SEO Rankings and Conversion Rate are the two most important metrics that matter to eCommerce stores mainly because of the nature of the business.
In today’s competitive market, especially, you need to at least be on page #1 of search engine results, and ideally in the top 3 results, if you want people to notice your store.
A Research Study conducted by Optify has also confirmed that it’s critical for eCommerce websites to appear on page 1 of search engine results, especially in the top 3 results as together they receive about 58.4% of all organic traffic.
The number #1 position in search results, according to Optify, receives an average of 36.4% CTR, the number #2 position receives 12.5% CTR, and the number #3 position receives 9.5% CTR.
In other words, your eCommerce store will lose lots of sales opportunities if you don’t improve your eCommerce SEO rankings.
Moreover, improving eCommerce SEO rankings that bring organic traffic as opposed to risking your money in paid advertising also has its own benefits.
For instance, a SEMrush study has found that 37.5% of all traffic to eCommerce websites come through search engines.
Another study also revealed that 44% of consumers who shop online start their journey with a Google Search.
And most importantly, organic traffic coming from search engines is also considered highly-qualified traffic because these are the people who are ready to buy and take all the necessary actions in the purchasing process.
So it is critically important to focus on improving your eCommerce SEO rankings to funnel such organic traffic into your eCommerce store.
For example, if you can rank for just one keyword (e.g. buy white Adidas shoes for men), you can funnel a considerable amount of highly-qualified traffic to your eCommerce website and make a lot of sales off this keyword.
Now, your only job is to rank for as many keywords as possible such as this one, and you’ll be well on your way to making more sales.
And to help you with that, I have shared the top 7 tips to improve your eCommerce SEO rankings and bring more organic traffic & sales in 2021.
Top 7 Tips to Improve Your eCommerce SEO Rankings in 2021
Now that you finally know the importance of first page rankings in search results, here are some things you can do to improve your eCommerce SEO rankings and secure ranks on the first page in SERPs.
1 - Perform Extensive Keyword Research
Keyword Research is the first and the most critical step to improve the eCommerce SEO rankings of an online store.
In fact, lack of quality & extensive keyword research can promptly result in ranking for wrong keywords or not ranking for any keywords at all, which eventually leads to making zero or close to zero sales.
Therefore, it is extremely critical to perform extensive keyword research using Google Trends, Google Auto-Complete, AdWords Keyword Planner, Amazon Suggestions, SEMRush, and prepare a list of keywords & phrases that are commonly used by online shoppers.
Ideally, you should look for:
- Search terms with purchase intent related to your products
- Seasonal search terms & phrases related to your products
- General queries related to your products
2 - Perform On-Page Optimization
Right after keyword research, on-page optimization is the second most critical step you need to take for improving the eCommerce SEO rankings of your online store.
On-page optimization basically helps to make the content on your eCommerce store more readable for search engine crawlers.
Specifically, the search engine crawlers focus primarily on:
- URLs
- Headings
- Meta Descriptions
- Sitemap
- Product & category pages optimization
- Internal linking
- And overall website architecture
So, if you want to improve your eCommerce SEO rankings, you must invest in optimizing the on-page SEO elements in your eCommerce store.
3 - Improve Website Loading Time
Website loading time is also as important as the above two points, especially since Google has made it a direct ranking factor from 2018.
Long website loading time is a common issue faced by many eCommerce stores mainly because of the large number of pages.
But, since website loading time directly impacts the SEO rankings of a website, you have no choice other than improving it for increasing your eCommerce SEO Rankings and also provide a seamless user experience in your online store.
4 - Perform Content Optimization
After improving the loading time of your eCommerce store, the next step is to perform content optimization on every page of your online store.
Specifically, you need to write detailed, keyword-rich, and user-friendly content for every page and update the content consistently.
You see, search engines like Google prefer ranking websites with fresh and quality content.
So if you don’t regularly update the content on your eCommerce website, you’re definitely going to see a hard fall in terms of your SEO rankings in search results.
On the other hand, if you update content for every page, especially product and category pages from time to time, Google will see it as a website that’s updated regularly and prefer ranking it on top positions in its SERPs.
5 - Remove Duplicate Content
Duplicate content basically refers to blocks of content that are either very similar (also called near-identical) or completely identical.
Now, Google officially does not impose any sort of penalty for having duplicate content on your website or eCommerce store.
But, it does filter both, identical content and near-identical content that eventually has the same impact as a penalty - Loss of rankings for your websites.
So, if you seriously want to improve the eCommerce SEO rankings for your online store, make sure that there is no identical and near-identical content on any of your web pages.
6 - Increase Domain Authority Score
If you want to expedite the process of improving your eCommerce SEO rankings, you can certainly do so by focusing on increasing the Domain Authority Score of your eCommerce store.
Domain Authority Score was first invented by Moz and it basically helps to determine the chances of ranking a website on top positions in search results.
The Domain Authority score ranges from 0 to 100 where the higher score implies better chances of ranking in search results.
Now, if you want to increase the domain authority score of your eCommerce website, the best way to do is by creating as many backlinks as possible from relevant blogs & websites in your industry.
Simply put, Link Building is a proven tactic to not only increase the domain authority score of a website but also improve the SEO rankings in search results.
7 - Optimize Your Conversion Funnel
Lastly, if you’re seeing an increase in organic traffic to your eCommerce store, even the slightest increase, but your sales are increasing along with it, then there is a chance that your conversion funnel needs optimization.
A conversion funnel is basically a series of steps a user is required to take to convert into a buying customer.
Now, if your conversion funnel is not properly optimized, it may result in zero sales growth.
However, you can easily optimize your conversion funnel by reducing the number of steps it takes for users to complete a purchase.
Similarly, you can also provide guest checkout functionality so that new visitors can easily make a purchase on your eCommerce store without having to necessarily create an account first.
And the good news is, if your eCommerce store is based on Magento 2 platform, you can easily reduce the number of steps in your checkout process as well as introduce a guest checkout option by simply integrating the One-Step Checkout Magento 2 Extension!
One-Step Checkout, as the name suggests, helps eCommerce store owners simplify the checkout process on their online stores to boost the number of sales and provide a seamless checkout experience.
Concluding Thoughts…
Improving eCommerce SEO rankings takes a good amount of effort, time, and work. And I’m not going to lie to you about that.
But, if you use the tips given in this article, I promise you that your eCommerce SEO rankings will definitely improve within a short period of time and you’ll be soon on the path to making more sales in 2021.
With that being said, if you’ve any questions regarding anything mentioned in this article, feel free to ask in the comments. I’d be more than happy to assist you.