A lot of people plan to sell their products online. However, the average success percentage of the e-commerce store is 10%. What keeps those 90% from being successful is the inability to make themselves appear in the search engine results with digital marketing.

If you are planning to sell your products or services online through a website, then people must be able to find you on the internet, especially via search engines.

In order to get your products in front of the right audience, you must optimize your pages for search engines. Follow these tips and strategies to improve your website ranking on the search engines with relevant keywords.

1. Conducting Thorough Keyword Research

Keyword research is the most important step towards search engine optimization. You must  identify some keywords for your products that can be used to build traffic towards different pages.

• Keep an eye on competitors and use tools to analyze the keywords they are ranking against.
• Look for keywords with higher search volume. More volume means a better chance to get more visitors to your page.

• Go with keywords that have lower keyword difficulty. There is a greater opportunity to rank for these keywords .

• Make sure that the keyword is related to your selected/working niche of products.
• Choose long-tail keywords, as the conversion ratio in long-tail keywords is better.

2. Website Hierarchy & URL Structure (site map)

Website hierarchy plays an important role in distributing link juice to your website. It is vital that all of your pages are connected to the home page.

The home page should be at the top menu, which is further followed by main categories and subcategories. Under subcategories, there are product pages and services.

The same should reflect in your website's sitemap. An XML sitemap should be created that includes all the pages with the division of categories.

3. Unique Product Descriptions

Search engines always value unique content with improved readability. Most of the time, e-commerce website owners do not focus on creating unique product descriptions for similar sorts of products. This could be your biggest mistake and could cost you the ranking in SERPs.

Add details about your products, even the minor details can help you rank better in the search engines. Details such as the weight, the dimensions, the color, and the materials used in the product may not seem important to you, but a consumer looking for specific information will be seeking this out.

Make sure your product descriptions answer All possible questions they may have about your product to deter them from bouncing off your page. Make sure all the descriptions and content on the website are unique. You can use tools like CopyScape to check for uniqueness.

4. Canonical Tags

Always use canonical tags on all your pages. In e-commerce websites, most of the content is similar from one another page. For instance, disclaimers, guarantees, menu, site navigation, etc., are the same on all the pages. To avoid Google penalizing it for duplication, you should use a canonical tag.

5. Product Page Optimization

Another crucial step is to optimize your product page for SEO. You must create unique titles and descriptions regarding your product to help search engines understand the page contents. Title and description are important as Google uses them to showcase your page.

Moreover, add related keywords within the content of the page. Do not forget to add images with suitable alt-tags. Create some internal links on the page so it can be accurately connected with other pages of your website.

6. Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are crucial for any product-based website. Users always look at reviews before making a purchase. In addition, search engines value a product website that has a review section.

You can also add a section under every product to write a review. Moreover, you can collectively show all the reviews from your various products under one umbrella on a separate page for reviews.

7. User-Friendly Website

Since 2018, Google has been prioritizing mobile-friendly designs. Since most e-commerce website users now use mobile for their searches, Google advises you to build a mobile-first design for your website.

Make sure that each and every image, text, header, and menu item are working perfectly on both mobile and desktop.

8. Optimize Load Time

The best way to optimize the load time of your website is to check it via Google PageSpeed Insights. You can check for several issues your website is facing, including server response time, largest content paintful, lazy loading, etc.

Moreover, with the help of Lighthouse, you can analyze the javascript running on your page and reduce unnecessary scripting that may be slowing down your page. This is exactly what we did with the coursework help page.

9. Add Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are basically a path that allows users and bots to understand where they are currently on a website and how far are they from the homepage.

You can simply enable breadcrumbs for the Yoast SEO plugin in the WordPress setting. They normally appear at the top of any post or page.

Breadcrumbs represent the hierarchy of any particular page and are linked with the homepage.

10. Backlink Creation

If you want your website to rank sooner, you will need to include backlinks.

Backlinks are basically links from your website to other websites that help increase the authority of your page. However, you should take care of the following points while creating backlinks for your e-commerce website:

• Choose a high-quality website to get a backlink from. Check the authority of the website via a tool like Ahrefs or MOZ.
• Look for quality rather than quantity. Avoid getting links back from directories and block comments. Look for guest posts and contextual links.
• Choose suitable keywords for creating backlinks. For instance, Crowd Writer uses buy essay online for their corresponding page. Use your brand name as a keyword where it makes sense.
• Do not create too many backlinks in a single month. You need to be careful about how many backlinks you are creating. Keep it at a normal pace. A total of 2 to 3 contextual backlinks for a page is enough considering the age of your page.

11. SEO Analysis

Along with any strategy you are using to optimize your website and pages for search engines, you should always keep a deep analysis of how your pages are performing.

You can use the following tools to analyze your website:

• Google Search Console to check for the keywords, pages, and their position in the particular region. You can also look for errors on your website.
• Google Analytics to keep an eye on the visitors and their statistics.
• Google Pagespeed Insight and Lighthouse to analyze your website performance and increase the loading speed.
• Ahrefs to analyze complete on-page and off-page planning of your website.

There are many more tools like MOZ, SEMRush, Ubersuggest, etc., that can help you analyze your website and improve it with numerous suggestions.

Conclusion

SEO for e-commerce is a long process, but it is equally beneficial. It takes time, but generates a higher ROI. You will need to be consistent with your strategies.

Start with the keyword research, and move on to content creation, on-page SEO, backlink usage, technical SEO, speed optimization, etc.

Make sure to create a mobile-first design and always think from the readers' point of view.

The above-mentioned points will surely help you optimize your e-commerce website for search engines and rank them in the SERPs.