What to Look out for when Doing Search Engine Optimization for E-Commerce Websites

An E-Commerce site is still a website; therefore you should still optimize it just like any other site. This means doing off-page optimization and having a well-structured keyword strategy to help your products appear in search results.

One of the important, but often overlooked issues for E-Commerce sites is duplicate content. Online shops might have listings for the same type of products in the same range and sometimes it is difficult to avoid duplicate content. Nevertheless, during a SEO campaign, you should avoid duplicate content at all costs.

Building Trust

On the internet, the difference between choosing one site or another to buy a similar product isn’t just about price. Online shoppers must also trust your business before purchasing your products.

Checking your website analytics, you will see that visitors are looking at your About page. Users will check your information, social profiles and any customer complaints. Make sure you have all of this information available and visible.

Moreover, you can give E-Commerce conversions another boost by including safe shopping trust marks on your site. A study found that these are important for 76% of online shoppers. Trust may be enabled as easy as including a message like “Secure checkout options” on your checkout page.

Shopping Experience

Shopping experience is vital for the success of an E-Commerce website. There are a lot of small tweaks you can undertake to improve it, but these stand out.

First, make sure that search queries on your site work well. It can become frustrating for a customer to go through a catalogue full of products when he knows what to he is looking for. Furthermore, include important information not only about products but also delivery times, return policies and more.

Secondly, try to come up with interesting and unique product descriptions. Avoid generic text; instead, make sure the description clearly states what problem the product solves for the customer.

Also, you can provide in-depth content, such as buyer’s guides, which will also help with your SEO since Google currently favours long-form and in-depth content.

Checkout Optimization

One of the most important parts of an E-Commerce site is its checkout page. Shopping cart abandonment is a major issue for E-Commerce sites.

Often users will abandon shopping carts because they are in a rush, because they don’t like the hassle of creating an account or because the process is too complicated. In some cases they leave because they get an unexpected increase in price due to shipping costs or they can’t find their preferred payment provider or method.

Optimizing the checkout page is a topic on its own and there are a lot of methods to improve conversions. Some of the popular techniques are:

• Showing people how far they are in the buying process.
• Reducing the number of hops needed to complete a purchase.
• Show up front whether a product is available or not.
• Keeping the checkout page as simple as possible with no distractions.
• Saved cart so that shoppers who return later can resume shopping immediately.