It’s important to take a step back when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. What are some of the best tactics and strategies you can use to optimize your ecommerce site’s SEO performance? For businesses in New Zealand, utilizing ecommerce SEO NZ strategies can significantly enhance your site’s visibility and ranking.
While artificial intelligence can be used to automate and accelerate tasks like keyword research or content generation, it is also changing the way people view search results.
Google Search Generative Experience, which uses AI for more comprehensive results in search, is an excellent example. SGE can provide AI-generated answers, an image carousel and follow-up questions. It’s crucial to remember this when trying to improve your SEO.
1. Keyword research that considers buyer intent
Don’t limit your keyword research to the most popular keywords within your industry. Buyer intent is a crucial factor to consider.
Buyer intent is the purpose behind a query. Look at the phrases and keywords that people use when searching online.
Keyword intent can be divided into two types:
- Informational Keyword Intent: These search queries include questions such as “how to?” or factual queries. The searcher will be looking for additional information about the subject.
- Commercial Keyword Intent: This search is performed when the user knows what they are looking for, but doesn’t know how to find it. These searches may include phrases such as “buy smartphone” and “find London hotel bargains”. Commercial keywords are usually used by users who have a higher intent to buy.
You can determine keyword intent in a variety of ways. You can use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner. You can also use , a tool such as Ubersuggest. This tool can be used by content writers, copywriters and bloggers who are looking to create new content or research user search queries. You might also want to use Answer The Public. Enter your keyword in the search box on the homepage to find out what people are asking.
2. Long-tail keywords are important.
Long-tail keywords are usually displayed on the right hand side of SERPs. Long-tail keywords are terms that have a low search volume, but still relate to your business. It converts better because it is a better match to what the searcher wants. This also tends generate more traffic.
Long-tail keywords reveal the customer’s intentions and what they are looking for. As an example, “shoes”, a short-tail keywords, is different from “best walking shoe for summer”, a long-tail one. This keyword provides more information on the customer’s intentions and likely next steps.
Ranking for long-tail keyword is important because they are a great source of traffic. These keywords are particularly useful for:
- Competitive niches
- Conversion rates increased
- Easy ranking of new sites
- Easy wins on a budget
If you want to find long-tail keywords, use Google’s ” Other people also ask ” feature. You can also use a free keyword tool such as Ubersuggest or Wordtracker.
3. To optimize product pages for better ranking
On-page optimization can be used to acquire and attract new customers, and increase conversions. Focus your efforts on areas of your site that are most important. You should focus on:
- Product descriptions
- Pictures
- Review
Product descriptions
Ask yourself these three questions before you begin optimizing product descriptions:
- What are the main elements of a page?
- How can you maximise the visibility and impact?
- How can this information be used to improve your product description?
To optimize product descriptions, you can consider:
- Adding high-quality unique images
- Including keywords
- Including keyword-rich descriptions
- Add CTAs
- Include testimonials
Images
Images and photos make pages more engaging and interesting, but they can be distracting. Avoid using them too much in your descriptions.
You can improve your search engine rankings by optimizing images for SEO. This will also increase traffic from potential clients. Social media can also increase traffic.
Optimize your images to get the best results:
- Select images of appropriate size
- Include captions in ALT tags
- File names should contain the correct keywords
Reviews
Reviews are essential for your e-commerce success. Reviews help consumers decide if they want to purchase a product or conduct business with a certain online store. Reviews can also be used to build trust and increase conversion rates with customers.
Send automated messages to customers after they make a purchase on your website.
4: Make sure your site is user friendly
It’s important to consider the UX (or user experience) of your website when you are e-commerce. A good design will make your website more appealing visually and improve its UX.
It’s not just important for your site to look good. It also needs to work well. Ads should not interfere with the view of content by the user. Make sure that your website is easy to navigate and intuitive.
You want your customers to be able to find the products they are looking for easily and quickly, stay engaged on your website, and have an overall great experience. Google may lower your ranking if it thinks that visitors to your site are having a bad experience.
To improve UX, ensure your site:
- Loads quickly
- Is mobile-friendly
- It is clutter-free
- It is easy to navigate
- Includes CTAs
- Consistent styling
- Is it accessible?
5. Use a simple URL structure
It improves your UX when you have a simple URL structure on your ecommerce site. This improves SEO efforts for e-commerce, since it gives search engines more relevant information. You can also easily share your products on other websites and social media.
The URL should be as simple to read as possible.
POOR EXAMPLE: https://www.example.com/article-about-baking/
GOOD EXAMPLE: https://www.example.com/baking-articles/
In your URLs, it’s important to include keywords. They are known as “meta tags”. These tags tell search engines about the content of a page. Search engines use keywords found in the URL when deciding where the page will rank on SERPs.
Use a navigational tool such as breadcrumbs, to help visitors to your website retrace previous steps and get back to the place where they began. To boost SEO, you can add them via JavaScript or markup tags.
Avoid using stop words when creating URLs. Stop words such as “the”, “and”, and “of” are examples. They can reduce the readability of your content and lower your SEO rankings.
6. Use Schema Markups for Google and Users to Understand Content
Use schema markups for SEO in e-commerce. These HTML tags provide extra information about your website content.
Rich snippets are created when you use schema markup. These are used by search engines to provide more information in the results of a specific query. These tools also assist users in finding what they’re looking for.
Rich snippets come in many forms, such as music snippets and reviews snippets. Schema is used most often in e-commerce.
- Product Schema: Provides rich product information such as images, prices, and availability.
- Review Schema: This allows online reviews.
- Product Availability Schema: This is a listing of products available for purchase.
- Video Schema: is a type metadata that describes the content of an embedded video on a website.
- Price Schema: Allows search engines to share product pricing data.
7. Avoid duplicate pages and content
Online retailers often fall into the trap by including identical product descriptions and images in their websites. Reduce the duplicate content on your website by:
- Use a CMS that has site-wide 301 redirects, or add canonical tags to every page you suspect might be duplicated; for instance, pages that have similar titles or share the same URL.
- Add a suffix after the URL
- Using different product images
- Add unique keywords to other pages
8. You don’t want to lose your ranking because of page speed
Page speed is an important ranking factor. Customers won’t sit around waiting for a website to load. Page speed should be around two seconds.
Google PageSpeed Insights or Cloudflare’s PageSpeed Insights can be used to test the speed of your website.
Your site may be slow because:
- Your server cannot handle the amount of content on your site
- The number of scripts slows down the loading time
- The images are not loading quickly
- Your web host is not working
You can accelerate your loading times by:
- Use fewer images
- Compressing files
- Use fewer social media widgets
- Optimizing images
- Avoiding clutter
- Use lots of white space
- Limiting redirects
- Limiting HTTP requests
You could also upgrade your hosting package or change web hosts.
9. Improve your E-Commerce Content
Your SEO strategy for e-commerce will be a lot more effective if you use written content.
Uploading high-quality, regular content:
- Organic traffic is attracted
- You can build trust with your customers
- Your website ranking will be improved
- You will be able to enhance your reputation as a specialist in your niche
Include a variety of different content types, such as:
- How-to articles
- Answers to frequently asked questions
- New product updates
- Glossaries
- User-generated content
- Testimonials
- Video demonstrations
- Question and Answer sessions
- Webinars
To improve your e-commerce content:
- Get to know your audience better by conducting research. You can then create content that speaks to their concerns and suggests products that will solve their problems. Buyer personas can help you with this.
- Discover what type of content your audience likes. data on content should indicate the types of content that are most popular. You can also ask questions to your customers in order to find out this information.
- Keep a regular calendar for your content to help you stay on track and streamline your production.
- Your content should be targeted at each stage of the Customer Journey.
- Use A/B Testing for key areas such as titles.
- Finally, evaluate performance and adjust content strategy as necessary.
10. Link Building for E-Commerce
Link building is a ranking factor that SEO considers. Google will consider your site credible if you have high-quality links. Backlinks can also help you rank your website for certain keywords.
Create quality backlinks
- Posts by Guest Bloggers
- Social media advertising
- Share content on Social Media
- Press releases
- Share infographics online
- Whitepapers and Case Studies: Publish them
Avoid buying links. Some paid links are against Google’s guidelines. Cheap links are also often of low quality. Low-quality links can lead to a drop in rankings and traffic. Poor quality links can also have a negative impact on your site’s reputation.
11. Create a Sitemap
A sitemap represents your website visually. The sitemap should include all pages of your website, including all subcategories and products.
You can create a sitemap manually or with an automated tool. Sitemaps can be created in both XML or HTML. HTML sitemaps provide more information to visitors.
These tools can be used to create a website map:
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Lucid Sitemap Maker
- Powermapper
12. Making Social Sharing Easy
Social media sharing does not directly affect SEO in most cases. When you share content on social networks, it can increase brand awareness and allow people to become more familiar with your company.
Social media mentions can also be useful for SEO. Social media mentions influence SEO in the following ways:
- Driving organic traffic
- Increasing visibility
- Local SEO: Improving local SEO
- Expanding the reach of content
- Brand recognition is important for brand recognition
- Increase backlinks
Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to schedule the automatic posting of content from your website across your social media accounts. You will get more social media shares.
