4 Helpful eCommerce SEO Techniques That Make A Big Difference

It doesn’t matter if your online store is large or small, a Fortune 500 company or a new startup — doing eCommerce SEO is a must these days. With the online competition increasing by the second, you need it to keep your store visible and — most importantly — profitable. 

Since being visible automatically means that your website has a chance to sell, you have to do your best to reach that goal. Even if your eCommerce site is built on WordPress, which is more or less made to be optimized for search right out of the box, there is still a lot you can do to improve its SEO capabilities. Unfortunately, intuition and gut instinct won’t work here, but targeted, proven strategies do. There’s no other way: Either you’re driving traffic by doing something or you’re not. 

The following guide to trending eCommerce SEO strategies will be helpful to:

• An eCommerce website owner regardless of the business’s size
• A digital marketer looking for tips to improve content strategy for eCommerce businesses
• An SEO manager looking to show the importance and return on doing optimization

The competition is at an all-time high! Let’s update you on what you need to do to be visible.

What are Trending eCommerce SEO Strategies?

1. On-Page Optimization

This is becoming increasingly relevant in a world where thousands of vendors sell similar products. For example, it’s a known fact that the vast majority of consumers – 87 percent, to be exact – begin product research online. They don’t always search for a specific product, so they start with some characteristics, features, and even a price range. 

Here are some examples:

One way to get more traffic from requests like these is to optimize product pages. There’s lots of room to work with:

• Title tags
• Description tags
• Product description

If you decide not to optimize those, you’ll be relying on the default titles, which are essentially the product names themselves. It goes without saying that there are hundreds of competitors who did the same, so optimization is definitely a way to stand out. 

Here are product pages that were optimized with details and product features to drive visitors:

Go custom and you’ll make your website more attractive and understandable for Google.

2. Again, Website Speed

Even though speed might seem like an essential requirement for good SEO, a lot of eCommerce businesses don’t realize that Google’s demands – that means customers’ demands, too – have been increasing. In an effort to improve the browsing experience for online shoppers, Google has released the so-called Speed Update earlier this year, and this is big. 

So how fast is acceptably fast? Google doesn’t give any specifics, but many reputable resources claim that the load speed should not exceed 3 seconds. In fact, here’s the performance of the world’s top 50 eCommerce sites, as described by Pingdom using Alexa data.

As you can see, almost half of the websites loaded in less than 2 seconds, which is considered to be the benchmark for eCommerce websites. According to Pingdom, 87 percent of the studied eCommerce websites had a loading time under 3 seconds and only 6 percent could afford to load for 5 seconds or even longer. 

Clearly, speed remains a critical consideration for eCommerce, so it’s going to make an impact on the success of eCommerce businesses in 2020 and beyond.

3. Implementing Google AMP to Improve the Experience of Shoppers on Mobile

AMP, which stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, is a recent project at Google that allows for creating a mobile version of a website that loads quicker than a typical mobile-friendly website. 

AMP is yet another step to make the web friendlier to smartphone users, and it makes perfect sense. With the number of people shopping on mobile increasing rapidly, any initiative or technology that improves their experience is welcome.

We won’t get into the tech stuff that comes with creating AMP eCommerce pages, but here are some of the benefits for those who choose to adopt it:

• Adding AMP functionality to a home page of an eCommerce store simplifies the layout and adds interactivity with the so-called “amp carousel”
• By adding AMP to product pages, you’ll be able to add tags to all elements, thus improving their visibility for Google as well as increasing the load time.

The results are lightning-fast websites that Google loves, as well as an increase in mobile rankings, which is tremendously important for meeting the needs of people who visit eCommerce stores on devices like smartphones and tablets. 

If you’d like to know more about AMP, here are Google’s guides and FAQ where you’ll find more about why implementing this technology is important for both search engines and your website.

4. Voice Search Optimization

This trend also falls in the category of making the online shopping experience better for users. With more and more people using voice search devices to search for information online and buy products using digital procurement, eCommerce businesses need to make sure that their websites are optimized for them.

Here are some stats to back this up. According to Entrepreneur, 29 percent of U.S.-based online shoppers who own a voice-first device Google Home said they made purchases with it; moreover, 41 percent also claim they are comfortable with using a voice search device for buying online and expect to do some shopping at some point. 

In other words, if shopping with voice is important for consumers, then it’s important for search engines as well. In turn, this means that eCommerce websites should follow the latest voice search optimization techniques to avoid being outperformed by those who apply them.

Optimizing for voice is something you can start doing today. In addition to improving your website’s speed – check out the current speed with this free Google Speed Test – you should also write your content in conversational language to resemble the language that people use when searching online with voice. 

eCommerce Websites Need SEO

So here you go, four eCommerce SEO trends that will make a difference in 2020 and beyond. As you can see, each trend is based on hard data and evidence, which show us how the fast-changing world of eCommerce really is (and how important it is to follow trends here). 

In 2020, we’re expecting to see more eCommerce businesses investing more effort into establishing themselves as reliable and user-friendly websites (or beginning to build a meaningful online presence). This makes the online marketplace even more competitive, so disregarding the importance of following the latest eCommerce SEO trends is definitely a bad idea.