SEO for e-Commerce: How to position your online store?
I already have my online store, but how do I position it in search engines so that my potential customers find me more easily? If you have ever asked yourself this question, today we want to give you the solution. What you need is to do SEO for e-commerce. You don’t know what it is or what it consists of? Don’t worry, we tell you all the details you need to know in this article. Keep reading!
What is SEO and why is it good for your e-commerce?
SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization (search engine optimization) and is one of the key strategies to position your online store or e-commerce. This term refers to the entire set of optimization and online positioning strategies that are applied to a web page to achieve greater visibility in online search engines (such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo) organically.
When we look for a product in a search engine, the first thing we should know is that the results that appear obey an algorithm made up of a large number of factors, both external and internal. This algorithm prioritizes offering the user the results that best fit the search performed. In that sense, SEO allows you to play with the algorithm to position your online store among the top positions.
Thus, a good SEO strategy means maximizing the benefits of your e-commerce business. Because your product or service may be the best, but if you don’t attract the consumer first, it won’t do any good.
SEO for e-commerce step by step
Once we are clear about what SEO for e-commerce is and the benefits it can bring to your online store, it is time to learn how to apply it step by step.
1. Analyze your business
The first step is to understand your business, or what is the same, your product. Understanding what you offer and what needs you are going to cover is a key aspect, not only to start your business , but also to know how to optimize your SEO positioning.
What am I selling? How do you search for my product on the internet? These are questions you have to ask yourself before learning how to position your ecommerce business. In addition, you must bear in mind that the perfect trend to monetize is to seek a balance between the most profitable and at the same time less competitive products.
2. Analyze your competition: Imitate it and do it better
A fundamental technique to position yourself is to analyze your competition. What positioning methods and procedures have they used to be there? What content do they teach on their websites? These are some of the questions you should ask to improve your SEO positioning .
Do a simulation: search for your product on the internet and take a look at the first results that appear. What kind of content is there? Are there any recurring keywords ? The objective of this simulation is to understand what these websites do so that they are offered as the results that best fit the search carried out .
This doesn’t imply that you need to duplicate them. It’s about knowing what’s right, to get there and improve it.
3. Keyword research, where do we start?
Keyword research consists of conducting research on relevant keywords or search terms to improve the organic positioning of your ecommerce business . The main objective of that visibility is, again, to attract traffic to your online store, aligned with your business objectives.
This keyword research will provide the ideal information to determine:
- What are my clients looking for?
- How many people search for my product?
- How do I search for my product?
- How difficult is it going to be to differentiate myself?
Thus, you must assess the possibilities offered by each of the variables and choose the most suitable to position your online store .
4. Informational and commercial searches with your blog posts
The user’s search intention is an essential element to predict what type of information they will look at on the search engine results page (SERP), what results they will click on and what they expect when they reach the landing page of your website through the search engines. Google results.
At this point it is necessary to make a distinction between informational and commercial searches.
Informational searches are those that respond to a specific type of information: What is the weather today, when is the next Champions League match , how to make a cheesecake . In one way or another, by providing quality answers to these informational searches, you will achieve: offer valuable content, position your online store as a reference source in your sector and get clicks for your online store organically.
On the other hand, commercial searches are those that provide data on a specific product and directly influence the purchase decision process : best air fryer , capsule coffee machine price . Your job is to know how to capture these searches and arouse enough trust and quality to convert that search into a click to the shopping cart of your online store.
The synergies between these two
types of search are intended to generate traffic for your online store, improve the positioning of your online store and, ultimately, improve the sales of your ecommerce business.
5. Rank product categories for transactional searches
To know how to position the product categories of our online store , we must first understand what transactional searches are .
- Transactional searches are those aimed at completing an action, usually a purchase . They are mainly aimed at sales, but we also talk about other “transactions” such as subscriptions to newsletters, signing up for the beta of a service, etc.
- These are searches that are usually related to the words price or discount , since most users are determined to buy a product and are influenced by these aspects at the time of purchase decision.
Let’s say we are a sportswear company and we want to increase online sales of our sports shoes.
First of all, all transactional searches that can reach the sports shoes section of our page must be converted into purchases. Therefore, the first step is to optimize our landing page for sports shoes. Include information and keywords about sports shoes, use intralinks , take care of the order and presentation in which the products appear, the ratings, the images…
And why not generate traffic first and then optimize the landing page? The sooner the better, right?
What would be the point of attracting traffic if when those transactional searches start to arrive, my landing page is not optimized? Would we invite our friends to see how clean our house is without cleaning it first? Well this is the same. If we don’t optimize our sports shoe landing page first, we run the risk of those transactional searches going away.
Secondly, we will take care of positioning our sports footwear catalogue . How? Well, very simple. Once the study of the keywords with which we are going to position ourselves is done, we will take care of generating content in the form of posts to attract traffic from informational and commercial searches . In this way, we achieve a revaluation of the sports footwear section of our online store as a point of reference (which will be rewarded with a better positioning in search engines ) and at the same time we increase transactional search traffic to our landing page. Sports shoes.
6. Technical SEO for e-Commerce
One of the biggest mistakes made in ecommerce is not considering the technical aspects of SEO for what they are: the key element to influence search results and establish the first contact with the customer.
Falling into the mistake of giving more weight to the “literary quality” of the content, than to SEO positioning techniques can be very expensive. Leaving aside the technical aspects results in poorly structured websites, with no traceability and poor performance.
Another of the most common mistakes is believing you know SEO positioning, or at least enough to improve the positioning of your online store . You may think that your strategy is done perfectly and that you are going to be a millionaire .
At the time, you see that there is no effect or that problems begin to appear in your online store and you begin to understand that it is too big for you. You can even believe that you are applying improvements to the positioning of your online store when in reality you are worsening its visibility.
Being experts in technical SEO would be ideal. However, not everyone has the necessary knowledge or the time and practice to exercise it. In that case, the best option is to seek the advice of a good SEO agency or SEO consultant .
7. Data marking
Also known as rich snippets, data markup is a series of codes inserted into a website that allow the link to your online store to be revealed, added to a series of visual stimuli and additional information about your website. Its main objective is to increase the attractiveness of your website to achieve a greater probability of clicks.
In this sense, data markup is key to making your online store stand out from two perspectives:
The search engine perspective, which will find the information more structured and organized and will improve your search engine ranking.
The perspective of the user who clicks on the link, who will see extra resources in your online store that invite him, both visually and informatively, to choose you as an option.
Because in a scenario of competitive searches in which people seek to save time, why not offer an attractive result in less time ?
8. Catalog pagination deindexation
First of all, you should know that it is essential that the URL of your online store be indexed in order to fight for those much-desired top positions in search results . We can index it manually or wait for search engine bots to crawl it. However, it is recommended to index your URL manually as soon as possible, since it will speed up the process.
In addition, the more URLS are indexed, the better positioning of your online
store will be with respect to your competitors . However, not everything goes.
It won’t do any good to index all your online content like crazy, if you include URLS with repeated content in other URLS already indexed.
This is especially noticeable in sections of the online store such as the pages in which the catalog is divided . Inevitably there will be information that is constantly repeated and this is normal. But if you index it, it will be considered by Google as duplicate and worthless content, which will penalize you in terms of visibility and web positioning.
In this sense, it is recommended to deindex the pages of your online store catalog , since with this you will save tracking resources for the most important sections of your online store.
9. Deindexation of products?
Another important aspect to take into account is the deindexation of products . Should we unindex them? The answer is it depends.
It depends on the extension of our catalog, we should consider whether to deindex them or not. If we have a very extensive catalog provided by the supplier, it is best to de-index it . In addition, it is always useful to try to reduce our catalog as much as possible and create your own product descriptions , again to save tracking resources and upgrade the situating of your web-based store.
10. Data markup to stand out in results with stock, reviews, and your physical business if you have one.
As we discussed earlier, data markup is a very useful tool, both visually and informatively, to increase the attractiveness of your online store in the eyes of future customers and search engines.
In this sense, you should pay special attention to the marking of stock, reviews and physical business in case you have it . Think about it, how many times have you gone to a restaurant for its evaluation or photos of its dishes? These elements actively influence the purchase decision process and most of the time they are decisive. Therefore, including them in the data markup of our online store is essential .
11. Product filter and internal linking.
Once you have classified your products in the different categories of your ecommerce business, why not mix them all and multiply the number of keywords ?
Let’s go back to our sportswear business for a moment. Let’s say that we already have all the sports shoes listed, in which we include a section of football boots, another section of shoes by colors and a section of shoes on sale. What if we put all these variables together, in such a way that users, when searching for red football boots on sale, are more likely to see my online store ?
This web distribution is possible thanks to product filters , which allow users to filter products by categories, the best structure for URLS being category/brand/product .
The resulting lists are more limited as the user filters. However, just as they are reduced, they are also more specific. In this way, transactional searches that are looking for something in particular will have a higher conversion rate in purchases .
The ideal is to have your online store with an intuitive and easy-to-use design , not only for users, but also for web crawlers. We have that clear. Therefore, emphasis must be placed on having an organized URL structure . This is not only achieved with filters, but also with internal linking.
With internal linking, what we achieve is that searches, mainly informational and commercial, stay in our online store. With this, what we achieve is to increase traffic between the products of our online store , favoring and strengthening the positioning of our ecommerce business . Therefore, it is one of the practices that should not be missing in all SEO positioning for ecommerce .
12. Sign up for Free Google Shopping Listings to position your products.
Another option to position the products of your online store is the one offered by Google with its Free Google Shopping Cards .
The free listings allow you to show your products on Google , on the multiple platforms that make it up: Google Images, YouTube, Google Lens…
To enjoy the advantages that Google offers you for your online store , you must meet a series of attributes that are aimed at the correct categorization of your products . Once again, the purpose is that the user obtains the best result for the product that he is looking for.
There is a data limit to include in the form below which you will not be able to catalog our products. However, Google recommends that we provide as much information as possible and be as precise as we can, since, once again, it will improve the user experience when buying from the platform.
13. Does Google My Business work for online stores? Yes, if they are optimized. Essential to capture the first traffic.
- Google My Business works as a platform to make physical businesses visible on the internet . But, the question is: does it also work for online stores? The answer is yes.
- Under the “Brand Pages” option, Google My Business offers the possibility of listing your online store without the need for a physical address . However, as we have been discussing in this post, it will be useless if you do not optimize it.
- One of the biggest mistakes when registering online stores in Google My Business is including the adjective “online”. Never use the adjective “online” and less so in titles, as it will always result in a worse positioning compared to other businesses.
There are a series of actions that we must carry out if we want to optimize our online store in Google My Business . The first is to add multimedia content : high-quality images, good framing… and at least 5 photographs from our online store.
The NAP (acronym that corresponds in English to name, address and telephone number) is also one of the most important data. In addition, Google benefits all those who include business hours , since it improves the experience for its users.
The category should also be taken into account when we create our Google My Business account. This must be as specific as possible and, in addition, we must have at least 3 different categories to optimize our online store in Google My Business .