Top 10 Ecommerce SEO Tips To Boost Your Store’s Traffic

Visibility on Google is one of the most critical determinants of your e-commerce success. Nearly 70% of customers make their purchase decisions via an online search engine before they get into a sales conversation. 

What will happen if your e-commerce store is invisible to the customers? Your online presence will become worthless unless your website can be found by your target audience via search engines.

SEO is the most effective solution to advance your site visibility on search engines, leading to higher online traffic and conversion rates.

In this article, we will give you everything you need to cover about web traffic, e-commerce SEO, and 10 best practical SEO tips for your e-store.

What is web traffic?

By the easiest understanding, web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website. You can know precisely how many users visit your site at a specific time via web traffic analytics tools.

Typically, there are 2 primary data of analytics tools:

Pageviews: The total amount of times users visit your online site. When a user visits more than one page, they are counted as additional pageviews

Unique pageviews: When a user visits a web page once or even multiple times during a specific session, it is counted as a unique pageview

If you still feel confused, the below example can help you grab the main points.

An user visits page A, moves to page B and navigates back to page A. It means you gain 3 pageviews from that user.

In contrast, with unique pageviews, no matter how many times a customer visits page A during a particular session, it still is counted as 1 unique pageview only.

The more traffic to your website, the more chances you have to generate qualified leads. In the long-term, more website traffic can significantly differentiate your business sales performance, earn a higher reputation, and so on.

However, not all traffic is good, so besides focusing on the traffic numbers, it’s also essential to increase the quality of the traffic you receive.

What Is Ecommerce SEO?

According to the SEMrush, 37.5% of all e-commerce traffic came from searches. It means that you could probably lose out 37.5% of potential traffic. What is more, 60% of clicks go to the top three websites in search engine results.

How to rank your e-commerce site?

In this case, SEO is considered the most effective solution to push your website to a higher rank in a search via common search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo.

What makes it unique is that all the rankings generated by SEO are organic. You don’t have to pay through Google Ads or any other advertising platform to get your ranks.

Considered as the most cost-effective solution, a SEO strategy will take a lot of time and effort.

However, it’s worth trying as the results you take back significantly increase in both quantity and quality traffic, leading to more conversions and repeat visitors.

Why are SEO and traffic crucial to your online store?

If you’re not interested in pay-per-click advertising or paid search results, and you still want to get your e-store to be visible to the targeted audience, then SEO is the best choice you have.

7 Reasons why SEO and organic web traffic are vital for your online success

Gain more highly qualified prospects: The leads generated by SEO are much more relevant and have higher conversion rates than the leads using paid advertising

Enhance sales conversion rate: Customers are likely to click to your site if your content’s website meets their needs and appears in their search result

Boots sales: As a result, when your store gets more conversions, it means more profit

A cost-effective solution: With more organic (non-paid) traffic from SEO, you could reduce the marketing expenses to buy traffic and maintain it

Brand building: Using SEO to create a steady flow of traffic will make it even more cost-effective and built up your web reputation in the long run

Get higher credibility: 75% of clicks are organic. Customers typically choose the top organic results instead of the paid ones. So when they find your e-store on the top page of organic search, it’s an automatic boost in trust

Be more competitive: The first organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click than a page in 10th rank. And the CTR (advertising fee) for moving up 1 spot in the search result will increase by 30,8%. With SEO, you have your competitive advantage

If we compare between the organic traffic (via SEO) and paid traffic (via advertising). In that case, it’s clear that SEO brings more advantages for your business in the long run though its result is not immediate.

10 Best eCommerce SEO tips to boost your store’s traffic

Research e-commerce keywords

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that Internet users enter into search engines for SEO or marketing purposes.

Places to use the researched keywords:

The page title: It’s the starting point for Google to decide the relevance of your site

The meta description: Put your main keywords within the first 160 characters of your content, which provide the description that’s below the clickable link

Subheadings: Help visitors known the relevance of content before clicking on it

Content: Use the main content in the first couple of sentences (or in the first paragraph). Then use that keyword and its variations

URLs: Best URLs give visitors and Google a clue about the things on your web

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, marketers can discover the interest and needs of most Internet users, including the targeted customer group.

Then, you can easily use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for to create relevant content to what customer’s search in search engines.

Some SEO tools for finding the right keywords:

i) Ahrefs
ii) Google Analytics
iii) SEMrush

Optimize business listing

With numerous competitors, it’s not easy to rank high in the search results. However, there’s one area of SEO that you can make use of to create a huge difference in where your business appears in search – Local SEO.

Local business listing optimization checklist:

i) Enter your business information into Google My Business
ii) Modify it so that customers can easily find you
iii) Update regularly your name, address, and phone number if there’s any change
iv) Maintain accurate business hours
V) Add high quality, relevant photos
vi) Encourage and respond to reviews
vii) Sign up for a local listing service

Update web structure

2 parts of web structure influence significantly to your store:

Breadcrumb navigation: A displayed form of site navigation lets readers know exactly where they are on your web but don’t have to check the URL. It has a positive impact on site mapping and the organization of your site structure

URLs: A clean URL is a readable URL, making it easier for both visitors and Google to seek for your web. (For ex, a good and clean example of URL is: https://www.mageplaza.com/magento-2-better-blog/)

Create more content

Even if your website is an e-commerce store, creating content is essential. Many studies and statistics have shown that optimized publishing content is the most effective way to generate visibility and qualified organic traffic.

According to Hubspot, the more blog posts you have on your web, the more indexed traffic you receive.

Optimize category pages

Apart from the website’s homepage, the category page on e-commerce sites is the factor that can generate most of your organic traffic.

The reason for that is because users are more likely to search for generic categories. To be more specific, the keywords visitor search will be strong intent rather than particular product names.

A few tips for your category pages:

i) Use the keyword research on category titles
ii) Optimize the category meta description with creative and attractive content
iii) Add one H1 tag to each category page
iv) Include a brief description of category page belove H1 tag
v) Insert Internal links within the description and incorporate visuals of your products throughout the category page

Optimize product pages

The content in the product pages plays a vital role in the success of your SEO strategy.

The difficulty is how to make your product’s description stand out in unique ways when you have thousands of products with similar functionality?

Optimizing every part of your web content, including H1’s, Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions, can help you do it.

Some useful tips you can learn from Amazon to make your product page content more effective:

i) Focus to your brand
ii) Minimum use of jargon and keeping your description easy to read/scan
iii) Use bullet points to distinguish particular features/benefits
iv) Focus on the buyer persona throughout your copy

Focus on Mobile SEO

As there are 5.15 billion unique mobile phone users in the world in 2020, it’s not strange when Google use has prioritized web performance on smart devices as a critical metric when determining a website’s search result ranking.

Mobile optimization makes sure that visitors using smart devices will have the best experience on your site. As a result, mobile-friendliness is a boost in SERPs for your online store.

As an e-commerce merchant, you should care about those elements below:

i) The mobile interface of your store
ii) Page speed and load time on mobile devices
iii) The navigation and UX on mobile
iv)Simple checkout process for smart devices

Above are some key elements for you to check and make your online store more friendly with smartphone users.

Next, We will give you a step-by-step guide to have all your mobile optimization work done right:

i) Check whether your website mobile-friendliness
ii) Choose your most suitable mobile-friendly solution: Could be responsive design, dynamic serving, a separate mobile-friendly website, or a mobile app
iii) Apply mobile SEO best practices: Ensure that your site meets Google mobile-friendly criteria
iv) Avoid common mobile optimization mistakes: Don’t block JavaScript, CSS or image files; avoid putting up unplayable content, repair irrelevant cross-links, etc.
v) Use SEO tools

Get rid of broken link

Imagine when visitors follow links to your site and expect certain content to be available to them once they get to that page. Broken links are bad for user experience and can also be harmful to your site’s loving relationship with Google and your SEO.

Some pieces of advice for avoiding and fixing 404 pages:

i) Update or refresh your content instead of deleting it
ii) Redirect visitors to a new page using 301 redirects
iii) Contact the web owners and ask for an updated link if the error happens as an external site uses an incorrect URL to link to you

Maximize website speed

If you don’t know, Google has indicated site speed is one of the signals to rank pages. It will measure the loading time of a page. As a result, a slow web speed means the search engines can only crawl fewer pages, using their allocated crawl budget. Hence, this harms your indexation.

Not only influence the Google search engine, but the site speed is also important to user experience. A page with longer loading times tends to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page.

You can check your page speed and find out the problem, which makes your web load slow down. Below are 2 tools that enable you to do that:

i) Google PageSpeed Insights
ii) Pingdom

Include XML sitemap to Search console

In simple terms, a sitemap.xml is a list of your website’s URLs. Its role is to act as a roadmap to let search engines know what content is available and how to reach it.

If your online store includes numerous pages, XML sitemaps will be extremely beneficial on SEO as it enables search engines to find and crawl all of them.