E-Commerce SEO Strategies That Help Outrank Competitors

E-commerce is a large battlefield for many businessmen, especially for starting entrepreneurs. It is no doubt that creating a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy can be a strenuous activity and require a lot of attention to be finished. In the world of e-commerce SEO strategies, visibility is everything.

Without being visible to your potential consumers, your business might not grow and lose a lot of revenue from this.

A search engine optimization strategy is established by businessmen as a competition where you, as an entrepreneur, are battling with co-entrepreneurs for the most visibility online.

This is particularly true for the first page of Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Most people browse within the first page of any search engine.

These netizens go beyond the first page when they are looking for a specific product or information. The average consumer only looks at the first five listings on a result page.

Being a part of the top listings can give you many potential consumers, which is why you need to spy on your online competitors. If you’re not part of it, you are missing a lot.

If you’re looking to improve your search engine rankings and be on the top of the results page, you can follow these tips to further improve your business’ strategy.

Check your site structure

First of all, you should check your website structure. Every site structure plays a necessary role in building the user experience or UX, as well as where you should rank in the search engine results page.

Each website should be made professionally to establish the right branding for your business online. One flaw made by most businessmen is making their online stores “too cute” up to the point where the site has many features that are not needed by the business.

A site for your online store is ideally simple, easy to navigate, and consumer-friendly. The single product page should be at a maximum of three clicks away from the home page.

With this proximity from the home page, it can help convert many visitors to buyers of your service or product. The more clicks it needs to get to the product page, the lower the conversion rate will be.

A site with great structure can help Google easily arrange all of your store’s products. Having a simple and systematized site can satisfy your customers and the search engines.

Optimize your keywords

Next, you need to use your site’s keywords on your website as much as possible. You need to settle on which keywords you want your site to rank on search engines, and it is needed to be optimized in your site.

The site should use the keywords as frequently as possible on your website or at least on the page you want to rank high on search engines.

Most likely, these desired keywords should be seen in the website title, web page title, headers, subheaders, URLs, meta-tags; basically, a very important part of your website that your potential consumers might read.

Also, these keywords should be implemented not only in the content of the site but also in the source code to rank in search engines.

Take advantage of the product page

When it comes to your product page, there are lots of ways to up your game in the search engine rankings. First, the URL can be helpful if it is short and concise enough to incorporate your target keyword.

Next, the header tags which are the words with a large font that are usually the title of the page should contain the target keyword of your product page.

Product descriptions are also a great way to give you an edge in the search engine results pages. It helps search engines to give more details about your product.

It should be thorough enough to answer any questions that may arise from the product details. Also, don’t forget to include your keywords in this part.

Image optimization is another way to boost your SEO rankings, and there are two steps for this. The first step is to have at least one of your images’ filenames should contain the target keyword.

Then lastly, the target keyword should also be part of your alternate text for your image. Metadata should be a max of 160 characters and also include your target keyword in the description on every product page.

Peek on your competitor’s domain authority

Just like any other business or establishment, a genius way to play the game is to spy on your online competitors. Every website has a domain authority or DA.

It is a search engine ranking score made to anticipate how a website will rank on the results pages. It is usually a number between 1 and 100.

The higher the score, the higher the ability to rank. The lower the score means a site is less likely to rank on the results page. Every site starts with a DA of one, and it improves along the way through many different metrics including the social signals, search engine friendliness, site’s content quality, and the number of internal and external links in the page.

MozBar is a beneficial extension that will let you take a peek on a certain site’s domain authority. Using this extension can help you find out different domain authorities of your different competitors.

This will help you set your expectations in knowing how much work and effort you need to exert in rising to the top of the search engine result pages.

Collect honest reviews from customers

Customer reviews count as word-of-mouth advertising, and it is considered one of the most trusted ways of marketing. Customer reviews kill two birds with one stone.

First, the brand’s credibility and equity are increased, and the trust of your consumers is built around these. Around 88% of customers online say that online reviews are more effective than personal recommendations when trusting a brand.

Second, reviews provide some texts the search engine can utilize in knowing more about the content of your product page. Studies show that these customer reviews can give a 10% increase in the store’s search rankings.

It is a resourceful way to include customer reviews of your products on your page as this helps boost your visibility a lot.

You do not need a lot of reviews to be posted on your page because studies also show that 40% of online buyers build an opinion or impression of business after reading one to three customer reviews.

Every good little review from your customers can help push your page up.

Checking your site speed

Site speed is an important factor in ranking your page in search engines. Google listed page loading speed as number 20 in the top 200 Google Ranking Factors.

This means that even if you have used an ample number of keywords in your page, designed an exemplary site structure, and used your customers’ reviews in your product pages, all of your efforts will put to waste if you have a relatively slow website speed.

About 47% of online consumers expect a web page to completely load in two seconds or less, 40% of these ditch websites that load more than three seconds.

Around 79% of online shoppers who have poor satisfaction with the website’s performance are less likely to purchase a product from it again.

Site speed matters a lot because as little as a second delay decreases customer satisfaction by approximately 16%. All of these statistics show that having a quick loading website is important in your search engine optimization journey.

Using the Pingdom Website Speed Test can help you speed up your site’s loading status. The test helps you determine your site speed and how it compares to other known sites.

This information can then be used to know what areas you need to improve to speed up your site.

Test and measure

Experience is the best teacher if you’re a beginner to analytics. All of the goals of the search engine optimization tips we’ve given earlier is to improve your search engine rankings.

However, you should also be wary of checking how your site is ranking because of your target keywords. Knowing your progress and its effects on your ranking are also as important as all other tips for improving search engine rankings.

A tool you can use is SEMRush which shows your position in the search engine result pages.

The information from this application may be very handy since it can give you some intelligent data that you can use in testing if your website is gaining ranks in the search engine results pages.

These optimization processes are always a slow process. It will not show instant results, so you must be patient with this. If you are not getting your desired results with your plan, it may be high time for reassessing your plan and strategy.

You may opt to revise the plan, such as changing the keywords and choose less competitive keywords. It could also be that your plan is just not aggressive enough to earn a top spot in the search engine result pages.

If so, it is an option to switch up your strategy completely.

The bottom line

Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. For example, you may not be able to imagine sequences of images very well, but you may excel in imagining other modalities such as smell, touch, and sound.

Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.

Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.

This blog was written by Lili Griffin. Lily is a freelance web developer from Sydney, Australia.

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.

It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

 When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. 

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

More reading on small business from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:

Is Your Small Business Coping With Technological Change?

 10 Entrepreneur Lessons You Need to Know

Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.