How To Improve Website Ranking For E-Commerce

Conversion and sales in e-commerce hinges on two things- effective marketing and website ranking. Leaving the former aside for another time, today, in this write-up, we are going to discuss the latter, i.e., website ranking for e-commerce sites. Website ranking is indispensable for any online shop owner to get higher visibility. In fact, 34% of all the online shoppers go to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo for product search. In order to target this shopper community, it is inescapable that the e-commerce business owners strategize their action plans to get higher ranking on various search engines. However, search engine optimization for e-commerce websites can be pretty intimidating for many online shop owners. For all the e-commerce sites aiming for the first page of search engines, this guide to higher ranking would help you step-up your game. Read on and follow these points to see your e-commerce site ranking going up.

Effective Keyword Research

Keywords are the crux of SEO and help in driving organic traffic to Google online shopping website. The keywords research for homepage and product page should be done with the content, being published there, in mind. Keyword cannibalization, i.e., targeting the same keyword for multiple pages should be avoided. Try out long-tail keywords as they tend to comprise of 70% of the web search (a study by Moz ) and offer a high exact match volume. Focus on your competitors keywords and avoid using the ones that are targeted by competitors with higher DA (Domain Authority) or PA (Page Authority). Tools like SEOmoz Keyword Tool and Google AdWords Keyword Tool can be used to perform effective keyword research and ultimately gain higher website ranking on Google and other search engines.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization plays a crucial role in getting higher ranking of an e-commerce site. The good thing is that you can easily control on-page optimization by keeping in mind things like keyword optimization, internal linking, adding rich snippets etc. Each page of the site should be effectively optimized so that the search engine spiders can easily crawl through the pages and rank it higher. Structuring the site, improving the usability, adding customer reviews, and updating the e-commerce site to a more responsive version are proven to be beneficial in on-page optimization. Proper categorization of all the products and optimized images with Alt tags can also come handy while performing on-page optimization for higher ranking.

Social Media Optimization

Social signals account for 8%-10% of the organic search algorithms, confirms the two search engine giants Google and Bing. Getting the social media following on the website is instrumental in gaining higher ranking on the search engines as well. Promote your e-commerce business on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc., to get the traffic to your website in a short time. The tweets, likes, shares, comments, views, +1s etc., are detrimental increasing the social signals. Incorporate social sharing icons on all the e-commerce pages and get as many people to share the content on social media sites as possible. You can also add Facebook Fan Box to encourage comments.

Publish More Content

Content is one of the fundamental pillars of SEO and the case is no different when trying to get higher ranking for e-commerce sites. Remember, search engines love getting fed with unique, informative, relevant and fresh content. The keywords researched in the first point should be the base of the content you write to get higher visibility on search result pages. Any type of duplicate content should be avoided and qualitatively rich content should be posted on the page. Regular blogging strategy with relevant keywords and e-books publication could be a great way to get more traffic on the site through various sharing means. Google Penguin gives utmost value to rich and lengthy content (1,500-1,800 words per page approx.), so try to make your blog posts accordingly.

Boost Page Load Speed

According to a Google case study by Hosting Facts, A single second delay in your website loading time can result in a 7% loss in conversion, and 40% of web users will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. This makes speed a supreme factor in determining the conversions and bounce rate. Boosting the page load speed is the perfect answer to the question how to improve page rank for e-commerce websites. As an e-commerce site has a number of pages with products displayed through high-quality images, the page load speed of the website tends to slow down and this may affect the website ranking in Google. Reduce the size of the components on the website, deploy faster servers and use better techniques to fetch data for improving the website ranking.

Once you've performed all these tasks, it's time to measure the success of your efforts and analyze what's working for your e-commerce site and what's not. Keep repeating the process and updating your website with the latest e-commerce trends to stay on top of the SERP ranking game.