9 Ecommerce Tips to Increase Sales During COVID-19
When it comes to increasing website sales in the world of Ecommerce, your site design and advertising are important, but you should never forget the organic arm of your marketing campaign. We’re talking about search engine optimisation, how you bring your customers from search engines like Google to your product pages. With these Ecommerce SEO tips, we can help get more of those clicks and, better yet, turn more of those clicks into sales.
Establish an XML sitemap
These sitemaps are, effectively, a list of URLs. You may already have an HTML sitemap, but search engine bots (or crawlers) index your website by reading this sitemap. This helps search engines better see the importance of the page, which helps with ranking. Setting up an XML sitemap is relatively simple, and there are even tools that can automatically generate it by scanning your website.
Use internal links wisely
A good, intuitive site structure and layout are going to help your customers more easily find what they need, especially if you have a ton of products to choose from. However, it’s also important to your SEO efforts. By using internal links to create a clear structure, you make it easier for the search engine’s bots to crawl your site, indexing the pages as they go. Having link anchors (the clickable hyperlinks in text) connecting the different pages of the site, especially with keyword-rich text can help those bots better understand the context of each page. Make sure that the clickable text accurately describes the content that it’s leading the visitor too, using at least one keyword.
Establish the site structure
Link anchors aren’t the only way to establish the structure of the site. You can also do it by defining that structure yourself. This is done by setting up navigation from the homepage that makes it easier to explore the different categories and sub-categories. Create a hierarchy of pages/products, which are in sub-categories- which are in categories, which are accessible from the homepage. You don’t have to make every single page immediately accessible from the homepage, but the series of clicks to get from the homepage to each individual products or page should make sense and involve going through the most logical categories and subcategories.
Don’t get bogged down in product descriptions
These descriptions are going to help sell your products, but when it comes to SEO Ecommerce, the real value is in better defining the product categories. Writing tailored descriptions for hundreds of products is very time-consuming, especially if those products aren’t especially interesting. People tend to search more for categories of products than specific products, so spend time sprucing up the category pages instead. If you have a smaller range of products, then individual attention on each might be more reasonable.
Optimise the URL
Search engines don’t only look at the content on the page you’re trying to optimise. They also look at things like the URL. Having each product and category URL include the words that best describe the content on the page is always recommended. For instance, instead of www.mockecommercewebsite.com/productid=394398, a URL like www.mockecommercewebsite.com/product=blue-ceramic-kettle could help direct more traffic to the page, instead. The more products you have, the more distinct these URLs have to get, too.
Make good use of Metadata
Your webpage has metadata, also known as meta tags. These data elements are specifically designed to help provide information to the search engines on what the webpage and the content on the page are all about. As such, search engines look at the metadata, just as they look at your content, URL, and links, to determine the proper context and importance of the page. In your metadata, making use of SEO keywords is essential. This includes the meta tags for your page title, your H1 headers, and meta description. You don’t need to flood your content with keywords, it’s better to let it work through the metadata, instead.
Scrub your broken links
Just as your internal links can help boost your SEO, your broken links can do a lot to undermine your efforts, as well. For one, it’s going to annoy your visitors if their customer journey is interrupted by a 404 page. Search engine designers know this and, thus, tend to penalize websites that have broken links up. You can run crawls with website surfing bots that can help detect these broken links pretty easily. Either replace the content that you’re supposed to be linking to or simply remove the link for the site.
Don’t be slow
Search engines priorities the usability of the website, and penalise any aspects of the website that would cause trouble or interruption for the visitors. Aside from broken links, this means you should focus on page speed. Essentially, the longer your website takes to load, the more your results are going to suffer. There is a range of ways to help your site load quicker, including moving from one host to another and using better-optimised media such as pictures and videos.
Don’t forget your mobile users
More and more consumers are using smartphones, tablets, and other portable devices to browse stores and businesses. Search engines cater their search engine results pages to mobile device users, as well. As such, you want to make sure you’re not leaving them behind. Having responsive website design, ensuring good page speed on mobile, having easy-to-use mobile navigation, and making sure that your checkout process is adjusted for mobile users can all help with your mobile SEO. Perhaps you’re not concerned about winning over customers on mobile, but you could be missing out on a significant portion of your market if that’s the case.
With Ecommerce SEO, you have real potential to easily increase website sales. SEO works by attracting those web users most likely to have a real interest in your website and your products, meaning that they’re some of the customers most ready to convert. You just need to follow the Ecommerce SEO tips above to give them the little push they need.