eCommerce SEO Guide to Rankings for Google

eCommerce SEO best practices that get you ranking on the first page of a search engine for target keywords and searches. Don’t believe me? I’ve got stats to prove it. One study by Chitka found that the first listing in Google’s organic search results receives 32.5% of the total traffic, and then each following listing receives a little less, from 17.6% for No. 2 to only 2.4% for listing No. 10.

[Source: chitika.com]

And even if you’re the 10th listing on page one, it’s better to be there than the first listing on page two. The study went on to say that sites that are listed on the first Google results page receive 91.5% of all traffic. On the subsequent pages, the Google traffic percentage drastically drops—even just going from page one to page two as it drops from 91.5% to just 4.8%. Basically, if you don’t show up on page one of Google for a consumer’s search, then you have zero visibility.

[Source: chitika.com]

A sure sign of SEO success is ranking on the first page of Google for a target keyword or keyword phrase, as shown by Chitka’s findings. And sitting in that No. 1 spot is even better because the No. 1 result on organic search typically has the most clicks of all the search results. Other studies have shown slightly different results than what is shown above but regardless, the higher on page one you are the more traffic you will receive.

How to Increase Your Visibility

 No question social media sites and places like Amazon have become highly successful platforms for consumers to find things. However, people use search engines more than any other tool to find information about websites, companies and ultimately products. Which in turn builds brand awareness, increases your website traffic and will generate more sales for your eCommerce business. In order to increase your online search visibility, here are six things you need to take into account with your SEO strategy.

1. Site Optimizations

To improve your Google rankings, you really need to get the SEO basics down first, and a big part of that is optimizing your website’s homepage and internal content. You do that by finding and using the right keywords, short and long tail ones, to optimize your page titles, meta descriptions, header and image alt tags, content and site architecture – e.g. – navigation and website taxonomy. You also need to make sure you optimize your blog content with keywords and relevant links pointing back to other pages on your site. More on internal links in point five. In a case study, a business set a simple SEO campaign goal to be found. What they wanted was to increase organic traffic to their website as well as organic traffic revenue through improved keyword rankings. A big part of hitting their goal was optimizing their entire website, and after doing that, among a handful of other things, this company increased their volume of targeted keywords on the first page of Google and their SERP visibility by more than 1400% in just four months.

2. Social Shares

Neil Patel believes there’s a correlation between social and search—and so do we. Google uses data from the various social media platforms to determine the usefulness of your eCommerce site and where it should be ranked in search results. That means the more active you are and the more social shares other credible sites have which includes your company and/or its content, the more likely you are to appear in Google’s top search results. So if you’ve ever been told that social signals aren’t part of Google’s ranking factor, you should reconsider that advice. Links from Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest more than other platforms do affect your Google search ranking. My advice, create quality content, share that content with your audience and regularly posting on your social channels and add social media sharing buttons to your website.

3. File Size

 Images are important with an eCommerce business since customers can’t touch and feel a product before buying it. But it’s more than just taking and posting a good picture. With an online store, image optimization is important to finding and keeping consumers, and file size is one thing you have to consider. You can’t add large images on your website, and then just shrink the dimensions using the source code. Instead, reduce the image size and give people the option to view a larger image on a separate webpage or in a pop-up. Doing so will improve the page load time. Load time is important because consumers only wait about 3-5 seconds for an image to load, and page load time is a factor that Google uses in its ranking algorithm. So to make sure you have a fast load time and rank well, reduce the file size of your website images and increase your page load speed.

4. Interactive Page Elements

Text is great. You can tell people a lot through words. But many consumers today don’t want to take the time to read about your business or products. They prefer to be told or shown through videos or easy-to-skim infographics, and they want to be entertained with interactive page content. In fact, when comparing video vs. text in terms of brand engagement, 60% of people prefer watching videos and videos keep visitors on your website longer. And according to some of the smartest minds in the SEO world, interactive elements are connected to ranking higher in search engines. These interactive elements include content mentioned above, but also include website buttons and menus, embedded Tweets, gifs, polls, quizzes, games and list content. Having a clean interface and a well-designed, easy-to-navigate site all improve the user experience, which results in ranking higher. 

5. Internal Links

A great way to improve your online visibility within organic search results is through link building; some even say it’s the best way to improve search visibility. And here’s why. You want to appear on that first page of Google? A large factor that sits at the center of Google’s search algorithm is links. Building good, useful and relevant internal links on your website pages and blog content will help you rank higher in Google search results because these kinds of links build authority and trust with Google.

6. Word Count

Word count of your blog posts also can help or hinder your search rankings. While 300-400 word blog posts take less time to write, longer-form content tends to rank better. Longer content gives you a chance to provide more insights to consumers and include more keywords and useful links. According to Google’s 200 ranking factors, a link from a 1,000 word post is more valuable than a link that’s inside a short, 25 word snippet. But this doesn’t mean you add a bunch of “fluff” to a post. Those 1,000 words you write need to be useful to consumers and relevant to your topic and business. If you’re looking for more SEO guidance, check out our solutions for eCommerce SEO services.]]>