Google recently came out and provided some SEO advice for online retailers, so we thought that it might be a good time to give you our best SEO tips for ecommerce sites.
As always, we know that SEO for ecommerce can be tricky. So, if you’d like to get in touch with the professionals, you know where to find us.
Driving organic traffic to your ecommerce store should most definitely be one of your priorities, especially as more and more people start shopping online.
Ambire thinks this is likely to be such a defining feature of the digital marketing landscape that we’ve dedicated an entire section of the blog to it, The Ecommerce Diaries.
Ecommerce is only going to grow. Make sure your site is SEO optimised.
What are Google’s Tips for ecommerce sites?
Well, basically, Google occasionally releases videos in the form of ‘Lightning Talks’ where they will clarify some of the trickier aspects of SEO for professionals and website owners.
Their most recent: an entire video dedicated to SEO tips for ecommerce sites.
Their first tip for marketers and website owners was to ensure the search engine has accurate information about your products. This is because once Google knows what you’re selling, it reformats the search results to help shoppers, well, shop.
Sometimes this is done on Search, but other times users will see this in Images, Maps and Shopping.
Some of this additional data includes text that gives the ratings, the price as well as stock levels.
All of this makes it likely that you’ll see an increase in traffic to your site. But, only if you manage to get there in the first place. So this is where SEO for ecommerce comes in.
Now, unlike other forms of content, Google is actually unable to pull data like product descriptions from product and category pages directly. It needs this information to be fed to it.
Think of Google like a very large and hungry baby when it comes to shopping – just keep spooning it in.
An example of data that Google’s bots aren’t very good at reading:
- Original price against the discount price
- Price of the actual product and price of the shipping
How do I give Google product information?
Well, unlike a real baby, Google prefers to be fed with structured data. There are quite a few options here, and you can use whichever one you’re most comfortable with.
However, the most common is to encode it in the page as JSON-LD.
The other option is to go straight through to the Merchant Centre. You can either provide structured data, or you manually submit all data, or individually update products with an API.
The Basics: Ecommerce SEO
Remember, as well as feeding your product information to Google, you need to keep on-top of the rest of your site’s SEO performance.
Simple Structure
When it comes to selling online, one of the greatest issues is just how much stuff ends up being all over your site.
- Simple information architecture system
- Make it easy to crawl by Google’s bots
- Structure blogs and forums in the same way as your site
Another thing to think about is the user-friendliness aspect of the site. How can a customer filter your products?
Believe us when we say that Google cares about this part too.
Take the time to sit down and brain-storm about how an actual user would organise their thoughts, and do the same thing with your website.
Once you’ve got your central themes:
- Internal and external links
- Set up internal site search and a site map
All of these technical elements are required by bots and users alike.
The Technical Bits
Sorry, I know SEO can get a little jargon-filled at times, but we will do our best to keep things as simple as possible.
- Exclude pages that aren’t meant to be crawled by marking them as such with robots.txt tags.
- Check up on the page speed and redirects.
- Keep the most important pages at the top of the information architecture so Google (and users) find them first.
User Experience
Keep users in mind at all times. How will they travel the site? How will they separate their search queries?
Remember that at the end of the day, no matter how much you fix the technical aspects of your site, the real deal is how great your user experience is.
They’re the ones who are going to buy products after all.
Ecommerce, as we mentioned at the start, can be pretty tricky – if you want to get in touch with Ambire so we can take some of the stress out of your SEO. If these SEO tips for ecommerce weren’t quite enough information, we’ve also published a whole article dedicated to the burgeoning ‘ecommerce boom’.
