According to Taylor Scher’s reports, organic search accounts for more than 53% of eCommerce website traffic and has an average conversion rate of 2.8%. Furthermore, 23.6% of eCommerce orders are directly related to organic traffic. 

To help you navigate through this crucial aspect of an enhanced online journey, we’ve curated an SEO checklist tailored to eCommerce website development​. You’ll learn: 

• What is SEO, and why is it important?
• What are the key SEO factors for eCommerce site rankings?
• What are the SEO best practices for eCommerce websites

Ready to learn? Let’s begin.

What is SEO, and Why is It Essential for Your eCommerce Website?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a practice of optimizing and aligning your website with search engine algorithms, improving its rankings on search engines like Google, Microsoft Edge, etc. 

For eCommerce, SEO involves optimizing your eCommerce website design​ and leveraging high-quality, keyword-enriched content that enhances online performance and secures better ranking for your website, increasing your digital store’s online visibility. 

It involves aspects like quality content, site loading speed, keywords, images and media, mobile-friendliness, etc. All these elements contribute to the online success of your website by making it more visible and attractive to users. 

Why is ​SEO important for eCommerce websites?

With around 1.09 billion websites online, ranking high on search engines is more challenging than ever. Here, well-planned and executed eCommerce SEO strategies offer multiple benefits – 

• Increases visibility: SEO is a significant way to increase online visibility. Ranking higher on SERP makes your website easily discoverable to users searching for your products or services. This increases your chances of attracting more visitors. 
• Builds trust and credibility: When you achieve higher SERP rankings and increased online visibility, it builds trust and credibility in your customers. Besides, it adds value to your business, and people are more likely to find your website more reliable and trustworthy. 
• Drives traffic: SEO strategies help drive more traffic to your website. This increase in traffic drives more sales and business growth. 
• Delivers long-term results: SEO is responsible for offering long-term results. If your website follows robust SEO strategies for eCommerce websites, you will reap its benefits over time. 
• Encourages cost-savings: Unlike paid ads and campaigns, SEO drives organic traffic without any cost. All you have to do is optimize your site and attract customers. 

What Are the Most Important SEO Factors for eCommerce Websites?

Does your online store fail to generate enough sales? Well, you are in the right place. While investing in eCommerce website development services​, you should consider these factors to ensure increased site visibility. 

• Backlinks: A critical ranking factor, quality backlinks tell Google about the credibility of your website. 
• Internal links: Internal linking involves linking directly to other website pages. If done correctly, it builds site authority, drives personalized user journeys, and supports your SEO efforts. 
• Duplicate content: Google hates duplicate content and will penalize sites with duplicate content and redundant pages. 
• HTTP: Make sure every URL is integrated with keywords. Automated keywords can rank your website down. On the flip side, personalized URLs with integrated keywords can help you increase your SEO rankings and capabilities. 
• Product descriptions: Product descriptions are highly crucial for SEO. They offer keyword-rich content and drive purchase decisions. Product descriptions should highlight benefits, use keywords, keep your descriptions brief, add testimonials, use images, etc. 
• Sitemaps: Sitemaps help Google to understand your website structure and allow it to crawl through the site.  
• Image optimization: Image optimization is crucial for your SEO strategies and helps to speed up your website. Also, add file names and alt texts to strengthen your SEO efforts. 

Focusing on these will help eliminate SEO issues on eCommerce websites and improve search engine rankings. 

An eCommerce SEO Checklist to Begin With

There are several parts to SEO. To improve search engine rankings, consider prioritizing on-page and off-page SEO, local SEO services, and technical SEO. A primary focus on these areas can future-proof your website and gain higher rankings in search engines. 

Equipped with this SEO checklist for eCommerce websites, let’s explore how some of its key elements can help you drive better results. 

1. Improve Your Architecture

Site architecture deals with the organization of your pages, products, categories, and posts. It is an essential technical-SEO aspect that every eCommerce website should consider. A well-optimized eCommerce website architecture helps Google index and crawl across all your products and categories. It also makes it easier for users to find your products quickly. Additionally, it transfers link equity, helping you improve your site rankings. 

2. Optimize On-Page Elements

On-page optimization is a vital way to increase your online visibility and relevance. Some compelling ways to optimize your on-page content include using header tags, title tags, meta descriptions, informative content, images with file names and alt tags, URLs, etc. It’s essential to maintain a content hierarchy to enhance readability and reduce bounce rates. Structure your content and use descriptive yet short and keyword-rich URLs. 

3. Consider Website Speed and Mobile-Friendliness

People do not like to wait.

If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors will abandon it. Besides, most users browse websites on mobile devices, and your website should look appealing and perform well on devices of all screen sizes. 

Google prioritizes website speed and mobile friendliness. To improve your website speed, consider compression, minimize HTTP requests, reduce server response time, consider browser caching, minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, optimize pages, etc. 

To ensure mobile-friendliness for your eCommerce website, use – 

• responsive designs
• readable font sizes
• clickable buttons
• avoid Flash 

4. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research

Keywords are fundamental to search engines. Keywords are words or phrases visitors type into the search engines to find answers to their queries quickly. Conduct thorough eCommerce SEO keyword research using tools like SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, and Ahrefs. 

To get the best out of keyword research, consider local keywords, long-tail keywords aligned with the search intent, and keywords competitors mostly use. 

5. Optimize for Local SEO

Local SEO is the key to tapping into your local audience. 

For example, if you ship only in New York, optimizing your website specifically for New York will fetch you more traffic than optimizing it for worldwide visibility. To implement local SEO strategies, keep your name, contact number, address, and other information consistent across all digital channels and citations, request customers to share feedback, improve your Google My Business profile, focus on area-specific keywords, etc. 

6. Don’t Ignore eCommerce SEO

For eCommerce businesses, SEO is essential to drive organic traffic and boost sales. To optimize your eCommerce website for SEO, use canonical tags to focus on your primary products, get rid of duplicate content, use schema markup for products, highlight product reviews, modify complex navigation, be cautious about redirects, and fix broken links. 

7. Include User-Generated Content

User-oriented content is another way to improve your SEO efforts. Furthermore, it boosts confidence and adds credibility to your product and business. 

Do not just focus on good reviews. Remember that bad reviews are not always bad for your reputation. Every product will have its pros and cons. Striking a proper balance between bad and good reviews makes your feedback look organic and authentic. 

8. Create Backlinks

Backlinks are a great way to increase Google ranking. It helps to determine where your pages are in the SERPs. The more backlinks you add from high-quality sites, the more authoritative your eCommerce website becomes. 

9. Add Schema Markup

Schema markups are codes that enable Google to understand your web pages better. By introducing schema to your website’s HTML code, you can increase the chances of securing rich snippets in SERPs. 

With rich snippets, you can add extra information below your title tag and descriptions. This information includes prices, reviews, ratings, etc. Displaying such data makes your website more noticeable and increases your click-through rate. It is significant for eCommerce sites as it helps boost your products and makes them stand out. 

10. Consider a Backlink Gap Analysis

Backlink gap analysis includes searching for websites linked to your competitors’ websites but not yours. Once you find them, you can consider contacting link-building professionals who can help you get your brand featured on their high-authority sites. 

Additionally, to support the above, consider monitoring, analyzing, and adjusting your eCommerce website’s SEO strategy to be up-to-date with market trends, search engine algorithms, and customer demands. Remember that SEO is never a “do it and forget it” practice. Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and rank tracking tools to analyze your SEO efforts and make changes. 

Summing Up

SEO is crucial for eCommerce website development​ and can boost your online visibility, increase website traffic, and build a loyal customer base. 

By focusing on the SEO checklist for eCommerce sites, you can optimize your online store without any significant investment. SEO doesn’t happen overnight, and it should not be rushed. It’s a long-term strategy that requires you to regularly monitor, update, and optimize your SEO strategies to stay ahead of your competitors, align with algorithm changes, and achieve the best results.

Get a No-obligations SEO Audit for your e-commerce website Today with Reeshatech.

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