The importance of proper eCommerce SEO isn’t even a debate. If you don’t do things right, Google isn’t going to rank you in the search engines.
Google has 75.93% of the search engine market covered, so you can’t ignore them.
Sure, you have the basics down. But is there anything else you can do?
Keep reading to learn about eight advanced SEO tactics that will help your rankings.
1. Create Clean URLs
Can you figure out what a page is about by looking at the URL? If not, then it might make it hard for a search engine to figure out what your page is about.
This process isn’t about stuffing keywords in the URL, but about making clear what the theme of a page is.
Clean URLs also means keeping your URL as short as possible. If you have any parameters in your URL, that only serves to complicate things. Use another way to pass dynamic information to your pages.
2. Use Internal Links
Links aren’t only things you get from other websites. You need to make sure you have correctly linked your content on your website as well.
When you use internal links, you are providing Google a way to learn about content on your site that’s related.
Internal links also help pass page authority through your site. If you have pages that have received backlinks, the power that that page receives gets distributed among the other pages it links to.
You can use this to pass link juice to harder to rank keywords to help them in the search engine.
3. Guest Post
You can’t throw a lot of links at your website and expect it to rank anymore. Google is better at spotting spam and will punish your site if it sees patterns of it.
You need a way to get links from authoritative sources, and guest posts are a way to do this.
Spend some time to find authorities in your niche that offer guest posts. Some will allow you to post for free, while others will want a small payment for the post.
Use these posts to link to the pages you want to rank in the search engines. If you combine this strategy with internal links, you can pass link juice to several pages at once.
Check out https://seojet.net/blog/backlink-strategy-that-works to learn about more backlink strategies you can use on your eCommerce store.
4. Use Software to Scan Your Website
If you have a large store and a lot of blog posts, it’s hard to go through every page to look for problems.
Luckily there is software to do this for you. You can use this software to perform an on-site SEO audit.
Your audit will show you an overview of your page titles, meta-description, meta-keywords, and any other information that you need to know.
Use the information you get from this to find problem pages and fix the SEO problems on them.
5. Optimize Page Speed
A slow loading page doesn’t only impact the user experience. It’s also a negative sign for Google and can affect your ranking.
Use a page speed checker to make sure you aren’t suffering from a slow website. If you are, this is something that you can fix.
The first thing to look at is images. You can use image optimization tools to reduce the file size of images without impacting the quality. Once you do this, implement a lazy-loading script, so images aren’t loaded before they need to.
Your next step should be to minimize and uglify your website code.
Doing this replaces variable names in code with letters and removes all unneeded white space. This change decreases your page size, which increases its speed.
6. Avoid Duplicate Content
If you have a lot of product pages that have similar items, then you could run into the problem of duplicate content.
While Google may not penalize your website for this content, it does mean that similar pages will have a difficult time ranking.
Use a duplicate content tool to scan your site for similar pages. Then change your pages so that they are unique.
Similar content is a bigger problem if you use separate pages for products that have variations. You won’t only have duplicate content, but product URLs that are the same. It makes it hard for Google to crawl your site and rank your content.
Instead of having a separate page for each variation, move your product variations to the same product page and have product options to chose from.
7. Use Rich Snippets
Do you know how websites get product ratings, stock status, and pricing information on the search engine pages? Rich snippets can help you accomplish this.
Rich snippets are small bits of code that allow Google to figure out additional information about your site. Search results with rich snippets are more likely to be clicked on that those without them.
Google wants results that have higher click-through rates to rank higher, so having an optimized search result can help your ranking.
You can use the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to see what Google sees about your site. Use this to get your rich snippets working correctly.
8. Add Content to Category Pages
Google loves content. It helps the reader learn and makes your page more valuable.
But if your category pages only contain a list of products, that isn’t much information. What happens when a consumer isn’t familiar with a category?
Use your category pages to inform users about why that product category is good. It not only helps your user but gives Google more content to help it figure out what your page is about.
Don’t Fall Behind on eCommerce SEO
While on-site eCommerce SEO has mostly remained the same, it’s still important to make sure you do it right. It’s easy to let things slip, so make sure you take the time to optimize all the pages on your store.
Doing this will help Google figure your site out and rank you higher in the search engine.
Are you looking for more guides about SEO? Keep scrolling our blog for more articles that will help.