How we optimize this Ecommerce Site Using On-Page SEO
Step1: Extensive Keyword research
Keyword research is the very first and most critical step for search engine optimization. Lack of quality keyword research is one of the most common issues with ecommerce websites that don’t sell. Using company feedback, AdWords Keyword Planner, Google Auto-complete, and Google Trends, a list of phrases & keywords commonly used as search terms by normal users was created.
SEO team also did a complete Competitor analysis to find out keywords being targeted by online store ecommerce’s competitors organically and through advertisements. Some keywords were combination of:
Search terms related to featured products.
Discounts and special offers.
Seasonal search terms.
General queries related to online shopping.
Does your website rank for the most profitable keywords? Is the website optimized to generate maximum sales?
Step 2: On Site Optimization
On page optimization is the second step. On-page optimization makes the content of online store easily readable for search engine crawlers. The focus is primarily on:
Information Architecture (URLs, tags, headings, sitemaps, content indentation, product and category pages optimization etc)
Textual Content
Images
Videos
Internal Linking
Social Media Integration
The ecommerce store was custom designed and developed by FATbit and was integrated with an SEO friendly Content Management System. The CMS helped us conveniently optimize website’s loading time, web page size, page titles, meta-tags, URLs, headings, alt tags for images, image & product description, and other various other details for targeted keywords.
Our team ensured proper categorization of featured products. If the question, ‘How to increase website ranking on Google’ is occupying your mind, then, on-page optimization could be the answer.
Step 3: Work on Website Loading Time
Our team brought down website loading time to further improve user experience and in the process managed to reduce website bounce rate as well. High website load time is one of the major issues with online shopping websites due to large number of pages. This helped the online shopping store score in one of the most important search engine ranking factors. Our design team accomplished this by reducing the size of various website components, using better development techniques to fetch data, and deploying faster servers. Working on website loading time is often forgotten by designers and SEO specialists and thus this point is missing from most SEO case studies.
SEO-ecommerce-loading-time1
Step 4: On-Site Content Optimization
We advised the category managers of online store ecommerce to add detailed, keyword rich and user friendly product descriptions and update the content on a regular basis. Search engines prefer websites with fresh and quality content. online store ecommerce team was warned against copying content from any other online stores as content duplication is strictly penalized by search engines. FATbit recommends you to improve your online store by paying extra attention to on-site content optimization.
After all these efforts,we were able to steadily increase organic traffic for online store ecommerce -leading Nigerian online store as you can see in the screenshot below:
how to improve google SEO
Step 5: Removal of Duplicate Content
online store ecommerce had duplicate content on some pages as some of the products being sold were very similar. Sometimes, multiple URLs were being generated automatically for the same page every time a new buyer left a review. To counter such issues with the ecommerce site, robots.txt was used. This blocked areas that created duplicate content.
Canonical tag was used to indicate web pages to be indexed and no-follow attributes were assigned to links that contained duplicate content.
Step 6: Established Multiple Sources of Traffic
On site SEO takes time to generate returns. So, from the very beginning, FATbit team looked beyond website to generate multiple sources of traffic. Targeting excessive keywords through the official website and getting decent online store ranking for all is not always possible. So, we constantly invested resources towards generating regular traffic through company’s blog, guest blogging, social media marketing, etc.
Also Read: Learn how to check your most relevant sources of traffic using Google Analytics
All these external sources were linked to dedicated on-site landing pages for better conversion. If you want to improve your online shopping website sales, then, create as many sources of traffic as possible. If any SEO experts company or their case study claims that excellent results were achieved by just working on the official website- you need to think twice before hiring them.
referral-sources
Step 7: Domain Authority Improvement
Our team of professional content writers generated quality, informative, and engaging content to share with target audience. Videos, Infographics, Slideshows and various such resources were also created to push as many resources on top 10 search results for targeted keywords. The content was optimized for keywords fwhich affected the online store’s ranking. This helped the brand avoid cannibalization. Content was always created with publishing platform and target audience in mind. Posts were then marketed through social media sharing, participation in discussion forums and comments section. All the external links also helped in link building and improved online store ecommerce’s domain authority.
Within 3 months, the website was appearing in top 3 organic results for important keywords like:
Online Shopping Stores
Best Online Shopping Stores Nigeria
Buy Online in Nigeria
Online Shopping Store Nigeria
Step 8: Optimization of Social Media Resources
Our SEO team strongly believes that Social Media Optimization is as important as on-site optimization. Various relevant keywords of online store ecommerce were targeted through company’s official and unofficial social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc. Competitive keywords were used in the profile details, posts, image titles and descriptions, various board details and pins created on Pinterest, etc. Hashtags were used to increase content visibility for both visitors and search engines.
Step 9: Conversion Funnel Optimization
online store ecommerce was then tested for usability and visitor user experience. Loopholes in the conversion funnel were identified and corrected to reduce bounce rate. Some corrective steps were taken to increase overall visit duration of the website and they contributed hugely in improving sales for online shopping website.
Step 10: Regular Monitoring
online store ecommerce performance was continuously monitored through Google Analytics and various other tools. Target keywords, homepage, landing pages, external sources of traffic, etc were constantly tracked for fluctuations and areas of improvement. The website’s overall traffic and individual page traffic, visit duration, bounce rate and exit rate, etc were also analyzed.
