Post Link: 7 eCommerce SEO Best Practices

7 eCommerce SEO Best Practices

So, you’re a wholesale distribution or manufacturing company that has just built a beautiful newdirect-to-consumer eCommerce website. You took everything you learned working with yourcustomers and applied all those best practices to this shiny new site. You might be thinking youcan just sit back, relax and wait for the orders to start rolling in. There’s just one problem.

Your customers can’t find you.

For wholesale distribution companies that have turned to B2C eCommerce as an additionalrevenue channel, figuring out how to attract customers to your site is a whole new animal fromwhat you are used to with in-person sales. Your B2B customers have a relationship with youthat has already been established offline.

But in B2C, effective search engine optimization (SEO) practices are crucial to attracting newcustomers. So what are some of the SEO best practices you should be using to grow the B2Cside of your eCommerce business?

Getting Found: How Search Engines Work

SEO isn’t just about what you do on your site – it’s about what you do off your site as well. Thedistinction is referred to as on-site and off-site SEO. On-site SEO refers to the things you do on

your website that tell search engines what your website is all about. Off-site SEO is about thethings that are happening off of your site that tell search engines how to find you, and that youhave authority in the topics you want to target.

To understand why both of these things matter, it helps to understand just a bit more about howsearch engines work. Think of search engines as “shoppers” looking for a store that carries aparticular item – in this case, a search term. Off-site SEO is like the map that helps you getfound; on-site SEO is how the search engine determines if you have what it needs. For a moretechnical discussion of how search engine rankings are determined, MOZ is a great resource.

7 Ecommerce SEO Best Practices

Based on the above explanation, it’s obvious that good search engine practices need toconsider both on- and off-site SEO in order to get the best results. So, here are the top sevenSEO best practices for your B2C eCommerce site, from both an on-site and off-site perspective.

Let’s look first at some on-site SEO best practices.

1) On-Site: Do Your Research: What you need to know is the most common search termsused by people looking for products like those that you offer. You can do this using tools like theGoogle Adwords Keyword Planner. You’ll be able to compare search terms and see monthlysearch volumes for each, as well as how much competition exists for that particular searchterm. If you need help coming up with search terms to check, try Ubersuggest (a Google searchterms scraper) to get a variety of related search terms that you can then run through Adwords todetermine which are the most popular. You also need to be looking at your competitors––whatterms are they ranking for? What do their metrics look like? The end result of this should be alist of terms to target for the products you carry.

2) On-Site: Solve Your Issues: Search engines are kind of like picky shoppers. There are avariety of factors that can “turn them off” from your site and lower your ranking, like slow siteloading speeds and 404 errors. If you’re not sure what your site’s SEO issues are, tools likeSEO Site Checkup can help you see what’s going wrong on your site from the search engine’spoint of view.

3) On-Site: Focus on Content:

Categorize: Your content must be categorized. This is crucial for companies that carry a lot of●

products. You can’t produce compelling content for every page, but you can and shouldproduce it for the categories that are important for your business. There should be searchabletext containing your key search terms for each category of products you carry.Build Internal Links: When you carry a lot of products, there will be natural links between●

them. Pages within your site should be logically structured and linked internally in a way thatmakes sense to your users. The SEO benefit will be that search engines will be better able tounderstand what your site is about. The benefit to your customers is that they can find more ofthe kinds of products they are seeking.Focus on Quality: High quality content is unique, relevant, and useful. It should include both●

text and images––both of which should be optimized for search results. A blog that providesvaluable information your customers want can also be just as valuable for SEO as yourproduct content.

4) On-Site: Structure Your Site: Once you’ve got good content focused around your searchterms, it’s important to make sure that your content is structured properly. Your search termsshould match up with the titles, descriptions and metatags in your HTML code. Pages should beproperly formatted as well, following an outline structure. Using the H1 and H2 heading tagshelps the search engines understand the structure of your content, and they also make yourcontent more readable for customers.

5) On-Site: URL Structure: Just like their human counterparts, search engines like to skimpages of your website to figure out which pages have the content they are looking for beforediving in for a closer look. A properly formatted URL can tell them right up front if the page haswhat they want. Proper format in this case means a URL that contains the search term,presented in a readable way. Search engines aren’t people, and they aren’t able to look at anumerical URL and associate it with a search term.

Now let’s look at two important best practices for off-site SEO.

6) Off-site: Social Networking: For off-site SEO, one of the most important things to do iseffectively use social media to promote your products. Whether you choose to use Facebook,Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or a combination, ads or posts that link to your site help searchengines verify your site’s authority.

7) Off-Site: Submit to Social Shopping Networks: Instead of waiting for customers to findyou, social shopping networks are a way to put your business where the customers already are.Social shopping networks like Pinterest and Polyvore blur the line between social networkingand shopping, particularly in industries like fashion or retail.

These are just a few of the dozens of SEO best practices that can help make your eCommercewebsite rank higher on the terms that are important to your business.

Are you developing a B2C eCommerce site for your business? How do you plan to approachSEO? Tell us in the comments.Post originally located at: https://www.handshake.com/blog/ecommerce-seo-best-practices/

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