SEO in eCommerce: Everything you need to improve

In this article, we dive deep into SEO in eCommerce or online store SEO. We'll suggest techniques that will improve your search engine visibility, attracting new organic visitors which in their turn will help your sales.

Introduction to SEO in eCommerce

Every online store, except the homepage and the categories where all products are displayed, has pages that show each product separately. In terms of SEO in eCommerce, the product page is the page that SEO experts should devote the most time to.

1. The basic SEO steps for the Product Page

The product page is a page like all the other pages of your online store. The techniques you use on the rest of the e-shop can also be applied to your product page.

Create a beautiful title for your product, using the name of the manufacturer if possible. For example Apple Macbook MJLQ2 Gold Corei7. By using the brand in the title of the product you can attract visitors who are only looking for the brand. Also, by using a feature like Corei7 of the example, you can get traffic from people who are generally looking for Corei7 computers.
Create an informative, unique description for each product. As we mentioned in our article "How to Increase Sales in e-Commerce", never use exactly the description that other websites, such as the manufacturer, have written. At best, visitors will find that you are not offering anything better than the rest of the e-shops but you also may be penalized for duplicate content by search engines and your website may be considered as low quality.
Create a meta description that will impress. Each product must have a unique meta description. As mentioned in our article "Website SEO: How to implement Search Engine Optimization" to your website, the meta description is what will bring the visitor to your website if he/she finds from the title that this result is what he was searching for. Imagine two different meta descriptions:
- A. Display. Retina display; 15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2880-by-1800 native resolution at 220 pixels per inch ...
- B. MacBook Pro MJLQ2, buy it at a discounted price and with a 1-year warranty.
Both online stores offer the same product but have a different meta description. Which of the two would you choose to click on? B, am I wrong? Even if B's eCommerce offered the laptop at a higher price, it might have won the market because it carried more than the manufacturer's equipped meta description.
Add high-quality photos with the appropriate alt tags to the product. Some time ago I used a photo I found on google for one of my articles. My partner Alexandros Nasiopoulos rushed to correct me. He told me that the search engines are seeing that the photo is duplicate and may penalize your article. With a search on the internet, I realized that he might be right with many companies finding duplicated images. It's difficult for the search engines to apply efforts on images (and duplicate images to be a ranking factor in the future), but how difficult is it to take a few more photos, than those which are on the web, and share them with my clients or how difficult is it for me to create one image for my article with a photo editing program?
Take care of the User Experience. You will find out how in our forthcoming articles!!!

2. Add structured data to the product page

Rich results are now in our lives and we are seeing them more and more often even in SEO in eCommerce. Using code you can mark every part of the page and explain to search engines and visitors what exactly this part is. Which is the price of the product? What is its average rating and how many have rated it? What is the main product image and how many pieces are in stock?

Without structured data, engines see the product page as an article with images and text. Structured data is what explains to the search engines what everything on the product page is. In turn, search engines, while they are not (yet) using them to rank pages, they reward their use by displaying results as rich results. Take the example of one of our products.

Another reason you should use structured data is that you can manage the impressions of your visitors. The visitor is aware of the price and availability and when he visits your site he will be instantly converted into a customer buyer (conversion).

3. Add real reviews

According to surveys, more than 80% of consumers check reviews before buying online. Many of them, of course, when seeing a lot of positive reviews, they are not considering them as reliable. A new trend is to ignore positive reviews of the product and focus on negative reviews. Studies on consumer psychology report that consumers are buying more products rated 4 out of 5 stars than those rated 5 out of 5.

Try to get your customers to evaluate your products, as well. Do you have negative reviews? Contact your customers to find out exactly what they didn't like and find a solution, so that the negative reviews may change.

Use the 2nd technique and add structured data with reviews to your eCommerce to get rich results in the search results.

4. Make your product page open incredibly fast

People are not used to wasting time. Waiting costs money. Especially nowadays when everybody searches the internet from mobile devices, every second counts. Visitors expect your page to load very quickly, as do the search engines. Speed counts even more if you want to convert a visitor into a customer. There are many techniques you can apply, but it is advisable to contact a web developer who knows better what your page needs to open faster.

5. Be sure to check out the User Experience (UX) of the product page

As we mentioned in our article "Website design to making the first impression", the first impression is the one that will win the visitor and turn him into a customer. User Experience (UX) includes the emotions and behaviors that a visitor will experience when coming to your website, by the design of your website and product. Research has shown that 82% of websites worldwide have poor User Experience. There are many aspects to keep in mind, from product images to the position of the Buy button. From our experience, Simple is Better Than Complex. A minimal look without lots of unnecessary distracting graphics or lots of color and size choices and a quick checkout page is the secret to success.

6. Build a relationship of trust with your customers, show that you are real humans and not a cold website

To convert a visitor to a customer, you need to gain their trust. Visitors want to see that you have a physical presence as a person and a physical address as a business and that their money will not end up in a fake business. The search engines also try to check the solvency of an online store by looking at people's reviews, search authority, backlinks, and articles.

Something you can easily do to gain some of your customer trust is to create an About Us page, a Customer Service page, a Shipping and Returns page and many articles that will increase the search authority of your eCommerce.

In summary, if you really want to do SEO in eCommerce, you should not just focus on common SEO solutions, you need to look a little deeper into your visitors' psychology and UX.

Increasing website's traffic through multiple sources of web traffic, limiting the bounce rate, and creating appealing landing pages can increase the website's conversion rate.

Cloud O.E. with years of experience in developing high-UX, custom online applications, and SEO website optimization, can help you with either designing, SEO, or promoting your eCommerce.

SEO in eCommerce: Everything you need to improve