How You Can Use SEO To Grow Your Ecommerce Store

If there is one industry that is more affected by Google and search engine optimisation than any other, it is eCommerce. The fact is that eCommerce businesses live and die on how they are perceived by search engines. If they rank poorly, they don’t get organic traffic. And if they don’t get organic traffic, they can’t make sales.

While PPC and a strong social media presence are key components of increasing your brand’s online visibility, if your eCommerce site is looking to dominate the organic search results then SEO is key.

That means that if you are looking to grow your eCommerce store, you need to invest in SEO. Optimising your site in the way that Google likes is not only a way to perform better in the rankings, but it is also a route to success more generally. Google’s algorithm is specifically designed to promote eCommerce sites that provide a good experience to users. So, following Google’s rules for optimisation can be the perfect way to boost your business.

Here we look at some key tips for using SEO strategies to grow your eCommerce store.

Provide the Best Content

High-quality content remains one of the most important aspects of good SEO. Content serves the purpose of providing information to help customers make buying decisions and also helps to make customers more likely to buy. From an SEO perspective, a site that provides great content to its users is one that builds trust and authority.

There are two types of content that eCommerce sites need to focus on to provide their SEO and their rankings:

  • Product content – the worst thing that you can put on your product pages is text that has been copied from the manufacturer’s or (worse) a competitor’s site. Your product content should be unique, informative and better than any other company offers for similar products.
  • Informative content – great quality product content can help pages rank higher and encourage sales, but amazing informative content can attract interest a little earlier in the customer journey. Create useful guides, tools and how-to pages and provide them to anyone who is interested. Useful informative content that users love helps Google to see that your site offers expertise in your industry.

Focus on Page Loading Time

Page speed is an increasingly important factor in eCommerce SEO. This was highlighted this year with the launch of Google’s Core Web Vitals. These are three metrics relating to page loading that are considered important ranking factors. One of the metrics is Longest Contentful Paint (LCP), and it specifically looks at how long it takes for the largest element on the page to load up – anything longer than 4 seconds is considered slow.

But Google is also looking at the other metrics, First Input Delay (FID) which measures how long it takes for users to be able to interact with the page, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which looks at how much the page moves around after it has initially loaded.

These metrics can be improved by optimising your images, improving server response time and implementing lazy loading – a process that ensures that larger resources are only loaded when they are needed.

Keywords Matter

Keywords are an integral part of SEO for eCommerce sites. Abusing them in your content, however, will have a detrimental impact on your site. On the flip side, naturally incorporating relevant terms into your content not only helps customers find your products but also signals to Google what your site is offering.

You need to take some time to do in-depth keyword research, not only to understand the number of searches and competitiveness of the term, but also the intent behind the search term. There’s no use optimising a key page for a term with a high number of searches if those searches are looking for something different than your website provides.

 

Artemis are specialists in all aspects of SEO – we have years of experience working with eCommerce sites and we would be delighted to help you. If you are interested in learning more, get in contact with our experienced team today.