5 SEO Quick Wins for E-commerce (With Bonus Wins!)
As an entrepreneur, increasing your sales and scaling out is a primary goal, and for many of us, this is much easier said than done when it comes to the internet and marketing online. Hitting the first page is an aspiration of many, but only the select few can hit that mark. This is mainly because the competition is extremely fierce in business and even more competitive in the e-commerce world. As the pandemic absorbs nearly all of 2020, more and more business owners and marketers turn to SEO professionals as a means of being discovered by their target audience. Some think that posting content, commenting on social media, and having a pretty site is enough. Unfortunately, it takes more than a pretty logo and nicely worded site to bring in customers, much less increase conversion. We’ve put together a comprehensive “e-commerce SEO quick wins” list that will help you finish 2020 with improvement and start the upcoming 2021 with a bang.
What can SEO do for my e-commerce website in 2020?
If you haven’t learned what SEO is, then now would be a great time to get on board and do some much needed due diligence. Knowing what needs to be done for your online store, and the best way to carry those tasks out is vital to securing more business from your online marketing efforts.
Before diving deeper, let’s take a brief moment to provide a topical explanation of what SEO is and how it can help improve user experience and create a seamless avenue of extra conversions for your e-commerce site.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization, better known as SEO, is all about positioning your site as the possible hub for information, products, and services within a particular niche or industry. Whether you sell handmade jewelry or head up a marketing team, aligning your SEO efforts with your growth strategy will garner much better results.
The ultimate goal of using SEO is to attract more customers, gain more traffic, and increase conversions by optimizing the content, structure, and delivery of your site and its components.
Why are e-commerce sites different than others when doing SEO?
Do you own a brick n mortar and struggling online to gain exposure and traffic? Are you a marketer in charge of ensuring your client’s e-commerce portal is hitting its organic goals and meeting traffic predictions? These can be just a few examples of when SEO takes a divide. Not all SEO is done the same, and for e-commerce websites, SEO has been treated a little differently. Search engines like Google place a different categorical metric on sites that sell or have financial transactions.
This is mainly due to how the site structure and consumer experience are employed. Unlike other websites that may promote a service or informational query, e-commerce websites have to deal with product categories, available inventories, shipping, etc. What this means is the approach for SEO is slightly different and requires a few techniques that are more favorably to the retail/e-commerce world.
Now let’s get into how to score some quick wins for your digital retail marketplace.
5 SEO Quick Wins for Boosting e-commerce sales
Whether you’re a seasoned marketing professional or a business owner looking to gain an upper-hand against your competition, we’ve made a checklist that will help you reduce the gap between your audience and shopping cart.
Mobile experience optimization
This cannot be stressed enough. Nearly 70% of most e-commerce sales result from a mobile user, and there is no downtrend in sight. This makes it extremely important to make sure your users are getting the best experience. In the 2nd quarter, the e-commerce sector in the US saw $47 billion from mobile sales. Not to mention mobile users, on average, spend twice as much as desktop-based consumers.
Did you know that over 60% of mobile users are more likely to click the buy button on sites that are optimized and mobile friendly? What does your SEO audit tell you about your mobile user experience? You can see a side-by-side comparison of how your desktop stacks up to your mobile by using tools like Mobile Moxie’s Page-o-Scope tool, that gives you on-page visuals of what the two look like next to the other.
URL optimization
Visual aesthetics play a factor in your URL structure and how likely a user will click on your site from a search result. URLs should not be hard to read, contain special characters, numbers, and look incomplete. Here is an example of a URL structure to avoid:
https://yourdomain.com/index.php?=31583=yja=?p=152
As you can see, anyone who clicks on this link will not what the page is about until they get there. The purpose of optimizing your URLs is to implement your keywords most clearly and concisely possible. Let’s say, for example, you own a retail website, and you sell electric skateboards. Your target URL structure should fall somewhere in the line of:
https://yourdomain.com/eletric-skateboards or https://yourdomain.com/electronic-skateboards
This lets the user, search engines, and other crawlers know exactly what your page is about and will help customer trust their click by avoiding long and weird-looking URL structures.
Make navigation easy
Location! Location! Location! It’s important to businesses in the physical element, and the same rings true when designing your user experience for your digital space. How easy is it for users to find what they are looking for on your site? Is your navigational menu easy to find and clearly composed with proper language and concise titles? For example, traditional e-commerce websites have About, Blog, Categories, Shop, and Cart components, give or take one or two of these. Is your menu a clickable/hoover responsive menu that reduces onscreen clutter when navigating is not needed? Making your pages easy to surf between brands, product type, etc.
Frictionless shopping/checkout
Perhaps one of the biggest cart abandonment factors is the checkout process. Users rarely want to go through a page-by-page checkout considered the norm for most other site niches. Retailers and e-commerce marketplaces are now turning to a frictionless checkout process that allows users to view, add to, and checkout from the cart on their current page without having to go to another page to enter information. This increases conversions by creating a seamless and smooth transactional experience.
Products by Popularity
If you notice that some of your products are outperforming others, it may be time to listen to the people and organize your listings according to their popularity. If customers are trending toward a particular product, it is only logical that others are also interested in something similar. Organizing your pages by popularity as a default can help boost sales by reducing how much time customers are spending looking for the “Right” product.
Wrapping quick wins up for an increase
Just paying attention to these quick win factors can help boost your sales. As a bonus for making it this far, we are going to share two more quick wins that are the most overlooked:
Secret quick wins
Thanks for making it this far. Let’s see what else you can do to have the sales start pouring in.
Metas swooping in for gains
Asking a variety of professionals, many will come back with mixed responses to this one. Ensuring your meta descriptions are in place, use your target keywords, and bring an element of engagement is as equally responsible for results as the above-listed tactics. It is vital. Your meta descriptions usually contain a highly engaging headline, use of targeted keywords, and crafty CTAs to spark action. Have you checked your Metas lately?
Product descriptions matter
Whether it is 20 words or an entire page, your product descriptions will have a major impact on your e-commerce sales and traffic. Generally speaking, there is no golden ratio of how long your product descriptions should be. Some can get their points across with 1 to 2 sentences, while others go the extra mile and make sure users do not need to go anywhere else for answers. Customer retention can be saved by having longer product descriptions. High-converting products usually have 500+ word product descriptions that go over every aspect of a product. This reduces the buyer’s confusion and permits your users to make informed buying decisions.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, what are you waiting for? Supercharge your e-commerce site and start scoring these quick wins today!
