Every year, technologies move forward, trends change, and, accordingly, the features of SEO optimization. For high-quality SEO website promotion, it is important to think through a strategy (a step-by-step set of actions aimed at achieving goals) taking into account the main trends and technological developments.
It will be interesting: how to build an SEO strategy
We have prepared 10 recommendations that will help online store owners get the most out of SEO.
Build a convenient store structure
The structure of an online store is a logically built system of blocks. A good structure makes site navigation comfortable and increases sales and product search speed, an inconvenient one confuses the buyer and forces them to go to competitors.
It is important to think through the structure at the design stage: this way you can make it logical and avoid duplication of products. Product names should be short and understandable for all users. If the product is called differently, we recommend using the most popular name.
Try to structure it like this: "Category" - "Subcategory" - "Product". Searching for a product in a maximum of three clicks is convenient and fast.
A convenient structure turns potential customers into regular customers, an inconvenient one wastes the buyer's time and does not lead to a purchase.
Develop a convenient mobile version of the store
SEO optimization of an online store for mobile devices is an advantage that will raise your site in search results. Firstly, Google has already launched a mobile-first index (therefore, the mobile version of the store is considered the main one), and secondly, 88% of users solve everyday tasks using mobile devices.
Read also:Internet Marketing Trends in 2022
Improve Your Snippets
A snippet is a small text with key queries. Users see it when they enter their query in search engines. Most users study the snippet before visiting the online store.
The content of the description tag does not affect the ranking of the site, but gives the search engine an idea of the content of the page, increases the clickability of the snippet, and affects the number of repeat visits to the site.
Click-through rate (CTR) is an important indicator of relevance for search engines. CTR is highly correlated with ranking, as an increase in clicks improves the position of an online store in search results.
We recommend using:
- Search Console performance reports to analyze target audience interests (if the page occupies a high position, but has a low CTR, this means that the Title and meta description tags are not relevant and need to be improved);
- additional characters in the description (they do not affect the position in the search results, but can increase clickthrough rate: people browse snippets in passing, so not only the content but also the design is important);
- rating (it has a positive effect on the number of transitions and distinguishes the site from other search engine results);
- Schema micro-markup (a dictionary of semantic data markup).
Read also: as correctly compose Title
Create a convenient navigation
Navigation on the site should be not only logical but also practical. Remember that the customer can choose between several items for purchase, and if it is easy for him to return to the previous product page, he will make a choice faster.
Use “Breadcrumbs” when creating site navigation
Breadcrumbs allow the customer of the online store to navigate where he is and how to go to another section. From the point of view of SEO optimization, breadcrumbs are another way of internal linking on the site.
Focus on search in the store
Search in the online store performs two important functions: it simplifies navigation for visitors and affects the optimization of the site. If you get the most out of the search function, you can:
- collect statistics about popular products, and their availability;
- edit metadata so that if the product name is entered incorrectly, the customer finds the product on the site;
- simplify the search and purchase of the product (if the customer is uncomfortable using the site navigation).
Do not forget that in the era of semantics, search engines try to determine the intent of each query in order to provide the user with what he is interested in. Search engines take into account search behavior patterns, search history, user location, and time.
Use human-friendly URLs
A human-friendly URL (HUR) is a simple and understandable page address for users and search engines. A HUR performs one of the main tasks of SEO - it increases the relevance of the page.
Don't worry about easy-to-remember keywords, use key phrases. For example, if you sell rubber boats, use these words in the page address.
It is advisable to use transliteration, not words in English, since such an address is difficult to read, and remember, and in general, search engines do not consider them synonyms of keywords, which is important.
Optimize category pages and product cards
The main page of the site is one, but there can be many categories, so from the point of view of SEO optimization, they are no less important. To ensure search engine optimization and comfortable use of category pages, we recommend:
- structure product descriptions;
- fill pages with unique content;
- use relinking, hashtags, key phrases;
- fill in the "alt" tag to optimize images.
Due to linking and navigation, categories can convey their weight to product cards and increase search results not only for low-frequency but also for medium-frequency queries. Any product card must contain a description, photos, and information about the cost and availability of products. Product structuring is mandatory.
Most often, products are displayed by default and do not always correspond to the client's interests. We recommend adding filters to the site that allow you to change the sorting of products by popularity, price, novelty, brand, technical parameters, and year of release.
Most often, customers use filtering by price: from higher to lower or vice versa.
Optimize images in the store
There can be more than 1000 products on the site, so it is important to take the choice of photo materials seriously. We recommend that you follow the following recommendations when adding photos to the store:
- use the "alt" tag attribute: its content is indexed by search bots, so it is important to write the text that corresponds to the image in the photo;
- add pop-up windows for quick preview of products;
- optimize the size of the images. It is important to choose the golden mean here since small images look unpresentable, large ones take a long time to load, and search bots do not index them at all;
- choose the size of the images taking into account the mobile version of the store. Viewing images with a large resolution requires a lot of traffic and takes longer to load, so the customer may close the store page before it even loads.
For sections and categories, use images with a size of 30 by 30 pixels, and for product cards - 300 by 300. You can also combine all the photos into a common CSS sprite: this way the store pages will load faster.
Google does not index or rank images with CSS, so to display them in the search it is better to use regular tags with source attributes.
The browser first analyzes all scripts, and only then loads the page. We recommend using a minimum of JavaScript to reduce page loading time.
Check the loading speed of your online store using the PageSpeed Insights
Actively develop your site's blog
A section with blog articles is not useless ballast! On the contrary, it is necessary to regularly replenish the site with fresh content, which is especially important for those online stores that do not have the opportunity to frequently update the product range with new items. Well-thought-out articles written from a professional perspective work to increase your expertise: after reading them, visitors will form a positive opinion of you as a true professional, which can directly affect sales. Even before making a purchase, people ask various questions: “How does it work?” “What types of products are there, and what are they used for?”, “Where can I use the product?” and thousands of others. Therefore, the more questions and topics of interest to your potential buyers you reveal, the better. You can find out what interests people in your niche by studying semantics and analyzing the popularity of competitors' articles.
Create a content plan, collect semantics, and think about who will write the content - a separate specialist or team, or maybe a separate copywriter.
If you work in a highly specialized niche, give preference to texts from experts: create separate pages with a biography for them, where each reader can make sure that the advice or review was written by a person who really understands what they are writing about.
Blog articles can improve not only your expertise but also your commercial pages: don't forget about linking!
Move your site to the secure https protocol, if you haven't done so before
You may have ignored this Google requirement. It's time to address the security issues of your online store! If your online store website involves registration, subscription, payment for goods, or other options for transferring personal data, you need to transfer your resources to the https protocol. It provides security on several levels:
- encrypts user data in such a way that it becomes a meaningless set of characters without a special decryption key;
- prevents data corruption;
- prevents attacks from intermediaries during transmission.
It is important to understand that the presence or absence of the secure https protocol affects not only the safety of users' personal data but also the ranking of the resource. The specialists of Idea Digital Agency have every reason to believe that in the future this impact will be even greater.
Get rid of duplicate pages and broken links of the site
Duplicate pages negatively affect your online store. Search engines simply cannot decide which page to show users on request, as a result of which:
- the rating of the entire site may decrease;
- keyword positions may also decrease;
- the search engine regularly changes the relevance between pages, which is why the positions will "jump".
To avoid this, duplicates must be found and eliminated in a timely manner. There are complete duplicates (the content is identical, only the URLs differ) and partial duplicates (when only part of the page content is duplicated). The former can occur due to incorrectly configured redirects, broken page hierarchy, or incorrect migration from HTTP to HTTPS. The latter may be a feature of your CMS system.
How to find duplicates:
- using the site: operator in Google;
- using various tools for crawling sites.
How to deal with duplicates:
- prohibit their indexing in robots.txt - a radical method that is more suitable for service pages;
- set up a 301 redirect from duplicates to the correct page;
- eliminate the cause of duplicate generation in the CMS.
Another problem that often arises when managing an online store with many products is broken pages. You can detect them in Google Search Console and when scanning the site with a crawler. Such pages have a response code of 404. They appear in the following cases:
- the page has been deleted;
- the page has been moved, but the appropriate redirect has not been configured;
- the user entered the URL manually and made a mistake.
If in the latter case, you cannot do anything, then in the first two cases you can get rid of broken pages. You just need to follow simple rules:
- If there is no product, do not rush to delete the page with it. Place appropriate labels to inform the customer that the product is temporarily unavailable, and offer similar products on the page.
- When moving to a secure protocol, don't forget to set up redacts.
- Set up a 301 redirect to the main page if deleting the page is unavoidable.
- Set up a 301 redirect if you have changed the page URL.
Focus on providing only high-quality content for users
Relevant content is the most important component of optimizing an online store. It is with its help that you can increase your positions in search results, gain user trust, and thereby increase your sales. We have already mentioned the importance of blog articles above, but the texts on product pages are no less important. Today, they still work great for promoting pages, so don't neglect their quality. In this article, you will learn more about what a good SEO text should be taking into account the latest trends.
Summaries
Proficient SEO optimization will attract new customers and increase sales conversion. We recommend following our recommendations to make your online store look modern and be in the TOP of search queries. These are recommendations for improving internal site optimization. In the near future, we will prepare an article on methods of working with external factors of an online store, so don't forget to subscribe to our blog so as not to miss new materials.
