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E-shoppers are now everywhere – on trains, in cafes, at football stadiums and walking past physical shops on the street. The rise in next day or same day delivery, the ability to compare hundreds of prices in seconds and the convenience of avoiding a battle with crowds in the shops are just the tip of the ice-berg that has crushed the world of physical shopping.
When selling online, search marketing – whether it be through an SEO agency or through an in-house team – is pivotal to the success of an ecommerce website. So, what are the key essentials to ensure an online store fires the right messages in all the right places?
Effective SEO across your database
Before anything else ensure a website is user and search crawler friendly. This includes keeping images below 100kb (crawlers don’t like large loading) and tagging each image with a relevant alt tag (they also cannot see what is in a pictures).
The nature of ecommerce websites means there are always a high number of elements to each section, for example images which naturally expand when hovered over or expandable product sections.
Within web development ensure you avoid the use of render blocking javascripts and that all essential information on a product loads above the fold of the page (this is everything you can see before scrolling). Both elements will improve page speed and load times – great factors for search rankings.
The final element here is to ensure page titles (or meta data as it’s also known) are clear and setup for search engines. Initially start with something simple such as Product Name | Product Category | Brand Name. Most CMS will allow for a bulk overwrite to avoid lengthy and repetitive work.
Google Shopping
Next up, install Google Shopping and spend a small amount of budget on getting sales in through paid clicks. This immediately allows a website to compete against brand names, even on day one of trading. Optimisation will be needed on a product feed, but again, most CMS will have an option to plug directly into Google Adwords. Use a digital marketing agency to manage the feed an optimisation on an ongoing basis if you do not have time, this will allow for average spend to reduce while income increases.
HTTPS and Security
Google values user security, ensuring a website has an SSL/HTTPS certificate essential for ecommerce success. What’s more, users expect a secure checkout and HTTPS ensures this.
If adding this element to an already existing website, then there will be a need to add a redirection to the htaccess file in order to ensure there are no conflicting or duplicate pages.
Rich Cards and Rich Snippets
Rich cards and snippets are currently Google’s favourite toy and they offer ecommerce websites an additional layer of exposure within search results.
Prices, reviews, stock levels, delivery times/costs and images of products can be tagged using what is called JSON Schema. This tagging, when on the page, results in an organic listing showing off key elements of a product. Attracting the eye of the user and resulting in higher click through rates.
Full site tagging – such as search boxes can also be used, allowing users to search from outside the website as well.
POLARIS is an SEO Agency offering a wealth of knowledge from a dedicated team of SEO and Digital Marketing experts.
