”Change is constant”. Some in the e-commerce industry would jokingly argue that change is more constant in the e-commerce industry. The moment you master a trend it slips away, new trends take over and you start learning again. This also applies to SEO. Some years ago, many SEO experts were using crooked approaches such as keyword stuffing to rank their sites on search engines. Now, it is a sure recipe for disaster. Amidst the changing SEO trends, here are the best traffic-boosting SEO practices you can use to rank your site on search results.

Prioritize Your Keyword Research

The first step to making your e-commerce site rank on SERPs is to start with in-depth keyword research. If your sites have content with the right keywords internet users are searching for, you increase the chances of your site being found on the internet. In fact, good keywords can put your site at the top roll of search results on search engines. The question is, how can you carry out in-depth keyword research? There are several tools available for this purpose, Google’s Adwords Keyword Planner is one of them. Enter words or phrases you think are related to your e-commerce content and use any or some of the keywords suggested by the software. Using tools like Adwords Keyword Planner coupled with other keyword tools will give you access to multiple high-volume keywords that can be used to optimize your webpages.

Hone Your On-page SEO

Your site stands a better chance to rank on search results when you optimize every page on the site. Basically, every page on your site should have quality content, page titles, headers and meta description. To achieve the best results, you have to use keywords in all the sections of the page, that is, using a keyword-focused title, headers, and meta-description, not only in the content.

BigCommerce is a platform that makes this process seamless, allowing e-commerce owners who are not skilled at editing HTML input their web page SEO elements in normal language.

Optimize Your Website For Mobile Devices

It is 2019, internet activity has shifted from desktop to mobile, and Google has adapted with its mobile-first indexing. So, you have to keep up with the trend and make your e-commerce store mobile-responsive. When users visit your site using their smartphone, your web pages should be tappable and scrollable, not zoomed-out almost impossible to navigate. To make your site mobile-responsive you have to make your desktop theme mobile-responsive. We advise that you use a theme that supports mobile use in the first place. You can use the highly recommended Stencil theme for this.

Optimize Your Site Speed

SEO experts have always suggested that site speed is an important part of SEO. In 2018, Google announced that page loading speed has become one of the most important factors for mobile search results. This means that the quicker your site/webpage loads when users click on your site/webpage, the better for you. There are tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix available to help you measure your site’s speed and improve using the report the tools gave. In any case, some of the practices that can improve your site’s loading speed are:

Don’t use too many plugins
Use small images in your contents
Don’t use heavy graphics
Use better and faster hosting
Use a fast DNS provider
Compress your site’s codes

Doing this will help reduce your site loading time and in turn, increase your site speed.

Use SEO Tools

You would notice that we have been suggesting some SEO tools in the article, it’s because you need to use SEO tools to enhance your SEO practices. You can’t do everything manually. You need SEO tools for accuracy, automation and for other functions such as auditing your overall SEO practices to see how you perform.

There are many SEO apps available for different purposes, some offer full packages while some are more specific. In any case, they’re much needed, so get them. You may like BigCommerce’s FavSEO which is an app that audits all your SEO tactics and gives a report of your keywords performance, sitemap, and more.

Optimize Your Category and Product Pages

We mentioned above the importance of optimizing all your webpages, however, there’s more to it for e-commerce stores. Site navigation can make or mar your e-commerce business depending on how you do it. If visitors can easily navigate your site then you’re doing the right things otherwise you need to improve your site’s navigation. Therefore, you have to create silos for all the different products in your store. After that, you need to internally link the content in each silo to your category page, this informs Google that the pages are important.

Going back to optimizing your site page-by-page with SEO elements, you should optimize your product and category pages with keyword-focused product titles, images, headings, and product descriptions. No page should be left unoptimized, optimize all your product and category pages.

Be Strategic With Your Internal Linking

As we mentioned in the previous tip, internal linking is an effective SEO tactic that can make your site rank on search results. Now, what if you can do more with internal linking? A few years ago, Google used to reveal sites’ PageRank scores, and this led to a tactic which we will call sharing page value. SEO experts discovered that you could share a webpage value with another webpage by internally linking them. While Google no longer publishes sites’ PageRank scores, you can still share your webpage value with another of your webpage with less value using internal linking. You simply link your web page that’s not doing well on search results to the webpage that’s doing well.

Conclusion

SEO doesn’t have to be a complex and rigid practice that may be too challenging for laymen. All you need to do is simplify your tactics to make things easier. Start with simple strategies you can grab and work your way up to the harder ones. What you shouldn’t do as an e-commerce business owner is neglect SEO altogether. If you think that you can’t manage your e-commerce SEO strategies, we advise that you outsource to an SEO agency while you focus on other important aspects of your business.