I remember that over a year ago, one of my colleagues – Michelle – wrote an article that said SEO would never be an outdated marketing tool, which is still true today. However, while the term SEO still of top priority for many e-commerce webmaster, do you know that the strategies and tactics in it have transformed dramatically? That is why today I restart this topic and list for you 6 top important tactics to maximize your SEO for your online stores and increase traffic to your sites as well as conversion rates and sales.
1. Create Unique, Original Content
Why you should?
Since 2011, Google Panda update has severely affects many sites with weak content quality. No matter what your site about, original content is essential if you want to top the search results and drive traffic. Unfortunately, many e-commerce website simply copy and paste descriptions from the manufacturers without knowing that would harm their ranking and traffic. We know that it is very hard to write quality and unique product descriptions, but if you invest time, you will stand the chance to prevent from Panda penalty and get high positions on SERPs.
How to implement?
In general, content in e-commerce website does not require too much word count but focus more on images, links, and even ads. However, as Google cannot read image or ads yet, you must pay attention to the proper ratio between unique copy and other page content. You much avoid duplicate content, neither in the form of copying content from other sites but between pages within your sites. To avoid the disaster of violating Panda, you should rewrite all the “directly-borrowed” descriptions and vary the descriptions for products of different colors, shapes or sizes if they are on separate pages. This will also give your users (and Google, too!) unique and significant value. Another idea to create unique content is by leveraging user-generated content, for example customer feedbacks, reviews and comments. You can build a community and discussion boards to encourage people speak their minds and engage together.
2. Get a right Link strategy
Why you should?
Penguin is another significant update by Google that punishes website with spammy link schemes. While in the past a lot of websites sought for buying as many links as possible, today that manipulation would kill you right away. So build a right link strategy and clean your link profile as soon as possible.
How to implement?
Firstly you must diversify your link profile. To do this, you must have various relevant sources to get links from in the various forms of anchor text. Instead of waste time building links, you should look for the opportunies of earning links through many channels of online marketing like blog, social media. Secondly, you should build strong reputation and authority, which in turn help you find valuable relationships and contributory social interactions to your link profile and grow your brand.
3. Laverage Social media
Why you should?
Search engines have now regard social interaction as important signals for website ranking. And as point 2, you have to build relationship to get link, social media is a great channel where you can show off and receive feedback from your online friends. So don’t forget to build a social strategy for your company and your website to assist your SEO efforts.
How to implement?
There are a lot of thing to do: create and activate your social company pages, put social button on everywhere of your assets, and more. I would not go into details as we have great posts about this here and here.
4. Insert Microformatting and Rich snippets to your website
Why you should?
Microformatting helps Google index specific product data like business’ name, brand, prices more accessible and easier. If Google crawls more necessary data from your website than your competitor’s, it is likely that it would put you to higher post on the result pages. 
Rich snippets make the website more noticeable on the SERPs Besides, to aid searchers to find what they need by useful and relevant details, Google enable rich snippets for e-commerce websites in the forms of star reviews, prices, stock status, location, etc. Implementing rich snippets would not directly change your ranking but will make you outstanding on the SERPs and give you higher CTR.
Rich snippets make the website more noticeable on the SERPs Besides, to aid searchers to find what they need by useful and relevant details, Google enable rich snippets for e-commerce websites in the forms of star reviews, prices, stock status, location, etc. Implementing rich snippets would not directly change your ranking but will make you outstanding on the SERPs and give you higher CTR.How to implement?
Rich snippets is just small pieces of microdata and HTML code which are embedded into the website for search engines to render display in the search result page, for example: <div itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Product”> <span itemprop=”name”> Magento Quick Login Extension</span> <span itemprop=”brand”>Magestore</span> <span itemprop=”description”> Magento Quick Login helps Customers quickly log in by displaying a popup right below top links like Login, My account, etc..</span> Product #: <span itemprop=”identifier” content=”mpn:925872”>102</span> <span itemprop=”offerDetails” itemscope itemtype=”http:// data-vocabulary.org/Offer”>Regular price: $49.00<meta itemprop=”currency” content=”USD” />$<span itemprop=”price”> 40.00</span> <div> It’s not too complicated to implement these symbols and code. Essentially, all you have to do is adding a bit of coding into the <head> section of your HTML. You can try and test again and again to hold the chance for your shop. For more information about Rich Snippets and how to implement it, take a look at Google’s Webmaster Tools.
5. Fix URL Structures
Why you should?
In many e-commerce cases, users have two or more ways to navigate through categories to access a certain products and by different strings of URL. Like this: Homepage shop Z => Category A => Sub-categories A.1 => Product X Vs. Homepage shop Z => Category B => Sub-category B2 => Product X So the two URLs turn out the same web page: www.shopz.com/a/a1/x.html vs. www.shopz.com/b/b2/x.html That is ok to user, but as for Google, this looks like duplicate content (look back at point 1) so be cautious.
How to implement?
You should fix this situation optimizing canonical tag and improve URL structure. So what can you do to keep both customers and search engines happy? Implement Rel=Canonical Tags on the pages you do not wish Google to index, which will allow you to identify a single URL as primary, and all others as “identical” versions of the original page.
6. Care more about Buyer Personas
Why you should?
If you want to grow your e-Commerce business, start thinking about your customers must always be the top of your mind. Then your website design, your content, your marketing, and even the products and services you offer are certainly not for you, they are for your customers. Right? So if you don’t have a buyer persona yet, start to create one right now. Creating an archetype of the customers you hope to attract and retain and understanding buyer persona is key to marketing effectively, improving user-experience, creating web design that sells, and writing content that converts.
How to implement?
In order to tap into the psyche of your customers and define (and refine) the personas of your buyers, try to do research and answer the question about:
- their demographics—age, gender, income, location, etc
- their daily life activities as a human
- their interests and liking, their goals
- their spaces, especially the online channels where they spend most of their time
- the search term they use, their influencers
- their buying habits and behaviors
How do you think about these tactics for SEO in e-commerce? Can they fulfill your expectation? What else do you want to know to improve SEO effectiveness? Drop us a line in the comment box so we can do more to help you.
See more:
5 RULES FOR OPTIMIZING IMAGES FOR ONLINE STORE
12 TIPS FOR OPTIMIZING YOUR MAGENTO STORE
Product Page: Magento SEO extension
Blog: Magento SEO Blog
