The Complete SEO Checklist For Websites In 2020
Increase traffic and gain more brand recognition is the goal of every ecommerce site. SEO is one of the tools which can help store owners achieve this goal. However, to make SEO work effectively is a challenge for many online merchants.
Preparing a good plan to implement SEO is vital to improve the SEO ranking of your website. Below are some checklists about the SEO, which supports achieving the SEO target.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. The purpose of SEO is to help your site increase the number of traffic by improving your site's position in search results like Google. People often visit the top ranking result on the search engine page when they are looking for something. It means that with the higher position of your website, the more visitors that you can have. This can finally boost your sales.
Why does your ecommerce business need SEO?
Shop owners usually want to attract more visitors to their website. However, the market nowadays has been increasingly competitive, which challenges online merchants. SEO appears to be a useful tool to help store owners gain more advantages in this race.
SEO increases traffic on your site
With SEO techniques, your store can get a higher position in the search result, bringing more traffic to your store. If you do not focus on SEO, you may miss out on tons of visitors to your site, which means that you’re leaking money.
Improve user experience
SEO not only supports you in the search engines, but a website with proper SEO practice will also bring a better experience to the buyer. To have good SEO, store owners need to make their website with useful data for users.
Long term result
Unlike paid advertisement, SEO will keep customer navigate to your store. It will build upon its self grow stronger day by day. The steam of customers and sales will not stop at the moment when you put brakes on.
10 SEO Checklist to Improve Your Website’s Ranking
1. Website Structure
Building website structure in the hierarchy is essential to help visitors save time to find what they need when they navigate your site. Getting your directory structure and URLs to match the literal page and file structure is the vital goal. Presenting organized topics and content brings more benefits to users and the search engine.
2. Website Loading Speed
If you already succeed in making a magnificent structure of your site and relevant content, do not forget the loading speed can be one of the critical elements. Web surfers will drop your site if it takes ages to load. The competitors with faster loading speed will attract more visitors.
Besides, site speed is also a ranking factor because search engines will analyze the bounce rate and conversion rate to decide the position of your website in their search result. With different ecommerce platforms, store owners will have various choice of plug-ins and apps to help them optimize the website loading speed.
Some Shopify tools for loading speed are available for you to choose if you are having this platform.
3. SSL
Along with the site speed loading, having security for your site is essential. SSL means Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol for establishing authenticated and encrypted links between networked computers. If your ecommerce website is not under an SSL, you may get fewer users because they can see a security warning in Chrome or other browsers when they navigate your store.
4. Plugin, Apps or Addon
Most ecommerce platforms have some tools which can help store owners control their SEO and analytics function. These tools are known as plug-ins, apps, or extensions. Shop admins can install them to manage and analyze the statistic to optimize their SEO. If you’re using the Shopify platform, it should be good to find some Shopify tools for SEO, which are necessary for your store.
5. Content
Having rich content written for users on your site helps improve your ranking in the search engine. Content is necessary to show relevancy and useful information and key to compete with the rich content with various data from your rivals. Along with the technical things that you can apply to improve SEO, it is essential to remember that content is also a vital factor in the checklist that you need to look into to ensure that your site is working correctly.
6. URL
Keep your URLs as short and straightforward as possible. It should use a dash to separate the words in your URLs instead of underscores or space. It would be great if you made your URL to be consistent with products, category pages, and each piece of content within your site.
If you have multiple items in various categories, it needs to ensure that your product URLs are not dependent on a category URL. It means that despite the link /category-one/item-a or /category-two/item-b, which makes your product URLs independent, you can remove the category level. The product URL should be /item-a/ or /item-b/.
7. Title and Meta description
It needs to customize title tags that reflect the main idea of the content of the specific page. Accurate description and clear titles help search engines understand what your content is all about. Besides, it will help users who are looking for the solution that your content provides.
Having title tags is not enough. Websites need to have a relevant meta description for each page. Websites need to have a relevant meta description for each page. Whatever platform that you are using, adding a meta description with useful information that contains keywords relevant to the content will help you improve your position in the search engine. For example, adding meta information for Shopify is easy but it will be not effective if it doesn’t contain keywords.
8. Headings
Headings that are a part of your content and useful for users and search engines because it shows the text structure. Using headings can create the content of high quality because it is easier to read.
We all know that better content for users can bring a better for SEO. If web surfers cannot find quickly what they are looking for, they will leave your website. If the bounce rate is high, the search engines conclude that your page does not give useful information for searchers. So they will lower your position in the search result.
9. Images and Videos
Optimized images and videos are also crucial for SEO. You need to choose the balance of your image size because it takes time to load if it is too large, which affects the user experience. Otherwise, weak images will not bring the satisfaction of visitors. Alt-text is helpful for the search engines to understand what an image is about.
As for videos, providing a transcription is a vital step because search engines cannot watch or understand your video. If you provide them the context of your video, they can crawl it and rank your video.
10. Links
Store owners can use internal links to insert links to other blogs, articles, or products on their store, which are relevant to the context that they are writing. External links are links from other content of different websites that are relevant to your product. Backlinks can be used from other websites which refer to your products or blog on your websites.
Using three types of links can help ecommerce stores to improve their position in the search results.
Summary
To sum up, you have a checklist that helps you improve your SEO ranking. The traffic that you achieve by SEO can bring a good result in the short term, but the user experience that you build will contribute the long-term advantages to your ecommerce store.