How to Optimize your E-commerce Website for Search Engines

Reputation Defender
2 min readJan 23, 2019

Search engine optimization should be done for both — the user experience and for the search engine robots. When optimizing your e-commerce store for search engines there are a few things to pay attention to:

  • Website Security (SSL)
  • Home page title
  • Home page description
  • H1 tag

Website Security Certificate

Having a security certificate is crucial to search engine robots. Websites that lack one will be quickly dismissed by search engines. A standard SSL will secure all information flow between your website and the server. Sensible information like usernames and payment details are all transmitted through a secure connection.

Besides the security aspect, having a SSL certificate will serve 2 more purposes:

Https is a known ranking signal and although not a significant one, it’s one of those ranking factors that you can easily gain by adding an SSL to your website.

It also impacts user trust. When you have an SSL installed, the user’s browser will highlight this and will give out a warning when website doesn’t have one.

SEO Title Google Guidelines

Webpage titles should be around 60 characters, since this is how much a snippet will typically show of your page title.

Try to fit in your brand name and location, if your business is location-specific. On the other hand, if you are selling a particular product you want to optimize for, then include the keyword first in your title. For example, if you want to rank your page for the keyword “baking course”, then this should be the first word in your title.

Page Description Optimization

The description also plays an important role because it may show up in search engine results. An informative description can have a positive influence on the click through rate.

The description should be no longer than 160 characters and should include:

  • Benefits and magnet words.
  • Mentions about your contact details.
  • A compelling write-up of what you are offering.

The H1 Tag

Every page of your e-commerce website should have one H1 (header) tag. An H1 tag hints to search engines what the page content is about. Moreover, it’s a way to highlight the important parts of a page to search engine robots.

The H1 tag doesn’t have to be identical to the title tag, but can be the same. Website themes will by default put the title of the page as an H1 tag, but you have the possibility to optimize it.

Your page can have multiple header tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.) and you should use them in an ascending order. Most website themes don’t make use of tags to its full potential; therefore always check how you can optimize your header tags.

--

--

Reputation Defender

Learn how Reputation Defender can help protect your online reputation and privacy. Reputation Defender is now part of Gen Digital Inc.