The Ecommerce sector is booming and to gain an edge over competitors, it’s important to focus on SEO services. After the pandemic, more businesses are coming online to grow their customer base. With such massive traction, the competition will only increase in the upcoming time.
Whether you are planning to launch your Ecommerce business or revamping the existing website, you need to ensure its SEO-optimized to get maximum results. With search engines changing their algorithms frequently and making it more user-oriented, it’s vital to follow the SEO practices while you design the website.
To help you get started with it, we have gathered the best tips that you can follow and gain a competitive advantage over others. On this note, let’s jump into the tips:
1. Choose HTTPS over HTTP
Security and user data privacy are among the top concerns among buyers and search engines. So, it’s become inevitable to ensure your site is safe and secure to access and perform transactions. If your ECommerce website is running on unsecured HTTP protocol, it’s high time to upgrade to HTTPS.
As security has become a major ranking factor for search engines, you have to make sure your customers feel confident in buying products from your website. You can easily get an SSL certificate from your domain provider.
2. Focus on speed
Website’s loading speed is a major ranking factor across all search engines and you have to ensure that your website is optimized for speed. A standard website loads fully within 3 seconds and if the loading time is more than this, it will increase the overall bounce rate.
You can use Google’s free tool to check your website’s speed on both desktop and mobile devices and make the necessary changes if required. With the trend of mobile-first indexing, make sure the website loads faster on mobile devices and every function is accessible.
3. Implement structured data
Structured data helps search bots to understand the website’s overall structure easily and index it as soon as you make the website live. With structured data, you can offer the exact ratings, price, availability, and other exact information to users and it will boost your website’s ranking in organic search. If you are using a CMS like WordPress, you will find a lot of plugins to optimize your website for structured data.
4. On-page optimization
The majority of people keep the on-page optimization for later but it’s not the right way to do it. The best approach is to keep the on-page SEO intact while designing the website. It will not only save you substantial time but also help the website get a robust boost in indexing.
Even if you don’t have an in-house team for SEO, you can easily perform on-page optimization. You will find the complete checklist that is easy to follow and implement. In addition to this, there are several free plugins available that will help you get started.
5. Mobile-friendliness
With mobile-first indexing updates, Ecommerce business owners need to make sure their websites are fully optimized for mobile devices. You need to check that all the features that are working on a desktop site version are also working on mobile devices.
You can use Google’s free tool to check the mobile-friendliness of your Ecommerce website and check the potential issues. Once you optimize your website for mobile devices, it gives a massive boost to ranking compared to non-optimized websites.
6. Focus on Meta tags
Meta tags help significantly to boost your Ecommerce website’s organic ranking and overall SEO results. Meta tags help search engines to understand the pages with comprehensive detail and rank them accordingly. Along with this it also helps users to know about the page even before clicking on it. So, it’s always better to optimize the website with Meta descriptions early while designing the website. For that you can choose a suitable SEO packages.
The earlier you optimize the pages with Meta descriptions, the more benefit you will get from the search engines.
7. Manage redirects
Whether you are revamping the old website or building one from scratch, make sure there are the minimum and short redirects on the websites. Too many redirects not only makes the website slower but also possess difficulties for search engines for proper indexing.
Sometimes redirects are necessary to implement, but you have to make sure they are minimum and not in the 2X, or 3XX redirection loop.
8. Optimize the images
Ecommerce websites have tons of images for a single product and due to this the site sometimes performs sluggishly. It’s important that you optimize and compress all the images that you plan to use on your website. The best way to do this is to integrate a CDN server with a website and let the CDN manage images for you.
Along with CDN, you can use tools to compress the images and then use them on your website. High-resolution images and animations take substantial resources to load and it can make the website loading slower.
9. If you’re using a template
If you are building your ECommerce website on a CMS then make sure you use a fast-loading template that shows loading results on third-party tools. Also, don’t use the nulled themes for your website and they often contain malicious files that send unnecessary service requests and make the site slower and risky.
It’s better to buy a template that comes with customer support and technical help if needed. You can also get the theme installed by the professionals as it will save you plenty of time.
10. Check for 404s
Before you hit the live button, ensure your website has no 404 pages as it ruins both customer experience and SEO. Use tools like Screaming Frog to check that your website’s all pages are working and there are no such ‘page not found’ messages flashing on the screen.
Final thoughts
These are some useful and most common practices that can bring significant benefits to your Ecommerce business. Get started with them now to gain an edge in the competitive domain and thrive on success.