SEO strategy for online stores: 7 best practices 

The e-commerce industry is extremely competitive nowadays. If you’re an online store owner, you’re probably looking for an effective and long-term method to help your business stand out from the others.

SEO (or search engine optimization strategy) gives you exactly that opportunity. Building an SEO strategy for your ecommerce store will provide you with a competitive advantage and increase your site’s visibility on search engines like Google and Bing.

That’s why today we’re going to talk about some best practices that you can apply to your business. By implementing them into your strategy, you guarantee yourself more satisfied customers and better rankings in search engines and search results (SERPs).

Image source: Pexels.com

1. Optimize the crawl budget

The crawl budget is the number of pages on a site that a search engine will crawl within a certain period of time. In other words, the amount of resources a search engine spends on your online store.

While this isn’t a worrying factor for smaller sites, it becomes a significant factor for web stores and e-platforms with hundreds of categories and millions of products, such as Amazon.

There are different ways to optimize the crawl budget, and their effectiveness can vary based on the individual website.

Let’s take a look at some of them:

• Update robots.txt – you can ” disallow ” the search engine to index certain pages or directories or other types of addresses that you think are not necessary for indexing. Keep in mind that this doesn’t always mean they won’t be crawled, but it works in most cases.
• Reduce page load time (site speed) – the faster the pages load, the faster the crawler crawls them.
• Fix crawl errors – if there are any, you can check what they are in Google Search Console.
• Add hreflang tags – it applies to international sites with multiple language versions.
• Audit and optimize XML sitemaps – remove pages with errors or redirects and create a clear hierarchy for the search engine to follow.

2. Build a user-friendly web design

A clear and intuitive design is the key to user experience, to keep visitors on the site and to increase conversions. This includes clearly laid out product categories, easy-to-navigate menus, and useful options like search functionality and SEO-friendly filters.

What to avoid?

Avoid unnecessary elements such as ads and pop-ups. They distract users and hide your main content. In addition, pay attention to whether there are “invisible” elements across devices. With an inappropriate design, users may not be able to see or interact with a menu or button.

Large banners and images may look good, but they are often not properly formed or do not meet the page’s purpose. Be careful when you use them, as they have the potential to slow down load times.

All of the above factors are negative signals to search engines and can lower your online store’s ranking.

Image source: Pexels.com

3. Make the store mobile friendly

Being able to conveniently use mobile devices is paramount for all online businesses for two reasons.

Firstly, Google has announced Mobile-First Indexing, which means that mobile versions of websites are crawled with priority. Secondly, mobile-friendliness is now one of the main ranking factors for search engines.

Bet on responsive design, intuitive navigation and fast page loading. In addition, it is recommended to avoid pop-ups, as well as to adapt text and button sizes.

4. Create a clear structure and categories

Creating a clear structure and categories is part of a larger task: building a comprehensive Content Marketing (CMS) strategy. This strategy should be based on thorough keyword research and analysis and requires a lot of hard work, planning, and time to execute.

The choice of keywords will depend on the results of the preliminary research conducted using some of the best SEO tools. Based on the user search and the products offered in the online store, a semantic-related core and product categories are formed.

Let’s imagine you have an e-commerce site selling clothes. Your main “cores” can be divided, for example, into “women’s clothing”, “men’s clothing” and “children’s clothing”. Hypothetically, the subcategories of “women’s clothing” could be expanded into “dresses”, “pants”, “outerwear”, etc.

This approach has many advantages:

• It increases the thematic relevance of the site and its relevance;
• Reduces bounce rate (users leaving the site);
• Makes it easier for users and search engines to understand the site’s organization;
• Improves user shopping experience;
• Creates clear navigation and offers users more options;
• Increases page performance and search engine visibility;
• Increases the number of sales that customers made.

Image source: Canva.com

5. Create clear URLs

Short and clear URLs are always the right choice. While there is controversy about the importance of URL format from an SEO perspective, it is certainly essential from a user perspective.

First, a properly constructed structure will give your users a guide to where they are on your site. For example, https://example.com/clothing/women/nike gives you a much clearer idea of what products to expect on the page than https://example.com/category1/women-products.

Additionally, when typing URLs, we recommend using Latin and avoiding the use of special characters. This has more to do with the aesthetic appearance of the URL, as Latin is rendered correctly when shared on social networks, while Cyrillic, for example, generates a long URL with many characters and special symbols.

It is recommended to use a hyphen (-) to separate words instead of an underscore (_) or another character (e.g. https://example.com/women-clothing). In case you are creating blog posts like “Top X Products for 2023”, avoid having the year itself in the URLs to stay relevant over time.

6. Optimise your product pages

Your product pages are the ones that will sell. So take your time and make them as helpful as possible to the user by “stepping into their shoes” and imagining what you would like to see in their shoes. This will serve as your main reference point.

Product descriptions

One of the best practices you can implement is creating unique, informative, and useful product descriptions. Describe all the parameters according to the product type. 

These parameters may include:

• Measurements
• Features
• Technological features
• Manufacturing
• Material
• Colour options, etc.

Add the product price in a visible and clear place for the reader and add an easily identifiable, contrasting add to cart/buy product button.

Visual elements

Use high-quality visual elements, including original product images. If necessary, you can use videos and infographics that add value to both the search engine and the user.

Keywords

Do a keyword analysis for the products you offer and see what people search for most often. Use this information and adapt page content to specific keywords and phrases where possible and relevant.

Structured data

For best results, use Product markup by entering all necessary attributes. Structured data makes it easier for search engines to understand the content of pages and improves the visualization on the search results page.

Customer feedback

Real customer reviews are a strong signal of trust and authority to search engines, but their purpose is not solely tied to SEO. 

If you’re a consumer looking at the same product from two competing sites, which would you choose to purchase – the one with positive reviews left by customers or the one with no rating?

This is true for all people in the online space, especially when it comes to money. By implementing review boxes, you guarantee yourself a higher chance of conversions.

Add more value

Offer consumers more than what your competitors offer. In addition to product quality and price, you can do this in a number of other ways. 

For example, you can add additional sections to the product pages to help the reader. These could be boxes with related products or promotional packages with a combination of products. Here again, it would help to think like your target audience.

7. Turn visitors into customers

Last but not least, make your site visitors want to become your customers and make the process easy for them.

Create helpful content

Useful content comes first. When readers find answers to questions, and you help them clear their doubts about a product, they’re already one step closer to being your loyal customers.

Guide the reader to action

Guide readers with clear calls to action (CTAs) and buttons to prompt and facilitate them to take the desired step. Interesting design combined with good copywriting and strategic placement on pages and the site will lead to more conversions.

Offer transparent pricing

Build consumer trust by providing clear, visible product pricing and avoiding last-minute surcharges. Make them aware of potential additional charges (e.g., shipping or VAT charges) right on the product page itself.

Facilitate orders and payments

There is a high probability that the user will give up an order if he/she encounters difficulties while placing it. Slow-loading pages, lack of a clearly visible add-to-cart button or unclear instructions are obstacles in the sales process.

Provide a seamless and convenient experience for your site visitors during checkout and payment to ensure more completed orders and happy, returning customers.