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Top 10 Strategies to Boost ECommerce SEO
Singapore is home to one of the most vibrant eCommerce landscapes in Southeast Asia, with more than half of Singaporean consumers purchasing items online at least once a week. According to Statista, the eCommerce market in the island state is projected to grow by 10.76% between 2024 and 2029, resulting in a market volume of US$8.40bn (SGD11.01bn) in 2029.
However, with this growth, ecommerce businesses are facing intensifying competition, underscoring the need for strategies to stay ahead. ECommerce SEO is positioned to help eCommerce players, drive traffic, boost sales, and, in general, establish a strong market presence. In this article, we’ll share 9 tips on how to improve eCommerce SEO. But first, what exactly is eCommerce SEO?
What is eCommerce SEO?
ECommerce SEO, in a nutshell, is the process of improving an online store’s visibility on search engine results pages. The goal is to increase organic traffic by making your site more relevant to search engines, allowing potential customers to find your products more easily.
Pretty simple right? Well, yes, but also, no.
Because, competition notwithstanding, the complexities of optimisation—whether its keyword research, improving site structure or building quality backlinks—typically grow with the number of products or pages, making the process a daunting challenge, even for brands with the requisite expertise.
For businesses, this often makes it far more practical to outsource to SEO agencies with the resources, skills and experience to handle these challenges effectively. In addition, in most cases, outsourcing your SEO to an agency is likely the most cost-efficient option as well, as opposed to hiring a full time SEO specialist in-house. That being said, the tips shared below can be invaluable for those just starting out, or those looking to enhance their existing eCommerce strategies.
1. Optimise Your Product Pages to Improve Ranking
In some digital marketing circles, you’ll hear product pages being referred to as the heart and soul of any eCommerce website. There’s merit to that statement, because this is where conversions happen, this is where customers find information on the products they need, this is where they make the decision to buy.
As such, it becomes essential to optimise these pages to not only attract customers and boost conversions but also to become visible to search engines.
You can do this by using high-quality images with alt tags to help search engines understand the content of the page, writing detailed, keyword-rich descriptions highlighting features and benefits, as well as including customer reviews to build trust and social proof.
2. Don’t Ignore Long-Tail Keywords
One of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen eCommerce businesses make is neglecting long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords comprise nearly 92% of web search traffic according to a Backlinko analysis. These keywords, often longer and more specific, despite, sometimes, having low search volume, often carry high intent, and high conversion potential. They are also often less competitive and easier to rank for. We recommend using tools such as Google’s “People ask” feature or “Answer the Public” to identify long-tail keywords relevant to your product
3. Embrace a User-Friendly Design
It’s easy to underestimate the importance of a user-friendly site, but its impact on SEO and the overall user experience and their actions is significant. You want your visitors to be engaged, and not frustrated or deterred by elements like poor navigation and slow loading times.
For example, Google found that bounce rate, a metric for the number of people who land on your website and leave without taking any action, increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds. This is bad for SEO, because search engines like Google also take into account user-friendliness when ranking websites. If your site is difficult to use, or displays signs of a bad user experience, such as poor loading times or high bounce rate, it can negatively impact the visibility of your site on search engine results pages (SERPS)
Keep the user experience in mind when optimising your website; make sure that it’s not only visually appealing, but also clutter-free and accessible to various devices.
4. Enhance Your eCommerce Content
Content is king especially when it comes to driving organic traffic and engaging potential customers. And this applies to eCommerce websites just as much as it does for any other business.
Think about the pain points of your target audience, and create various types of content to address those needs, such as how-to guides, tips (like this article), answers to frequently asked questions, customer testimonials—basically anything that provides value, and, importantly, supports different stages of the customer journey.
This does two important things for your website: a) improves search rankings and b) builds trusts and boosts your brand’s reputation.
Read More: SEO Copywriting
5. Avoid Duplicate Content
Under ordinary circumstances, we’d talk about duplicate content as part of a broader content strategy, like the previous point on improving eCommerce content. But we’re addressing it separately here because it is a common issue for eCommerce sites, especially when it comes to product descriptions and category pages. This sometimes stems from relying on thin production descriptions from the manufacturer, which, you’ll find, are often repeated across various websites selling the same product, and even on multiple pages within the same site.
In the case across different websites, search engines like Google and Bing, often prefer not to show the same content multiple times in their SERPS, so only one of them will end up being shown. Likewise, within the same website, only one of the pages will be shown, limiting the potential of pages on your website to appear in SERPS.
To avoid this, consider using canonical tags, setting up 301 redirects for similar content, and writing unique descriptions for each product.
6. Use Sitemaps for Better Indexing
If structured data helps search engines contextualise, understand, and match website content to relevant search queries, then sitemaps serve as a guide; they direct search engines to all the important pages of your eCommerce website, essentially, allowing them to crawl and index your pages.
XML sitemaps are particularly useful to eCommerce websites given that they are prone to having multiple categories, subcategories as well as product pages, some of which might be deeply nested or newly added—making them difficult for search engines to find.
7. Conduct Keyword Research with Buyer Intent in Mind
We’ve talked about all the various ways you can optimise your website, but before we conclude, we’d like to touch on one more important thing: keyword research, or, to be specific, keyword research that takes buyer intent into account.
Behind every keyword is an intention—which is usually easy to infer. For example, when a user queries, say, “child care near me” the intent is clearly to find a nearby childcare centre. Or if they search for “best smartphone” you can infer that their intention is to find information on top-rated smartphones, likely with comparisons, reviews, or recommendations.
When conducting keyword research for eCommerce websites, take time to understand the intent behind each popular search query and optimise your content based on the different stages of the buyer journey.
What this does is align your website with their needs, which not only invites them to return, but signals to search engines that users found your website helpful and relevant, and therefore deserve to rank higher.
8. Strengthen Site Security with HTTPS
In 2014, Google announced that HTTPS would officially become a ranking signal. For those unfamiliar with the term, ranking signals are essentially criteria used to determine a website’s position in SERPS. The goal for this change to the algorithms was, as Google puts it, “to make sure that the websites people access from Google are secure.”
While the perspective on HTTPS may have changed, today, a decade later, to become an aspect of the broader page experience, and not standalone as it once was, it remains a crucial factor in determining search rankings, especially for websites, like eCommerce stores, that handle transactions and user data.
9. Use Structured Data to Enhance Site Visibility
Google defines structured data as a standardised format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. Why is this important? Because it helps search engines contextualise, understand, and match website content to relevant search queries.
If executed properly, search engines can use your structured data to display your products more prominently, such as in SERP carousels, featured snippets, sitelinks and search box, FAQ and more.
This, in turn, results in more visibility, improved click-through rates, and ultimately more conversions. In fact, Rakuten found that users spend 1.5x more time on pages that implement structured data than on non-structured data pages.
10. Build High-Quality Backlinks for Your eCommerce Store
Backlinks, for those unfamiliar with the term, are links from external websites that direct users to your website. They are essential, chiefly because they signal to search engines that your website is credible, authoritative and relevant. Despite the constantly evolving nature of search engine algorithms, they remain a critical ranking factor for improving your sites visibility.
But beyond increasing credibility and authority, they act as direct pathways for users to discover your website. This traffic is valuable because it comprises users who are already interested in your product or service, which increases the chances of them engaging with you. Note that not every backlink is the same, some, especially those from authoritative sites can boost your SEO, while others from low quality sites can even harm your website’s ranking.
There are several ways to generate high quality backlinks including guest posts, press releases or social media. Do not, under any circumstance, purchase links, because this violates Google’s guidelines and negatively impacts your rankings.
Final Thoughts
ECommerce is a powerful tool for online stores looking to enhance their visibility, attract more traffic, and boost sales. The tips shared above, aside from creating a seamless shopping experience for customers, will help your business remain competitive in what is not today a digital driven marketplace.
If you need experts to help you boost the performance of your eCommerce website, Rogue Digital experts, thanks to a combined experience of more than 14 years in the industry, can help through a wide range of services, depending on your needs, including SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing, Content Writing, Creative Design, Website Design & Hosting as well as Display & Video Advertising. Contact us for a free consultation and discover how we can help achieve your marketing objectives.
