How to Rank your E-Commerce Website on SERP?
The US census bureau estimated an upwards of $870 billion in e-commerce sales in 2021, a 14.2% increase than 2020 in the country.
The internet is driving more and more people to shop online, which means a lucrative opportunity for e-commerce brands to put their businesses together and tap into the massive potential of online sales. With the proper marketing tactic, e-commerce ventures can get more visibility online and drive up their sales.
And there’s only one way to gain higher visibility on Google; to rank highly on SERPs or search engine result pages. SERPs consist of various features like snippets, people also ask, local map packs, etc. Needless to say, your business has plenty of opportunities to feature in the SERP tools and gain high visibility and search engine traffic.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to gain hyper-visibility online and surplus traffic to your e-commerce site.
Why Is It Important To Rank Your E-commerce Business on SERPs?
With a high e-commerce website ranking, you can get heightened visibility, which increases inbound traffic to your site. This increase in traffic results in more leads and conversions for your business.
Moreover, conducting SEO to position your e-commerce firms top of SERPs also ensures higher visibility and accords more trust in your business. E-commerce SEO reduces the need for paid search advertising on Google and enhances your organic rankings, which have a better impact in the long term.
But there are several other advantages as well. For one, with a high ranking, you can be sure that you’re beating your competitors for visibility, as more people are finding your business online over them.
So if you have an e-commerce business and looking for higher conversions and sales, investing in SEO could be the right solution for you. Even if you’re not ranking among the top pages currently, you’ll get many opportunities with SEO, given how feature-rich Google’s SERP is.
Tips to Rank Your E-Commerce Website on SERPs
Even a well-devised SEO strategy can take time to bring back results for your business, but it’s important nonetheless that you start now. Here are a few ways in which you can increase your e-commerce website rankings:
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Keyword Research
Keywords are at the heart of any SEO campaign, and you need a mix of focus keywords, related keywords, and long-tail keywords in order to succeed with higher rankings.
But here’s the deal: you’ve been focusing on keywords and incorporating them in your site, but any result from those keywords remains elusive. Why so?
That’s because you may not be targeting the right keywords for the job. Your keyword strategy should include keywords that have a high volume of monthly searches but have low competition. This means that an increased number of your target audience are searching for the keyword, but the phrase isn’t being targeted by your competitors. This opens up a glorious opportunity to be visible in front of your prospects and beat your competitors to it.
If you’re unsure about the right keywords, there are various online tools, such as ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, etc., that can help you find the right keywords to target for your niche.
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Optimize Product Pages
Product pages in your eCommerce site should have a flawless user experience, as it’s the first part of your site that visitors will land on. So your prime focus should be on optimizing the landing pages on your site.
In order to optimize your product pages, you need to focus on getting some design elements right on your site. This includes an appealing yet clean layout with a proper presentation of products and categories. It should also have clear CTAs and seamless navigation for the user to find the correct information quickly. You should also invite reviews, ratings, and testimonials on your products to further influence the buying decision of your target audience.
Optimizing the product page is all about offering a high experience to users who are browsing products on your site. You want your products to appeal to them in a certain way, but you don’t want to burden them with too much information on your landing pages.
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Improve Page Load Speed
Ecommerce product pages have lots of information, from product images and videos to their descriptions and other related information. All of this information could make your site page slower in responding to user commands, which could spell disaster for your e-commerce business.
Ideally, your page should load with all the visual elements within 4 seconds. Any longer than that and your users are likely to leave your site. But beyond a high bounce rate, if your page is taking too long to load, it’s expected to have a detrimental effect on conversions for your business. Page load speed is also one of Google’s core web vitals, meaning it impacts your SERP rankings.
You can test your product page’s load speed via online tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, which tells you how your individual pages are performing and the areas of improvement.
There are a number of things you can do to reduce the page load speed, like limiting images on your web page or compressing them using image editing tools like Illustrator and Photoshop. You can also consider improving your site architecture and navigation to enhance the user experience of your site.
Lastly, if you have video content on your site, try and compress or optimize them, along with removing excessive plugins and unnecessary codes.
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Increase Mobile Responsiveness
More than half of e-commerce purchases are made via smartphones, with sales exceeding $350 billion in 2021 alone. And this number is expected to double by 2025, to a staggering $728 billion.
Mobile devices are all the rage when it comes to online search. More than half of global searches are made via mobile devices, and this number is only expected to grow in the next few years.
Search engines also prefer the mobile version of a site when indexing and ranking web pages due to such a high number of mobile searchers. Therefore, it’s imperative to optimize your site for mobile viewing to enhance user experience and generate sales.
To make your site mobile-friendly, ensure the readability of your page’s contents with contrast colors while testing your site on various browsers and devices. You can also offer mobile-specific features like barcodes and a smartphone-optimized URL. If your images are too large for mobile viewing and affect your load speed, compress them on low bandwidths to reduce the page load time.
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Analyze Competitors
Your top-performing competitors are a great yardstick to measure what is a hit and what’s not in your e-commerce SEO strategy. By analyzing your competitors, you can know their strategy, the keywords they use, and the various optimization techniques they’ve incorporated into their site.
Other areas where you can look into their strategy are the linking opportunities, keywords, areas where you both differ, and what makes their strategy effective.
Competitor analysis can reveal a lot more to you about how your competitors are performing in your niche. It’s a great starting point when you’ve just established an e-commerce business, but as you move on, you should incorporate your own strategy based on your observations and experiences.
Best E-Commerce SEO Services in Brampton
Knowing how to improve your e-commerce website rankings is essential for higher revenues and the growth of your e-commerce business. In the absence of high visibility on SERP, you’ll most likely fail to reach out to your target audience.
Follow these 5 basic essentials to improve your e-commerce website rankings and generate more leads and conversions for your e-commerce business.