How to Optimize an ecommerce website

As we all know that with hundreds (or even thousands) of product and hundreds category pages, on-page optimization for ecommerce websites is a real challenge for SEO person, In this article  I’m going to share you some best practices for on-page SEO for e-commerce website. And just like for any website, on-page SEO for e-commerce sites begins with keyword research. So now login to your Google Adwords account, click on tools and analysis. And then click on keyword planner.

Obviously with the e-commerce website, you don’t have as many keywords or key terms to choose from keyword tool. So basically what you’re trying to do is find the variations that people use to find the products that you’re selling. So once you’re here, click on search for keyword and ad group ideas, and you have a few options.

You can put in your products, category and service here. Or you can put in a particular landing page. So if you’re trying to rank a category or product page, you can paste that in here. And Google will give you suggestions based on that page. But for the sake of the video, we’re going to put in a couple of keywords at the top.

Now once you have your keywords in place, it’s time to check to make sure that you don’t have any duplicate title or description tags on your site. And to do that, you want to install the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool. So just Google Screaming Frog SEO Spider and this is the first result.

So once you’ve identified and fixed any duplicate content issues [if any you find] you might have had with your META title and META description tags, it’s time to check to see if your duplicate content within your site, which is very common for e-commerce site, [are] on their product and category pages.

Now I want to talk about breadcrumbs navigation. This actually has to be custom coded, but it’s something that’s very SEO friendly. So as you can see here, they have breadcrumbs navigation. So from their home page, they have the category home and garden. And from that, they have kitchen. Then they have hot drinks preparation, and then they have coffee grinders.

Some Elements of the product landing page

Customer Reviews
Build or buy a system to automatically email customers a few weeks after purchasing and ask for a review
When getting off the ground and trying to get volume, offer incentives such as a discount on their next purchase in exchange for a review
Don’t worry about publishing negative reviews, customers aren’t silly and can tell when reviews are a bit too positive

Added benefit: microdata
You also need to make sure you are marking up these reviews with relevant microdata. This will give Google more context about your content, as well as giving you the chance to improve click-through-rates from search results
The use of review microformats is increasing all the time so there is an argument that you are not standing out anymore if all the other results have the same type of markup.

Rel=”next”, Rel=”prev” and view all
One of the problems that always crops up on large eCommerce sites is how to efficiently deal with pagination. You can have product categories that contain thousands of products that span many pages.

Also, make your as, when we scroll down more products visible, means normally show some products while on scroll listing increase, this is good to reduce the load time.

Since Rand’s post of 2009, we’ve been given an additional way of handling pagination. Namely the rel=”next”, rel=”prev” and “view all” attributes. This markup can help Google better understand pagination and pass link equity to key pages

Other Important factors

  • Social sharing buttons
  • Page Speed
  • Open graph tags
  • Search options

Clear call to action
Essential for any eCommerce website. Your ultimate goal is to sell a product so you need to make the call to action as clear as possible. Make sure you are running experiments on your product pages to test and improve conversion rates. Many eCommerce stores focus a bit too much on getting more traffic via SEO and PPC, whilst a quicker way to get more revenue is to get more out of the traffic you already have by improving conversion rates.

Trust signals
You are asking people to enter their credit card details on your website. They need to be able to trust that you are a genuine company and that their personal details are secure. You can do this on the product page and enforce it again throughout the checkout process.

Product description
In a post-Panda world, it is very important to make your product descriptions unique. Taking descriptions straight from manufacturers or product feeds does not differentiate you at all from the hundreds of other retailers who sell the same product.

Page URL
Again, this is pretty basic SEO but there is one key thing to remember with eCommerce sites. You should not include categories or sub-categories in product URLs, especially if there is more than one way to find a product, for example if it is in more than one category. This can lead to duplicate product pages. You can fix this with rel=”canonical” tags but it isn’t really ideal.

Best practice is to just use product name and a code as the URL, for example – www.example.com/product-name-12345. The reason for the addition of a number in the URL is to cover yourself against similar product names – not usually a problem but worth trying to prevent.

Phone number
If you can provide a phone number, do it. Not only to help in terms of customer support, but also as another trust signal. If we think back to what Panda was trying to achieve, one of the questions was “would you trust this website with your credit card?” and one factor that certainly helps inspire trust is a phone number.

Company details
Particularly relevant for companies who target local markets, giving Google more signals of your location can help rankings for those types of keywords. You can also use a few bits of Schema.org markup to give some extra context to the content. It is also another trust signal for Google and users to look at.

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