Want to rank higher in search? We reached out to ecommerce experts and asked them to share their best advice. Read their SEO quotes:
Top SEO Quotes from Ecommerce Experts
Matt Janaway
CEO, Marketing Labs
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“Product descriptions are one of the most underrated SEO tactics and have the power to convert buyers and drive targeted traffic to your website through organic search queries. Product descriptions also offer the unique ability and chance to target new long tail keywords and rank for search synonyms! In their most basic form, product descriptions are used to highlight key product features and the benefits to the customer. Poor product descriptions result in fewer conversions and stop search engines from understanding the product. If you want to seriously growth-hack your e-commerce sales, stop all other marketing tasks and write some awesome product descriptions that answer customers questions and give ‘search bots’ something to feast on. At a minimum, at least write 5-10 bullet points for every product! Read this post to grab possibly the best product template of all time.”
Megan Krause
Content Manager, Vertical Measures
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“In regards to using content marketing to grow your business, my advice is this: You must have patience. Good content marketing generates brand awareness, drives traffic to your site and keeps people coming back for more — but it takes time. Our clients start to see a major uptick in search rankings and web traffic around the 6-month mark of regularly posting high-quality, search-optimized content that people want to read. Content marketing works, just remember to have a little patience in the beginning.”
Camilo Olea
Director, Olea Consulting
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“Building the ecommerce store platform is nothing but the first step. If you don’t constantly optimize it for conversions and search engines (SEO), it won’t get much traction. It’s a heavily competitive cyber world out there with millions of other stores, you must constantly review and optimize yours in order to be seen. Track everything – how people come to your store, what items are they viewing, how much time do they spend on each page, etc. All of this can be tracked using a variety of tools; Google Analytics provides you most of this for free, but there are other paid options that provide much more detail. Have a digital marketing budget for paying useful tools; sometimes there are excellent tools that need to be paid for, don’t expect everything to be free. This is your business after all, you need to invest in it to make it grow.”
Geoff Jackson
Director of Search & Operations, Clubnet Digital
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“Don’t cut corners. Investing the correct expertise, time and money into your project from the outset can save you a lot of hassle and money in the long-run. Ensuring you do your homework first and bring the right people or agency on board from the beginning is critical to the early success and growth of your eCommerce business and there are plenty of failed business owners that will be only to quick to explain the costly mistakes they’ve made, like horrific global SEO mistakes across their store causing timely indexation / performance problems or a lack of branding or conversion paths integrated into the build of a website with proper planning.”
Bryan Young
CEO, Retail Rescue and Digital Managed
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“You can have the best value for money products, … on earth and still not make a cent if people can’t even find your ecommerce site when they search on Google for the types of things you sell.
A great way of getting found on Google is to set up an info page on your site that gives away free information and tips that relate to the types of offerings you provide. Said page should feature the most relevant keywords for your industry and include an offer which links to another page, (a landing page), where they simply enter their name and email address to get the offer. Examples include a free ebook, free entry to win something, a bonus item or perhaps a discount if they purchase before a set date, and so on.
A blog page works just as well, if each post uses keywords relating to the specific item/service discussed in the post, and you always include the link to the landing page. If you want to have an array of offers, just set up a landing page to match each offer.
Use the info you capture from these landing pages for future email marketing campaigns.
Also insert Facebook and Google Adwords pixels into the landing page; in this way, if someone visits the page but doesn’t fill in the form, they will start to see your adverts everywhere they go, all over the internet.
If you are not sure how to do any of this, engage an expert, like us, to do it for you.”
Fernando Angulo
Head of International Partnerships, SEMrush
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“The best future strategy for almost any ecommerce nowadays is through the mobile channel.
No matter that the tendency still is very positive for desktop search traffic overall we see that the Mobile organic search traffic is strongest in the electronics (55.22%), jewelry (44.7%), travel (44.11%) and flowers industries. It is just not good enough to have good rankings organically on Desktop devices, it must also be in the mobile results.
Most Internet users, in addition to their desktop computer or tablet, have a mobile phone with access to the network. And unlike the first ones, the mobile phone is always on top of it.
Mobiles are and will be increasingly decisive in the buying process, and those online stores that know how to take advantage of this trend and adapt will have an advantage over their competitors.”
Sean Si
CEO and Founder, SEO Hacker
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“We all know that the biggest obstacle that e-commerce stores need to overcome is to increase their website’s traffic. If e-commerce stores fail to attract and keep loyal customers, then they fail the very essence of e-commerce – make the lives of consumers easier and hassle-free. So, how do they do this?
It’s easy. Lots and lots of outreach. If you can’t attract customers and build a following, then you can make use of a partnership between you and an influencer that already has a massive following. Bloggers, press, instagram celebrities, and many more. All of these people amass a massive following, and are usually open to partnerships.
So, the best tip I could give e-commerce stores that want their business grow to new heights is to spread their name through different channels. It won’t work all the time, but it will bring in a significant number of traffic – which can help you take off.”
Dan Kern
Founder & Principal Consultant, Kern Media
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“Ecommerce websites can maximize organic search engine traffic and revenue to their product pages, typically their highest converting pages, by ensuring that product pages have unique content. This helps influence Google and other search engines to give more value to your product pages and will allow them to better compete (rank) in the search results. If you sell products that you manufacture, then ensure that your vendors receive different product descriptions than the ones that you list on your site. If you sell the manufacturer’s products, then ensure that you rewrite the product descriptions so that they are unique to your site. Find more insider eCommerce SEO tips here.”
Tom Treanor
Senior Product Manager, Alexa Internet
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“The best and most affordable way to grow your business is to rank in Google for Buyer Keywords that are relevant for your products. These are terms used by searchers who are close to a buying decision for products like the ones that you’re selling. These search phrases often include terms such as “buy”, “store”, “coupon”, “reviews” or “price” (e.g. “buy art prints”). I often focus on these terms in my own content and have created a guide (and tool) to help people find Buyer Keywords here: What are Buyer Keywords and How to Find Them.
Once you pick the buyer keywords to focus on, use SEO and content marketing techniques to integrate the most relevant and high traffic phrases into your website’s content. This could take the form of a new blog post or buyers guide such as “A Guide to Buying Art Prints Online” or “A Comprehensive (Product Name) Video Review”. Don’t forget to promote any new, high value pages in social media and to link to them from other, relevant pages of your site. If you want a traffic boost, you can also advertise on these Buyer Keywords using Google Adwords or Bing Ads or promote any new pages or guides you create using social ads.”
Gavin Duff
Head of Digital Performance, Friday Agency
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“Start preparing your search engine optimisation strategy as soon as possible, whether you [own] a new e-commerce business or an established one. It is absolutely critical to establish strong Google rankings and visibility because this will likely be your biggest channel. The mania of Christmas spending, for example, only comes around once a year and SEO is a long-term play. So even though you may not yield those results this year, it will set the groundwork for higher visibility the following year. The same thinking applies to other seasonal opportunities – create your content now for those audiences in order to rank well when the time is right.
Also, find broken product pages or out of stock items and if appropriate then redirect them to desirable products. This addresses internal linking issues and also external link juice – and should lead to actual sales. Look to your suppliers and other opportunities for strong links to core products so that you’re ready and more visible during those busy periods. Continue these efforts throughout each year to be in an even better place each time.”
Altaf Gilani
Co-founder, Eminent InfoWeb LLP
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“If you [have] an e-commerce site, you are more or less dependent on search engine organic traffic (mostly Google). And for that SEO is a must-do. SEO for e-commerce websites is quite different from a traditional SEO. In an e-commerce website, technical on-page optimization is a basic necessity. Backlinks are no doubt very important but as you have lots of pages obviously you cannot build links to all the pages, so if you can make your website search engine friendly, you can easily ripe the low hanging fruits (traffic from long tail keywords) as they’re lesser competitive in nature. Few things where I would like every eCommerce webmaster to focus on are, my top 5 tips:
- Keep the URL clean. Rewrite the URL., and for god sake Please keep the “category name” out of URL structure for product pages, as a single product might fall in two or more categories. This will create duplicate pages on your website.
- Don’t copy and paste the manufacturer’s product descriptions exactly same, either rewrite it a bit or add more content on page (may be by adding review section or comment section) to stay away from Duplicate Content issue.
- Write unique Title Tag, Description Tag and Header Tags for each page. If you have a large e-commerce site automate them using variables. Automation is good sometime in SEO 😉
- Deal Smartly with your out of stock product pages, if product has gone out of stock temporarily then just hide it from navigation but do keep page live (with related products showing on that page). But if product has gone out of stock permanently then you should configure 410 status code (gone) to the page which notifies Google that the page has been permanently removed and will never return, or if you already know that product is temporary then set the date the page will expire using the meta tag, unavailable_after tag.
- Use Schema.org tags to show better snippet of your web pages in Google Search Result Page.”
A.J. Ghergich
Founder & CEO, Ghergich & Co.
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“Use your site structure to tell Google what’s important.
- Identify your top 25 products by sales
- Segment paid traffic and organic sales
- Scan your site with Screaming frog or Sitebulb
- Are your top 25 products receiving the most internal links?
- Are high value paid traffic products lacking internal links?
- Promote these products across your homepage, categories, related products widgets, and blog posts.
- Check this once per quarter. “
