Ultimate SEO Checklist for eCommerce Businesses

There’s no doubt that ranking on top of Google means putting in more effort over your online competitors. However, what if you’re getting behind on SEO tips and tricks to drive your eCommerce site forward? If you’re missing out on clicks, you’re most likely losing sales significantly.

 

Running an eCommerce business opens a vast range of distractions and opportunities. That said, the primary key to success is knowing the difference between regular and eCommerce SEO.

 

Remembering the vital role of organic search and eCommerce SEO for sales is essential. It is important to note that statistics indicate 37.5% of eCommerce traffic comes from search engines. Hence, ranking on top of Google SERPs translates to an increase in revenue.

 

Along those lines, you might think that SEO is the same everywhere else. But before you hit Google Search, keep in mind that regular and eCommerce SEO differs in more than one way. 

 

Here’s why:

Regular vs eCommerce SEO Checklists

 

When working with SEO on any websites, creating unique content, keywords, and URLs with so many pages can be daunting. Most of the time, that’s the case for eCommerce sites.

 

Unlike regular pages with profound structure and a slimmer content range, eCommerce pages cover a vast range of keywords depending on their product line. And while both types emphasise the significance of avoiding duplicate content and promoting high-quality content, they differ on more elements than one.

 

With that, approaching an SEO strategy with eCommerce differs in many ways than regular sites, including:

 

- Keyword research
- URL canonicalisation
- Structure simplicity
- Responsiveness and loading speed
- Multimedia optimisation
- Product reviews, testimonials
- Inventory and product data management, among others

 

Aside from on-page SEO optimisation, the digital landscapes for regular sites and eCommerce pages vary greatly. To begin with, blogs and other non-eCommerce pages answer people’s questions by providing information about a topic of interest.

 

On the other hand, eCommerce sites sell their products to target audiences. A typical blog site can accumulate hundreds, if not thousands, of URLs. In contrast, a single online store with about 1000 products would have 1000 pages right off the bat, plus one URL for every variant, excluding the contact, blog and about pages. That could accumulate into tens of thousands of different pages for Google to crawl — and with a limited crawl budget, it can have a detrimental effect on your ranking.

 

Whether you’re new with eCommerce or a seasoned professional looking to expand your business, this ultimate SEO checklist has handy strategic tips to ramp up your SEO game.

SEO eCommerce Checklist

 

Red Search compiled this comprehensive SEO checklist for eCommerce to guide you through various elements and components essential in shaping your website for search.

User Experience (UX)

 

For eCommerce entrepreneurs, a smooth shopping experience should be the priority. However, many people trade it off with less significant components, when it dramatically improves the chance of a visitor to accomplish their task.

- Ensure your site is mobile-ready

 

70% of websites shown on Google SERPs are mobile-ready, and 58% of Google searches come from mobile devices. The sheer amount of mobile traffic remains an untapped potential if you don’t shift to responsive web design.

 

To check if your site is mobile-ready, plug it into Google’s mobile-friendly test. It won’t test every single page but examines all of your page templates. That way, you’ll know if your home, product, cart, and checkout pages look snug on smaller screens.

- Carry an HTTPS and Security Seal

 

Depending on your web hosting provider, you should renew your SSL certificate regularly to maintain a secure login and checkout process.

 

Besides, 95% of websites ranking on Google’s first page have HTTPS encryption. So it’s a no-brainer for you to secure one if you want to rank higher.

 

Additionally, don’t forget to tell users about your security, especially on the checkout page. Displaying an SSL and security seal improves your trust rating and encourages repeat customers.

- Highlight product reviews and rating

 

People rely on peer reviews when shopping online, and Google knows it. Therefore, encouraging buyers to leave a product testament and review establishes your website’s journey on top of Google’s rankings and invites more people to purchase the product.

- Implement search functionality

 

Allowing users to search within your site cuts a lot of time spent browsing across pages. Moreover, it gives you a goldmine of information about what people want in your store, thus improving your keyword strategy.

- Provide information pages

 

Visitors and customers will most likely seek information that’s not relevant to your product. Aside from shopping, they may want to know your shipping schedules or returns policy. You can also add an FAQ page to accommodate most of their queries immediately.

- Use a wide range of payment options

 

You don’t want your consumers stuck on the checkout page, only to find out they can’t pay with their preferred method. Having people come this far only to fail increases your cart abandonment rate, and when they don’t come back, you might hurt your SEO too.

- Have an HTML sitemap

 

As stated, eCommerce sites contain massive amounts of content that can be confusing for people and web crawlers to navigate. To help customers quickly find what they want, consider providing a user-facing HTML sitemap.

- Minimise navigation clicks

 

Having webpages that take more than three clicks to reach can lead to bad user experience. Also, it indicates a low search engine value for your website as it takes more time for crawlers to scour your site.

Speed

 

UX and page speed always go together. That means, a slow website kills conversions, and Google encourages webmasters to optimise page speed as it has an indirect impact on your ranking.

 

Benchmark your site speed with Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and get a broader look at how to improve your mobile and desktop loading speeds.

 

Here’s a quick checklist on how to cut your page load speeds down:

- Enable GZip compression

 

Compressing web pages and style sheets with GZip reduces file sizes before you launch them off the ground. That way, a user’s browser will receive smaller files and improves your page loading speed.

 

Check your site to see if it has GZip compression enabled.

- Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

 

Unused and white spaces can still slow down your page as long as you leave them unoptimised. By minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, you save sending unnecessary bytes to the server or device, thereby improving loading speed.

- Minimise third-party resources

 

Don’t get us wrong; eCommerce platforms need plugins and third-party apps to function. But the moment you install popups, social proof widgets, and remarketing tags, you are adding a few scripts for the user’s browser to call.

 

Every script contributes to page speed, so optimising for faster load time means cutting down on unwanted plugins.

- Optimised images

 

If your images exceed 1MB and 2,000px+, you’re adding significant rendering time to your page. Large files are not necessary for your page to look excellent, and you have the option to load high-quality images if the user selects the photo to zoom it in.

 

Thus, make sure to resize product images to optimise them before uploading to the site.

- Delete unwanted images

 

Regardless if you have 50 products or 50,000 items in your product pages, you will stack up on images that will slow your site down. Red Search recommends you to delete unwanted media files from your library to optimise your website.

- Compress existing images

 

Aside from deleting images that you don’t need, compressing the ones displayed on your page significantly improves load speed. You may not know it, but photos contain unwanted meta information (author, date, lens profile, etc.,) which add weight to the web page download. Hence, compress your images before uploading them to your website.

Images

 

We’ve already discussed how optimising images makes your site load faster. However, they are also vital assets that will make or break your SEO strategy. Besides, think about image search and how you can leverage it to rank in Google.

 

Here are a couple of ways to make the most out of images for your SEO.

- Use ALT tags

 

ALT tags are texts that add a description to an image. ALT tags or texts also help search crawlers understand what the photos are all about, improving your chances of getting indexed.

- Use keywords in file names

 

Adding a descriptive file name to your photos is one way to describe their content. While filenames hide in plain sight, search crawlers use them to help index your site in the right category.

Crawling and Indexing

 

At this point, you should have read the word search crawlers a couple of times. Crawling and indexing are technical areas of SEO. However, it’s perhaps a more crucial element in eCommerce than other verticals due to the intricate structure of its pages.

 

That said, if crawlers can’t find your site and individual pages, it won’t be able to index and rank it. Even worse, Google and other search engines may penalise your page for failing to meet the basic search guidelines.

 

Here is a checklist on how you can help Google find your site.

- Check Google’s index

 

In Google Search, enter site:websitename.com.au, replacing websitename with your eCommerce site. Typically, it should return your pages that it has in its index. Otherwise, if it displays your homepage only to reference the robots.txt file, that means your site is blocking Google.

- Check Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

 

Having an account for Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools provides you with a goldmine of valuable information. Keep your eyes on these tools for broken links, manual action penalties, and HTML problems, among others.

- Generate an XML sitemap

 

Create an XML sitemap for your eCommerce site and submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. XML sitemaps provide information about your pages, media, and other files, as well as the relationships between them. Therefore they tell Google which pages or files you think are essential in your site and suggest valuable information about them.

- Be mindful of product variations

 

The products you sell online may have colour and size variations. Besides, these variations are critical to your SEO, so you need to get them right.

 

If you have a separate page for every size and colour variant, you risk your limited crawl budget and end up with a plethora of pages. Besides, most of them will have similar content, so crawlers may see this as duplicate content which is a critical issue.

- Utilise canonical URLs

 

In the case of having an individual page for every product variant, utilising canonical URLs tells search engines which URL you would prefer to use for every product variant. That said, you need to get the unique identifying keywords closer to the main URL.

- Leverage your robots.txt file

 

You might have read the word robots.txt in the previous pointers, but don’t know what it means. Essentially, the directives in a robots.txt file tell search crawlers what to crawl and what to ignore.

 

To check yours, visit websitename.com.au/robots.txt, replacing websitename.com.au with your site’s URL. Make sure you don’t see a Disallow: / text as it tells search engines to avoid crawling your entire site.

- Redirect discontinued products to relevant ones

 

If you’re running your brand for a while, you may have one or two discontinued products. But if their pages are still up and running, you may need to redirect the URL because it no longer provides value to consumers and search engines.

 

That said, redirect them to a relevant product URL. But if the item stopped production for good, your best bet is to redirect to an appropriate category page instead.

- Noindex low-value products and pages

 

You will have one or two pages that you want Google to crawl but don’t need to be in search results. If so, you need to noindex these sites.

 

Noindexed pages could include your privacy policy or terms and conditions. These pages are relevant for your site, but you don’t necessarily need to have them in search results.

Category Pages

 

Aside from images, category pages are among your most powerful and potent assets. Unlike your products, category pages don’t go out of stock and get discontinued. They will continue building your authority as well as acquire links for you.

 

To make the most out of your category pages, here are a couple of pointers to add in our checklist:

- Implement keyword research

 

Use priority keywords and do your research. Category pages must target broader and higher-volume keywords. After all, you’ll see more traffic and obtain more links over time, so you have more chances of ranking.

- Craft a remarkable introductory content

 

Most of the time, eCommerce pages with product inventory on category pages but lacks supporting introductory content. Treat every category page as landing pages, and add unique content to describe the entire category. Besides, initial content can highlight your best sellers and link to informative content.

- Use product filters

 

We already touched product variants and how they create a plethora of pages that can hinder UX. For that, using product filters form category pages, or the main shopping page should be a viable solution.

 

Aside from sizes and colours, you can also include other filters such as price, brand, review quality, and different variations that can otherwise look messy from a product URL perspective. Controlling product filters can also require a cunning blend of noindex tags and robots.txt file directives.

Product Pages

 

While category pages are landing page assets for your site, product pages are equally vital in an optimised eCommerce site. Here are some SEO tips you can use to make the most out of product pages

- Promote related products

 

More often than not, your main goal should be keeping visitors in your site until they convert into buyers. And showcasing valuable and relevant products is one way to achieve that. Not only is promoting related products excellent for UX, but it also helps establish the value of other products.

- Create amazing video content

 

66% of consumers prefer watching a video review or product demo than reading about them. That means creating great video content for product pages will make people stay on your site longer and get your messages across faster. Video content sprinkles sugar to the user experience and in turn, emphasises your value to search engines.

- Showcase product images

 

Purchasing online rids users the chance to inspect the product up close before buying them. Hence, a customer wants to grasp a better idea about how the product looks and feels to eliminate anxiety throughout the buying process.

 

Therefore, displaying product close-up images along with video content can help reassure your consumers that buying your product is the right choice.

- Use unique product descriptions

 

Many eCommerce entrepreneurs with no SEO agency partner rely on copy-pasting product information from the manufacturer’s webpage. Not only is this uninspiring for your audience, but it also makes you no different from your competitors.

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