How to Build an SEO Friendly Ecommerce Website
Today, the importance of SEO for an ecommerce business is very special as it directly affects the amount of traffic access to the website. SEO is not only a fashionable trend for the global market but also a proven technique that effectively helps to gain more brand recognition as well as boost revenue.
While many e-stores are competing to get a high rank, it is a burning question of how to build an SEO optimized webpage to attract as many customers as possible. However, boosting SEO ranking can be done in a flash as it requires long-term investment and consistency. If you do not know how to start or improve your SEO ranking, do not worry! You have come to the right place.
In this post, we will discuss SEO knowledge and provide the most updated techniques to help you create an SEO friendly website and instantly leverage your SEO ranking without requiring too much time and effort.
What is SEO( Search Engine Optimization)?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a set of techniques and actions that support the website to be simply recognized and give fast results in the largest amount by search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
In other words, the purpose of SEO is to make the search engine find your website quickly and adequately, which can motivate your website to be displayed on a high ranking while being searched by a customer. Because people are more likely to vist the top ranking websites, the higher the position of your website in the search results page, the more likely it will be visited.
Why SEO Matters for an Ecommerce Website?
In a competitive market, SEO marketing is more important than ever. Millions of users are looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problems. If you have an SEO friendly website, it is quite easy to get targeted and free traffic from the search engines.
The following are both short term and long term benefits that SEO brings to your business.
Low-Cost Marketing Strategy
Compared to PPC, organic SEO is relatively cheaper. With PPC, when your budget runs out, your traffic stops. However, SEO is essentially the gift that keeps on giving. It only costs a regular investment of time in great content and a healthy dose of patience. When you find yourself on the top of organic search engine results, you can sit back and watch the traffic come in. This is without the need for a monthly budget on PPC (pay-per-click) advertising like Google Adwords.
Nurture and Convert Leads at any Specific Stages of the Buying Cycle
Many of your prospects turn to Google when they need to find an answer to their question. However, the way they express it might differ depending on how aware they are of their problem and the available solutions. They may not purchase products from you immediately. But the content resource powered by the best SEO practice will gradually guide buyers from the awareness stage to the action stage.
Improve User Experience
Google has learned how to interpret a pleasant or unpleasant user experience. Therefore, a positive user experience has become a pivotal element to a website's success. If customers can not find the answer to their question when surfing a website there will be a problem, and of course, website performance will suffer as a negative result.
We would say that quality SEO incorporates a positive user experience, leveraging it to work in a brand's favor.
Higher Brand Credibility and Authority
Another further-than-expected effect of SEO is building trust in the customer's mind. Whether the customer has known your brand or not, the impression of a high ranking website is commonly excellent and trustful. This can lead to a positive buying attitude. General customers tend to think that such sites are famous and believed by many people, so possibly they get the sense of being in a no-risk buying process. The willingness to purchase accordingly will be higher.
Increase Competitiveness
With SEO, you can stay ahead of your competitors. If two websites sell similar products, the search engine optimized website is more likely to have more customers and make more sales.
Statistics show that over 60% of site traffic comes from big search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. If you are good at SEO, you get more chances to increase our brand visibility so that customers can find you without being attracted by your competitor.
How to Build an SEO Friendly Ecommerce Website
Step 1: Select the right CMS platform
Because content plays a vital role in SEO optimization, choosing the right CMS platform is the first step towards achieving this goal.
The primary responsibilities of a CMS are to manage the generation and adjust digital content including images, videos, documents, marketing materials, etc. The more active your CMS, the better SEO results you will receive.
Here are key features that you should consider while choosing a CMS platform good for SEO:
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H1 tags, page titles, and meta descriptions
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The use of irrelevant and hard code
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Page templates
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Add-ons, plugins, and modules
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A customizable URL structure
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The ability to use Alt attributes for images
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Canonical problems and duplicate content
There are many platforms for you to choose from. We recommend these top five CMS options for SEO purposes:
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Wordpress: WordPress is one of the best and most sophisticated CMS options. It allows for a great deal of flexibility with multiple pre-made templates
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Magento: This platform provides many SEO-specific plugins to make it easier for ecommerce sites to succeed. Magento also focus on improving greater user experience
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Shopify: Shopify is an all-in-one ecommerce platform which is being used by over 800,000 businesses worldwide. It is easy to optimize SEO function with a lot of thoughtful SEO apps.
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Joomla: This is a popular CMS with a clean, streamlined dashboard, many third-party add-ons to consider. This allows for great versatility in achieving SEO goals, ticking all of the must-have boxes for an SEO-friendly CMS.
Step 2: Choose a reliable hosting provider
If you want to host your Magento store with SEO optimization, you need to find out a reliable hosting provider who can cater to your business need.
Now, I am going to highlight a few crucial aspects of choosing the best Magento hosting provider that ensures the high rank of your website.
Security
Of course, you do not want to have a great ranking website that can be easily attacked. Therefore, security is one of the most important concerns that should be prioritized. A reliable hosting provider should be the one who can ensure these key factors:
Uptime
Uptime is a factor that mainly affects your customer experience. The slightest of downtime can make customers switch to your competitors. If you have a Magento store, you must ensure that your store has 99.99% uptime.
Speed
If you want to build an SEO friendly website, optimize your web loading speed first. It is a fact that a web page takes more than three seconds to load; the visitor will leave the website and will navigate to another website that loads faster. Consequently, customers will not stay on your site unless the loading speed is optimized as fast as possible.
Compatibility
Compatibility is one of the most critical elements to consider opting for a powerful hosting provider. You can take advantage of the flexibility to integrate your store with useful tools for SEO. You do not want to use a hosting vendor that is limited with poor SEO performance.
Step 3: Do keyword research
Keyword research is defined as the activity of analyzing and finding a list of valuable keywords for SEO copywriting. The keywords, or search terms, often become a guide for the direction of your content and marketing strategy.
Finding high-volume search terms itself is not enough. You need to ensure that the SEO keywords used in your content match your brand, product, or service to the keywords that your customers use. And this is where keyword research happens.
There are many ways to do keyword research, either manually or automatically with keyword tools. No matter what kind of method you choose, here are eight steps that you should follow:
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Study your niche, have close conversations with customers
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Define your goals
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Make a list of relevant topics
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Create a list of seed keywords
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Use right keyword research tools
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Study the search intent
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Identify more descriptive keywords
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Find out about your competitors
Doing keyword research can be a tedious and time-consuming task. However, once you've gone through these steps, you will get enough insights to create a good content and SEO strategy.
Step 4: Optimize website architecture
An SEO friendly website needs to be in a well-organized structure. Web structures matters for your website because:
At the very core of good SEO, an ideal website architecture helps users and search engine crawlers easily find what they're looking for on a website.
A good site structure means greater user experience because they can navigate through your site easily. It results in bounce rate reduction and dwell-time improvement, which is good for improving site rankings.
With a good site structure, you have more site links, which helps to enhance the navigability of your site, point users to the most relevant information, increase your brand's reputation, improve user trust, etc.
Now we are summarizing the best practices to build your own SEO-friendly site structure:
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Plan a hierarchy before building your website
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Make your hierarchy logical
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The number of main categories should be between two and seven
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Balance the number of subcategories within each category
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Develop a URL structure following your navigation hierarchy
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Develop your site navigation in HTML or CSS
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Develop a header that lists your main navigation pages
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Create a comprehensive internal link structure
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Use a Sitemap
Step 5: Optimize on-page SEO
We have analyzed a few factors that generally affect the site ranking. We continue with the most useful practices for on-page SEO optimization, which is all about improving the search engine rankings and earning organic traffic though available factors right on your webpage.
When it comes to on-page SEO, we need to take into account various aspects such as relevant and high-quality content, optimized headlines, optimized HTML tags and images, good keyword combination, etc. That brings together a high level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness for your website.
Optimizing On-page SEO is more than technical stuff, and smart SEO practitioners know that on-page optimization should be constantly prioritized. Because of the time limitation and the complication of the technique itself, we will not go deep into this topic. You can find a comprehensive guide from our articles.
Step 6: Optimize for mobile interface
There are a lot of factors to keep in mind when optimizing your site for search engines. The mobile interface is one of the most important, but also one of the most overlooked optimization methods.
Today, people are leaning toward using mobile instead of PC. People spend 70% of their internet time on mobile. Therefore, optimizing your website on mobile devices is a competitive advantage.
Now, it's time to start adapting your plan for your mobile users. Let's take a look at the best practices for improving your mobile SEO strategy.
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Improve your site's load time
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Integrate responsive design
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Focus on the user experience
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Use pop-ups wisely
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Optimize for local
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Implement a clean, easy-to-use navigation bar
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Optimize title tags and meta descriptions
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Create a separate mobile URL
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Create mobile content
Final Thoughts
SEO optimization is an integral part of growing your business online. If you want to grow your business through SEO, you should build an SEO friendly ecommerce website.
Now, you will have comprehensive and applicable methods to optimize your SEO. While there is a no size-fit-for-all solution, we hope that our hard-to-win experience brings good value to your SEO strategy.
We know the process can be time-consuming. However, if you start with patience, out looking vision, and essential skills, you are in a good place to find your success.