SEO Tips & Everything Else You Need To Succeed In ECommerce

The good news is that if you have the technical know-how, it is possible to create an e-commerce business that is designed for maximum success. In fact, below we identify some of the most effective ways to ensure your ecommerce business flourishes. We start, of course, with the holy grail of digital marketing techniques for any e-commerce business, SEO. Keep reading for more. 

Image sourced at Pexels - Licence CC0 

SEO Key Words

The first thing that your e-commerce business will need to succeed is high-quality keyword research.  You must select words and phrases that are known to help conversions or sales, as they are also known.  What this means is you will need to consider the buyer's intent of any keywords you are looking for, as this will allow you to attract customers who are truly ready to buy. It also makes sense to analyze competitor rankings for keywords, as these can help you identify any ones with good potential that you may have missed.

Remember to use long tail variations of any phrases you find effective, as these tend to have lower competition but still attract quality leads. It's also vital that you properly map by intent keywords to pages on your website, making sure that you do not repeat them or end up cannibalising search visibility. 

It's also vitally important that you track the ranking performance for these buyer intent keywords,  because this will show you how effective using them on your website has been.  It's also vital that you refresh any outdated content that is no longer working to convert visitors into buyers.

Organic SEO, including schema 

Organic SEO is all about optimizing your e-commerce website to ensure that the people most interested in what you are selling can find it organically,  or by searching associated terms, and it comes up in search engine results.  Of course, as you know, your e-commerce website needs to rank highly in the search engine results because most conversions come from the first three entries. 

The good news is that there are plenty of tactics you can use to help maximize your search engine results page rank. The first of these is to ensure that every product description is properly optimized,  which should include using the correct keywords,  ensuring the content of each page is optimal,  and every page has a properly structured data schema. 

You will also need to optimize meta titles, strengthen the SEO of your pages by using internal linking from one page to another, and take some time to identify and fix any technical errors, such as redirects.  The reason is that all of these things will impact how effective your SEO is. 

High-converting website experience 

If you want to succeed in e-commerce, you will also need a highly converting website that offers a high-quality experience to your customers.  To achieve this, you'll need to make sure that the page speed, both on PC and mobile, is as fast as possible.  Remember, the vast majority of people now use mobile devices to research and shop for purchases and having quick page speeds means you will minimize that significantly. 

The written copy displayed on your pages should also be carefully written to drive conversions.  This means instead of spending a great deal of time and effort only describing the product, you should be writing about the distinct benefits a customer can gain from buying it.  This means you should focus on customer outcomes and how buying and using the product will have a positive impact on their life. 

Last of all, if you want your e-commerce website to be highly converting, it's vitally important that you do everything you can to streamline your checkout process.  This is because many people spend a considerable amount of time coming to the decision to buy one of your products, only to face the final hurdle of having to enter all of their credit card and address details.  

Unfortunately, this added pause often causes customers to rethink their purchase, but by streamlining your checkout process, you can have them complete their purchase before any doubts creep in.  With that in mind, offering third-party payment options such as PayPal and Apple Pay is always a good idea. Similarly, allowing customers to create accounts which are already ready for the details should streamline the process. 

Order fulfillment services 

A great deal of e-commerce success is based on what you do online; there are other considerations to be aware of.  The most important of these is ensuring that customers receive the right products quickly and effectively in the real world. 

The issue here is that most people do not have the resources to effectively run their own logistics.  The good news is that by working with providers like ecommerce fulfillment services, you can meet and exceed customer expectations and deliver globally with minimal hassle. You can even use such fulfilment services to handle sales spikes with ease, perfect for those times when your products go viral. 

Data and performance tracking 

Last of all, for success in e-commerce, you'll need to make sure that you properly use data to track and assess performance.  The first way in which you will need to do that is to monitor which channels your traffic is coming from.  You will then be able to identify the channels that are most effective and spend more time and effort building those up. 

It's also worthwhile tracking your overall conversion rates, as this will help you to measure your sales efficiency and give you a good overall idea of your ROI. 

Finally, do not forget to review your SEO performance and grow every quarter.  Remember, even though SEO is more of a long-term strategy,  it is the bedrock of e-commerce success,  and that means it's worth keeping our close eye on and ensuring that measures such as Keyword rankings,  impressions,  search visibility,  and click-through rates and taking action to continually improve them.