5 SEO Best Practices for Retailers This Holiday Season 'Tis the season for holiday internet shopping. Optimize your ecommerce SEO and website with these five hacks.
By Atul Jindal Edited by Micah Zimmerman
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
With the emerging economic globalization, we see a rising trend of online shopping and ecommerce. Global ecommerce sales amounted to around $5.2 trillion worldwide in 2021 and are expected to grow by 56% over the following years, reaching about $8.1 trillion by 2026.
The holiday season is upon us, and ecommerce SEO during these times has always positively impacted profit and revenues for retailers. With emerging trends in SEO, we need to keep ourselves up to date with SEO best practices to stay competitive.
Ecommerce SEO best practices in 2023
An ecommerce website facilitates buying and selling goods digitally, and it is estimated that 95% of all purchases will occur through ecommerce stores by 2041.
Thus, ecommerce stores are the most profitable digital business strategy for retailers. But, establishing an ecommerce website and putting together the proper marketing is more challenging than it sounds and has many challenges.
Studies showed that the ecommerce store success rate is only 10-20%. Shopify released research that said one-fifth of all ecommerce businesses that started in 2016 closed after their first year in operation.
So, if you have an ecommerce website and want to yield revenue through it, you may have to struggle with its success unless you follow the right ecommerce SEO practices to design and optimize it.
With the following SEO best practices, you can carry out your ecommerce store optimization:
Related: How to Build an Ecommerce Brand in a Crowded and Competitive Industry
1. Keyword research
Conducting keyword research is the most important step in SEO for ecommerce websites. Optimizing your ecommerce website content with the right keywords yields outstanding results in the long run.
Keyword research involves finding those words that users enter into the search engine when are trying to find your products or services.
Your target keyword has to fulfill four standards:
- Significant search volume
- High relevance
- Strong conversion value
- Adequate competition
Using long-tail keywords can increase conversion rates and rank your website more easily. A long-tail keyword is a term that has low search volume but fulfills the criteria for relevance to your business. People searching with long-tail keywords are usually out with a buying intent, which is why these keywords tend to generate higher conversions or yield high returns on investment.
So, consider including relevant long-tail keywords in your marketing research as you optimize your ecommerce store.
2. Optimize product pages
A product page is a page on your ecommerce website where your prospects view your products. This page contains all the details about your product that a customer might be interested in before making a purchase, including product images, related information, pricing, shipping details and reviews.
After conducting thorough keyword research, you can use your researched keywords to create content for the product pages on your website. A product page with well-optimized content can drive traffic with a strong buying intent to your website.
The product page contains product descriptions, images, videos and reviews. Your product page can be optimized by:
- Using high-quality images that a user can zoom, pinch and see from different angles.
- Detailed video about the product.
- Keyword optimized in product titles and writing rich text descriptions.
- Adding testimonials from other consumers.
- Adding CTAs (Call-to-actions)
3. Premium quality product images
How often have you bought an online product after viewing poor-quality images? The chances are low.
The same is the case with other consumers. Product quality influences how customers perceive your brand, consequently impacting their purchase decision. Poor-quality product photos threaten to drive customers away from your store. High-quality product photos, on the other hand, attract people and convince them of your product's worth.
Therefore, using multiple high-quality product images makes your website look appealing and optimizes your store for SEO. This is because a well-optimized image gets better visibility in Google Images and brings more traffic to a website. It also improves user experience by making a website easier to navigate.
Related: 10 Reasons Ecommerce Sites Fail
4. Website personalization
Website personalization provides your site visitors or buyers with unique experiences tailored to their demands and desires.
86% of customers admit that website personalization influences their purchase decision. This is why personalizing your product recommendations according to the customers' interests may increase their chances of buying from your store.
For example, personalization on ecommerce can be done using data analytics, which could show customers similar products based on their browsing preferences or even show custom offers that can be used to upsell other items.
5. Simplify the checkout option
A 2021 study suggested that 83.48% of online retail orders were abandoned during the checkout process in 2020.
While there were several reasons for shopping cart abandonment, the primary reason was the complex checkout process. You can increase your ecommerce store revenue by simplifying the checkout process.
Improve your checkout landing page by providing consumers with clear shipping information, multiple payment methods and guest checkout options. This makes the consumers more likely to shop from your store in the future.
Related: How the Online Shopping Checkout Process is Becoming More Efficient
Conclusion
In the present competition, improving the visibility of your ecommerce website in the search engine space is very important to the success of the online business. The holiday season drives most of the traffic to ecommerce stores, and your site with low traffic could be a critical impact on business revenue.
Ecommerce SEO might not be able to deliver overnight success, but you will start noticing the benefits of SEO in terms of traffic and conversions. Depending on your product, you may likely compete with the big sharks.
