Marketing for e-Commerce sites means facing specific challenges. First of all, putting e-commerce sites in the foreground necessitates a good balance between marketing experience and user experience, conversion improvements, and SEO. Second, because online stores often have a comprehensive and complex structure, on-site optimization can turn into an endless nightmare.
This guide deals with all of the content and technical problems that e-commerce SEO professionals may encounter. However, there are practical methods to deal with these issues and techniques that can save you time.
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Keyword Research for E-commerce SEO
Keyword research for e-commerce sites means going beyond search volumes and competitive analysis. The main reason behind this complexity may be the purchase cycle. Each step in the buying cycle requires focusing on different keywords.
In general, when customers enter online stores, they go through 5 different steps before making a purchase. The keywords and phrases used within each of these steps are different.
Awareness: The searcher is in search of general information about a topic. Ranking in keywords in this field is not easy due to competition.
Research: Visitors seek more specific information. The names of the category pages are the keywords that should be focused on.
Comparison: Users search for the good and bad aspects of a brand, product, or store. Keywords in blog posts and product reviews are important.
Purchasing: Searchers decide what they want to buy and go shopping. The focus here is on the keywords on the product pages.
Don’t lose: The right thing to do in this step is to try not to lose the directly acquired customer. It is necessary to reach the customer with attractive campaigns.
As you can see in the above steps, the keywords used in the research, comparison and purchase steps are the keywords with the highest conversion potential. You should try creating a comprehensive list of these keywords. To create a comprehensive list of these keywords, you will need 3 groups of keywords that you can then convert into long-tail queries.
But before you begin, you should do research on the current search behavior of your target audience. You should be aware of the gender, age and social status of your target audience. For example, if you are a man and you are not familiar with personal care products for women, you should try to get information from your female friends with help. You should try to understand the language of the target audience by spending some of your time on appropriate social media resources.
As soon as you understand how your customers speak and the words they use, you should add them to your keyword list.
1. You must create a list of keywords that contain actions. Buy, price, compare or review.
2. You must list all product brands in your store. “Like Apple, Samsung, Sony or LG.”
3. You should create a list of categories, product names and key features. “Television, laptop, smartphone, iPhone.“
Once you have made the three lists available as described above, you can create dozens of long-tailed keywords by combining general keywords with product keywords and their characteristics. “Buy iPhone 11 Pro Max 256GB” is a good example. You can create dozens or even hundreds of search queries of this type by mixing your keywords.
You can do this yourself. If you wish, you can also do this by getting support from the keyword tools in a much shorter time. You can get long-tail keywords instantly by using tools that feature word combinations like Rank Tracker. It’s that simple. You now have dozens or even hundreds of long-tail keywords that you can use efficiently. If one of these keywords has good search volume and low competitive status, you should try to use those keywords in your SEO efforts.
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Wise Keyword Targeting
Have you ever heard of keyword cannibalization before? In short, this term means that more than one page on the site focuses on the same keyword. Targeting the same query, these pages will compete with each other in terms of ranking on the search engine result page. In some cases, the search engines put the page that you consider unimportant to the foreground and leave the original page in the background.
To avoid the keyword cannibalization problem, you should try creating a keyword matrix. Within this matrix, you should appropriately indicate which page is targeting which keyword. This way, you can avoid using similar keywords on the pages you will try to create in the future. This simple method allows you to avoid the problem.
Alternatively, if you’re using a keyword tool, you can take advantage of the keyword map feature of that tool. This allows you to easily see which landing page targets which keyword. If you don’t use a custom keyword tool, you can continue using the simple method above.
Note: If the content management system you use to manage your e-commerce site generates additional pages for variations of products, you must notify search engines that these pages are equivalent to the main product page. For this, you can use the canonicalization method.
Check https://www.yeapdigital.co.uk/blog/ecommerce-seo-for-beginners/ for more information about eCommerce SEO keyword targeting.
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Save Time Optimizing Thousands of Product Pages
An e-commerce website can often have thousands of product pages, even if it doesn’t have many options for category pages. When it comes to category pages everything seems to be very, very simple but the landscape changes at a time when it comes to business product pages. You may not have sufficient time and resources to create original titles, H1 tags, and custom descriptions for product pages.
You should try to choose a content management system that you can easily make this change. Remember, that the titles and meta descriptions will appear on the search engine results page. Therefore, you should try to increase your clickthrough rate in results by using appropriate call-to-action messages.
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Improve Your Website’s Page Speed
Site speed is a very effective ranking factor for e-commerce sites. A slow site means poor user experience. Poor user experience means lower sales. Site speed has been an important ranking factor for a long time. The quick loading of your site’s pages is a factor that can move them to the first page in the search engine results.
First, you should analyze the main landing pages on your site to make sure that there are no speed issues involved. You can do this quickly by performing a variety of tools. You can try using Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. All these tools will provide you with the speed score of your site after scanning your site in detail. In general, the factors that reduce the site speed of the pages and ignored by e-commerce sites are the following factors:
- You must cancel unnecessary redirects. Often sites make redirects between non-www and www versions. They also perform similar transitions for the mobile version of the site. You can speed up your site if you can safely cancel such unnecessary redirects.
- You should improve the product images. Ecommerce sites often have too many product images. Since all of these product images put too much pressure on the sites, the opening of the pages may be delayed. You should ensure that all images are optimized and compressed in the best way. If necessary, you should use small versions of the pictures and try to show larger versions by clicking.
- You can use the caching method for browsers. On e-commerce sites, visitors often browse different pages in a single session. You should try to take advantage of browser caching technology because it would be a waste of time to reload and reload unchanged content.
- You can set the content to load as it appears. This will load the content when the user scrolls down the screen on your site. Thus, the instant load on your site is provided to be less.
- You should avoid using JavaScript scripts that prevent rendering images on pages. When you use these scripts, you allow the user to need extra time to load the page. This is not a very useful method for user experience.
- If necessary, you should try to use AMP technology. AMP technology is a fairly new technology. This technology helps to load pages with fixed content faster than other pages.