main topic. It is considered the most critical content on your page and serves as the visible on-page title of the blog post or article. It is always the most prominent font to set it apart from the rest of the content.
With H1s, ensure you are clear and precise. You want your reader to have an overview of the article but do not wish to bore them. Also, ensure you use the right keywords, which are vital to Google’s search engine algorithms.
H2 headings
These are, in essence, subheadings of your main subject. They break huge content into simpler, easier-to-follow parts. Use H2s throughout the page to create various subsections. While you can only have one H1, you can have as many H2s as you want.
When writing H2 headings, be descriptive but also keep it short. Doing so improves readability and also helps with search engines.
H3 Headings
H3s aid in further elaborating on a particular point. Here is where you find more detail-oriented information. These should be more specific and have keywords to enable readers to scan through quickly.
H4-H6 headings
These headings are but further subsections of the aforementioned hierarchical headers. They aren’t commonly used except when dealing with complex topics that contain vast information.
To sum it up, here are tips to help you write more eye-catching headlines:
- Have only one H1
- H2-H4 should expound on the main theme
- Your headings should contain relevant keyword
- Vary your fonts, text sizes, and styles to match the respective headings
- Your headings should remain objective and captivating
4. Optimising Internal Linking
You can also use internal links to optimise on-page SEO. You can add internal links to your category pages or store products whenever you create new content.
An internal link is any link within your website that links your page to another internal page. Internal links are critical for your page as they help both users and search engine crawlers comprehend your content and its value.
Internal links are of different types. Besides putting links on your menu, homepage, and post feed, it is crucial that you also add links within your content. Such links are referred to as contextual links.
They direct your readers to related and engaging content. In addition, they allow search engines to establish the relationship between the various contents on your site and determine their value. Remember that the more links a significant page receives, the more important it appears to search engines.
Internal links vs external links
Every website comprises both internal and external links. External links differ from internal links in connecting your page to other websites. External links should always be to authoritative and high-quality websites.
Developing an internal lining strategy
A proven way of improving your website’s fitness is by regularly evaluating and improving your internal linking strategy. Adding the correct internal links ensures that Google understands the pages’ relevance, value, and relationship.
Here are some tips to help you optimise your internal linking.
Use a keyword that relates to the page you link to:
- Do not link to pages that have no relation whatsoever to your page topic.
- Avoid generic anchor texts such as read more, click here, etc.
- If the keyword appears several times, link to the first one.
- Please do not overdo it. Avoid using many keywords in their anchor text that are not necessary.
5. Optimising Your Image Alt Text
This is a tip that most people are likely to overlook. Alt text helps Google understand an image’s context. The text also aids visually impaired readers by vividly describing the image in question. Using alt text helps improve the search engines’ understanding of the relationship between your content and images.
In addition, image file names play a critical role in SEO ranking. Therefore, if you are adding images you took, ensure you remove the default names generated by your camera (like “IMG_9870”). Instead, use more human-friendly and detailed titles.
Suppose you are selling a brand of yoghurt in three flavours: blueberry, strawberry, and vanilla. Renaming the images in your camera to uniquely identify each photo allows Google and other search engines to differentiate between the three flavours. The result is increased online visibility.
Here are tips to improve alt text optimisation:
- Your image names should be keyword-oriented and SEO-oriented
- Don’t use stock photos
- Lay-load your images
- Consider using modern image formats such as WebP and AVIF, as they load faster.
- Ensure image elements have explicit height and width to avoid issues with Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
- Have the same number of images as your best-ranked competitor. This isn’t to mean that you can’t have more.
- Defer offscreen images
6. Optimising Your Product Description
An SEO-friendly product description in your online store is written to increase organic traffic and improve user experience. If done right, it could boost your conversion rate, raise awareness of your brand and improve its perception.
When optimising your product description, there are many practices to follow, as search engines have indicated what they are looking for. However, it is quite tricky to know precisely what is required for full optimisation of your site. Moreover, Google analytics could change from time to time.
So how do you deal with this? How do you ensure that you best cater to your customers even with their needs changing regularly? You could start with a trial and error phase and work your way through.
Importance of product descriptions for SEO
Good product descriptions are critical to the growth of your business. They:
- Improve the overall buying experience as a considerable portion of optimisation involves providing detailed, unique content to consumers.
- Increase your search rankings.
- Increase your sales by pushing your products to the front where there are the right consumers.
Tips for creating SEO-Friendly product descriptions
Do you want to write unique and SEO-friendly product descriptions? Follow some of these best practices.
1. Learn about Google’s algorithm
By going through Google’s SEO starter guide, you could benefit your business by understanding indexing and signing up for Google Search Console, which helps you monitor your SEO efforts and flags any unusual activity. You could also learn how Google uses meta descriptions to determine your page’s contents.
2. Identify your target audience
Your potential buyers will determine whether your business survives or closes down. To identify your target audience, start by reviewing your existing customer base and studying their behaviour, demographics, and other helpful information.
You could also research your competitors to find out what they are doing better than you. Also, you could conduct a customer survey to get thoughts and opinions from real buyers.
After identifying your target market, you can now ensure your website is tailored to meet their needs.
3. Your product descriptions should include keywords
This is an efficient way to help Google index and increase your site ranking. Consider incorporating long-tail keywords in your content could be beneficial as the purchase intentions of buyers that search them is always high.
4. Give detailed descriptions
While following Google’s SEO best practices is essential, your clients should always come first. After all, there is no point in ranking well if your page doesn’t explain your product well to customers.
This is why it is vital to come up with detailed descriptions. In your description, outline the product feature, benefits, dimension, and any other thing that may be relevant to the consumer.
7. Optimising for Mobile Search Engines (SEO)
Keyword research is vital for the SEO needs of your eCommerce store. Improving your search engine ranking organically needs you to unveil top-searched keywords and terms associated with your product niche.
Some important factors to always keep in mind as you perform your keyword research are:
- Keyword search volume.
- Keyword competition/ranking difficulty.
- Keyword search intent.
Choose market keywords with low competition and with the highest search volume. Ensure it is aligned with your website page’s intent, and avoid overusing keywords. Remember to choose a target keyword for a unique page on your website and some LSI or related keywords.
For instance, say you are the owner of a beauty and cosmetics shop and want to sell lipstick; targeting the keyword ‘lipstick’ would be unwise. Instead, go for keywords like “best vegan lipstick” or “best glossy lipstick” with a keyword difficulty range of 1 to 15 and a high monthly search value.
Carrying out keyword research helps optimise your content to make your site more accessible to potential customers searching for your products online. All it takes is understanding Google analytics and naturally blending high-volume keywords in your website.
Generally, consider these during your research:
- Study the keywords in Google search results.
- Perform a keyword analysis on your competitors.
- A keyword research tool such as Google and Amazon will help when you are aiming to rank high for local search results.
- Use Amazon and Google auto-suggest options to find out what people are searching.
8. Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate content refers to considerable blocks of content across or within domains that completely match or are almost similar to other content in the same language. Simply spinning a few words doesn’t save a page from being branded duplicated content.
The consequence of duplication is a negative effect on your organic search performance. The chances of coming across duplicated pages on eCommerce websites are exceptionally high, given that online shops publish enormous amounts of content, including images, videos, user guides, and product descriptions.
Most of the duplicated pages in e-commerce platforms result from sellers reusing product descriptions. Think of it this way: you need to describe an item several other retailers sell. Usually, it is the manufacturer that provides product descriptions. Evidently, you will end up having a similar product description as that of your competitors.
Impact of duplicate content
Some of the issues associated with duplicate content include:
- Reductions in core site metrics such as rank positions and traffic
- Unforeseen failures in the performance of key pages in SERPs
- Key pages having indexing problems
- Wrong versions of pages displaying in SERPs
- Other unforeseen actions by search engines resulting from confusing prioritisation signals
Dealing with duplicate content
The best way to ensure the originality of your pages is to go the extra mile and develop unique product descriptions. While this could seem like an exhausting task considering your website may have hundreds of product pages, it is worth it in the long run.
However, you should note that not all duplicate content could derange your SEO performance. Some examples of content that will not hurt your SEO performance include:
- Discussions in forums that generate stripped-down and regular pages that target mobile devices
- Products in online retail stores that are shown or linked to by several distinct URLs
- Versions of web pages that are printer-only
So, how do you deal with duplicated content pages on your eCommerce website? Here are some strategies to help you come up with original high-quality content for your product pages:
Where possible, create unique pages
It is vital that you write unique product descriptions for your pages. The dilemma is that getting creative without altering some product details could be difficult. The solution is to rewrite these descriptions without altering the product’s most vital features.
If applicable, you could consider adding some keywords that you might want your brand to rank for. While this could take up much of your time, it will significantly increase your search engine rankings.
Clean your URLs and avoid duplicating content across categories
Typically, online shops are organised into product categories. So what occurs with these product categories, and how do search engines crawl them? Suppose you have a variety of product categories.
Your website’s CMS system will generate a unique URL for each of the categories. The issue occurs when the unique URL is generated for each path, which automatically results in a duplicated URL.
This action poses a huge problem, especially if your competitors have optimised their category pages and unique links for each product, as they will have a higher Google ranking.
The solution is using canonical tags and adding a field for each product, leaving room for assigning a canonical URL.
9. Analysing Competitor Backlinks
Having backlinks in your product pages is important as they are among Google’s top considerations when it comes to search engine ranking search results. Backlink gap analysis is a technique that involves studying competitor sites’ backlinks to determine the strength of their backlink profile.
All you need to do is use an SEO tool like Ahrefs to spot all your competitors’ backlinks. Then, go to Ahrefs and key in the competitor’s website URL before clicking on the ‘Backlinks’ tab to view their backlinks.
With the list of backlinks that you have, identify the common ones. Then, search for the website where all your competitors are obtaining their backlinks and see if you can get a backlink from there. It is also essential to analyse the domains to which your competitors get links to.
For example, find out if they get them from educational or government domains. Backlinks from unique domains as such are considered high quality as they indicate to Google that your site is reputable. Having them, therefore, will help increase your domain authority.
Conclusion
Other actions you can take to optimise your e-commerce page are advertising on social media platforms and giving discounts and samples to your customers.
While at it, ensure every aspect of your e-commerce SEO optimisation checklist is in sync and works harmoniously to increase your website’s Google search engine ranking. This way, your potential buyers can find you faster.
