E-commerce has changed the landscape of the retail supply chain; fast and accurate delivery of e-commerce orders is critical to ensuring customer satisfaction and thus realising profits. Operations and Warehouse managers must now consider split case picking, multiline item sorting and fast turnaround times for their customer 24/7 to maximise expectations.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) for e-commerce businesses may seem like a challenge. Majority of online stores have some characteristics that make them different from other websites and therefore is not ideal to follow the same best practices that are applicable to blogging or informational websites.
Some essentials such as unique and helpful content, user-friendly site navigation and social share-buttons do really work well for online stores plus support to optimise traffic for their website.
Online stores have their specific rationale and goals that require specific optimisation strategies and site structure. However, there are certain key elements crucial for a perfect e-commerce website.
1. Schema Markup
I did explain this in my previous blog post but would expatiate on that again. Schema Markup helps search engines return further information helpful for the web user. With schema markup, you can describe more details about your product to search engines, so this information appears in search results. Adding prices, reviews, today’s deals, offers, discounts, ratings etc. – is very essential for e-commerce site performance.
2. Page Content
Product descriptions for an e-commerce website must be unique and informative. On most occasions, you would see website owners use the same manufacturers’ descriptions – as this is not best practice in SEO. Unique content and description is always key, therefore, make sure you use separate description for each product to avoid duplication of content, as Google would penalise your site.
3. Page Load Time
Page load time is the time it takes to download and display the entire content of a web page in the browser window of a user (measured in seconds). Page load speed is vital to websites especially e-commerce as it affects user experience and critically contributes to your customers leaving the web page if they have to wait longer all the time. The quicker the page load time, the better.
4. Category Pages
Categories pages and tags help you sort your content and make it easier for users to find what they are looking for on your website. Customers tend to use general phrases when searching for products online ‘’cars,’’ ‘’dresses’’ etc. When you use keyword research, you can discover how your customer are looking for products and therefore create category pages based on this information – for your e-commerce business. Good examples are using seasonality’s to create such categories:
- Cars summer sale
- Autumn 2017 dresses
- Shoes summer 2017
- Shoes and accessories
Such pages tend to draw higher traffic for e-commerce website generally.
Certainly, there are no universal features or design options, which guarantee that your online shop will be elevated to the top positions of search results with popularity – but there are several general essentials and even desirable things, which should not be ignored when creating an online store using these SEO tips above.
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