If you run an online business, optimizing your website for search engines is essential to drive more traffic, increase sales, and grow your business. However, things are a little different for an eCommerce business.

Given the massive size of such websites and the number of elements involved backstage, there are some SEO elements that are different for eCommerce businesses compared to other types of websites. Since we work on both web development and eCommerce SEO for our eCommerce clients, here is a quick rundown of the list of things that we have learned over the years.

SEO for product pages

Product pages are probably the most important part of your eCommerce website, which is why optimizing them for search engines first is crucial. You need to focus on ensuring that your product titles, descriptions, images, and user reviews are relevant and being searched for. You should also optimize your product pages for long-tail keywords and include schema markup to help search engines understand your product information.

Once the relevant keywords have been identified, below is what your optimization process should look like:

• Title Tags: The title tag is the most crucial on-page SEO element for eCommerce businesses. It should contain your primary keyword and be compelling enough to attract clicks from search engine users.
• Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are the short summaries that appear beneath the title tag on the search engine results page. A well-crafted and search-optimized meta description can attract clicks from users and improve the click-through rate (CTR).
• URLs: The URL structure of the product page should be search engine friendly, in that it should not only contain the keyword but also be easy to read, even for humans.
• Product Descriptions: It is inarguable that your product descriptions need to be informative and persuasive. They should highlight the benefits of each of your listed products as well as organically include relevant keywords to help them get found on search engines.
• Images: Images are essential for eCommerce product pages since people still buy using visual aids. Since search engines index images separately for image searches, your images ought to be optimized for SEO (i.e. descriptive file names and alt tags) so that you can rank for both text- and image-based searches.
• Reviews: There is no doubt that social proof sells better. It has been proven time and again. So, it is no surprise that user-generated reviews can help improve the SEO of the product page. Not only do they add fresh, relevant content to the page but they can also improve the overall authority of the website, which is an important factor for ranking on Google.

SEO for category pages

Content marketing is an essential component of SEO for eCommerce businesses. Creating useful and informative content can help drive traffic to the website and improve rankings.

Content marketing can take many forms, including blog posts, infographics, and videos. And it can also be how you choose to market your category pages.

Category pages are the pages that organize your products into different categories. Not only are these pages important as part of your content marketing efforts but also for eCommerce SEO because they help search engines understand the structure of your website.

To optimize your category pages, you must focus on creating unique and descriptive category titles and descriptions. You should also include internal links to your product pages and use breadcrumb navigation to help users and search engines navigate your website.

Site structure

The structure of your eCommerce website is at the core of both user experience and eCommerce SEO. The more comprehensible your site structure is to search engines, the better incentives your online business would receive.

To improve your site structure, focus on creating a clear hierarchy of pages and categories. Eliminate the pages you are not using and clean up the dead codes from your backend.

Shift your focus towards creating descriptive URLs for your product and category pages. And while you are at it, make sure you also include an XML sitemap and robots.txt file to help search engines crawl your website more effectively.

User reviews

User reviews can have a significant impact on your search engine rankings and conversions because search engines reward social proof. Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your product pages, and make it easy for them to do so.

User reviews can help improve the relevance and authority of your product pages, which can lead to higher search engine rankings and more sales.

Backlinks for eCommerce

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to the eCommerce website and they are crucial for SEO for any eCommerce business. Since the quality and quantity of backlinks can affect the website's rankings, backlinks from authoritative websites in the same industry can have a significant impact on the website's rankings.

Mobile optimization

Roughly half of your audience uses smartphones and other mobile devices to surf the web. More and more people are shopping on their mobile devices. Since the number only seems to be increasing, it is essential that your eCommerce website is optimized for mobile.

This means everything needs to be well-planned - from having a responsive design that is made using the mobile-first approach to optimizing your website’s loading speed and making sure your checkout process is mobile-friendly.

It is true that optimizing an eCommerce website for search engines requires some additional considerations and marketing efforts compared to other types of websites. The rules of traditional SEO make up only half of the SEO plan. But that only means more opportunity for optimization and a better chance at ranking higher in the search results.

There is no doubt that through constant monitoring and optimizations, eCommerce SEO can help your business make significant improvements in your bottom line.