Getting an eCommerce website up and running is no more a big deal even for small businesses. But the real challenge starts when there is no or a low number of sales from the eCommerce website.
A great eCommerce developer can definitely help you to build a great eCommerce store but who would help you to get more sales from your store?
Either you can go ahead and hire an SEO expert or you can also learn some basic yet helpful SEO tips and implement them yourself. Learning and implementing SEO strategies on an eCommerce website becomes even easier if your website has been developed using WordPress. If you are a self-learner and possess a passion to implement new strategies on your eCommerce website, then this blog post is for you.
In this blog post, I am going to share 8 SEO secrets to grow your eCommerce business sales from your WordPress online store.
Are you ready? Let’s start.
Secret #1 Combine keywords strategy
What kind of keywords do you want to use to attract traffic to your eCommerce website? Are you trying to rank for the short keywords like ‘scarves’, ‘women scarves’ etc, or long tail keywords like ‘perfect pink scarves for women’ and ‘buy summer scarves for women’?.
With the growing awareness among internet users, various major search engines have discovered that people tend to use long tail keywords when they are looking out for their desired products or services. For eg. instead of searching for just ‘scarves’ or ‘women scarves’, they tend to search using keywords like ‘where do I get best scarves’ or ‘sale and offers on scarves’.
So, don’t underestimate the power of long tail keywords while defining the list of keywords for your eCommerce website. Having said this, it’s always good to consider both short and long-tail keywords while preparing a list of your targeted keywords.
Secret #2 Loading speed optimization
If you think that optimizing the loading speed of your eCommerce store will only help your potential customers to navigate, you are not 100% correct. Search engines like Google have also started considering webpage loading speed as an important factor to rank a website on their search result pages. Having said this, if your eCommerce website loads slower than the acceptable speed, it will most likely kill your conversions.
Luckily, there are several ways to enhance the website loading speed of your website if you are using a WordPress-based eCommerce website. There are lots of free and paid plugins available in the WordPress repository that you can install and use in your store and enhance its loading speed in just a few clicks.
If you are not using WordPress and are not sure how to improve the loading speed, just hire a web developer and get it done professionally. This small investment is really worth it.
Secret #3 Blogging
Create a blog on your eCommerce store and start writing interesting content there. The more content you write on your eCommerce blog, the better attention it will get from search engines. Why is it so? Because search engines like Google love those websites or eCommerce stores that publish unique and knowledge-rich content for their users.
For eg, if your eCommerce store is about selling women’s scarves, you could probably write and publish content on ‘How to choose best scarves for summer’ or ‘Which type of scarves are good for winter’.
Additionally, you can also include some widgets that have call-to-action for the products that you sell in order to increase your eCommerce sales eventually.
As we all know there is no other better blogging platform than WordPress. So you’ve got another reason to choose WordPress for your eCommerce website development.
Secret #4 Title & Description tags
If you possess some SEO knowledge, you probably know about meta tags like title tags and description tags. The title tag is what you see as a one-liner headline in search engine results and the meta description is what’s shown below the title tag.
It may be interesting for you to know that these tags could be managed for each webpage of your eCommerce website. There are a few best plugins like Yoast SEO that helps you to manage meta tags easily and efficiently.
For the title tag, you must include your main keyword but do make sure that it must be relevant to the content theme of your webpage. If it’s a product page, you can add keywords like Price:$199 or Buy Now which will encourage users to click the link from the search engine listing page.
For the description tag, you must explain the benefits of your product along with the relevant keywords.
Secret #5 Image Alt tags
Most of us know how search engines recognize images. For those who don’t know, let me share that it’s through alt tags of the images. The alt tag is the text that appears when users place their cursor on the images and it shows a small text.
The core function of an alt tag was to display the image name when the browser is not able to download the image or for some reason, the images are blocked. But at the same time, alt tags help search engines to let them know about the image.
It’s even better for eCommerce websites to use alt tags for all of their product images which will increase the chances of displaying the product images on the search engine results pages when users are searching for those products.
If your eCommerce website has been developed using WordPress, you will notice that when you upload any product image through the image uploader, you will see an option to write an alt tag for that image. So use it as an opportunity to improve the SEO score of your website.
The more relevant and keyword-oriented names you use for alt tags of images on your eCommerce store, the better it is, for SEO.
Secret #6 Keywords oriented texts
Now it’s time to let the creative juices flow. Be as descriptive about your products as possible. Also, don’t forget to include the keywords in your descriptive text. No, I am not asking to stuff the keywords at all, but rather focus on the keyword-oriented text.
In the descriptive text of each product, you must make sure to include the primary keywords and long-tail keywords as well. Having optimized text for all the product pages will help you to achieve higher rankings on search engines.
Secret #7 Mobile responsive
This demands no special consideration. In the age where more than 60% of online users search for information, services, or products using their smart devices, you simply can’t ignore the importance of mobile responsiveness for your eCommerce store.
If there has to be an eCommerce website today, it must be responsive. There is no second choice. Any website which is not responsive will definitely lose more than 30% of its total expected revenue.
Talking SEO, it has become one of the important criteria for search engines to consider the mobile responsiveness of a website in order to rank them in higher positions.
There is good news for eCommerce webmasters who have chosen WordPress for developing their eCommerce store. Almost every WordPress theme for eCommerce is mobile responsive so you don’t need to worry about it.
Secret #8 Active social strategy
Almost everybody is on social platforms these days. Having social sharing widgets on all the product pages of your eCommerce website will lead to more sharing of your products on social websites like Facebook.
What SEO has to do with this? Well, search engines also consider a social score of a website as an important factor to consider a website as trustworthy and credible to rank in higher positions of search engines.
If your eCommerce website has been built using WordPress, luckily there are plenty of free and paid plugins to integrate social widgets with your online store.