As many people who run e-commerce sites online will already know, there will always be a competitor site with a similar offering. Of course, you can compete on the prices you sell for or the quality of service you offer but these approaches are only helpful if people look at your site in the first place. In other words, to get them there and even considering purchasing from your site, you need an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Read on to find out what the top-rated e-commerce sites do to raise their online profiles.
- Ensure Your Host Server Provides Fast Loading Times
This is more crucial than many website owners imagine. The problem with slow-loading sites is that they tend to be ranked lower by Google, Bing and the other big search engines. Site loading plays a big part in search engine results pages so you need to have your site hosted by a provider which doesn’t only offer proper cybersecurity measures but which also provides a slick, effective service to users on devices in any part of the globe. This is why web hosting is so important for all websites and it is certainly the case that e-commerce sites need fast-loading pages if they are to rank highly and get an edge over their competitors. Note that rapid loading capacity from your web host service should be scaleable, too. In other words, it needs to remain just as quick regardless of how many pages you add to your site over time.
- Provide Unique Content For Each of Your Category Landing Pages
Among the best practices for running a commercial website of any kind is how you deal with content that is generic in its nature. Let’s say you have just added a new line of products to your site from a manufacturer. If you upload information about each of these products that has been copied and pasted from the manufacturer’s own sales literature, then you can bet that the same wording will appear on multiple e-commerce websites. Search engines will recognise this and won’t typically rank your site so well going forward. Doing so can drag your visibility down overall. To counter this, provide your own, unique wording for the web crawlers to read.
- Keep Your URLs as Simple as Possible
URLS – the online addresses for each of your e-commerce site’s pages – may not be a key part of the user experience shoppers will encounter when they visit your platform but they are important nonetheless. If you have URLs with long strings of letters and numbers that no one can understand or if you have an inconsistent approach to naming your product pages, then it can affect your SEO. Use a methodical approach that can be replicated with every product you sell to make it easier for both people and bots to navigate your site.
SEO For e-Commerce Platforms in a Nutshell
Raising the visibility of your e-commerce platform takes time and some care but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Some of the measures, such as updating your site’s schema, can be achieved relatively simply. What you shouldn’t do is assume your site’s SEO is in good order and needs no further attention because this will only open the door to competitors who are keen to outrank you.
