The Advanced SEO Guide For eCommerce Websites

Want to get more traffic to your eCommerce website? We know you’ve already heard about SEO, but have you thought about how you could step it up?

It’s not an afterthought, it’s the foundation of your sales.

SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation – is the process of improving the ranking of your website in search engine results pages. When your website ranks higher, more people will see it, which means more traffic and more sales. In short: the better your SEO, the more organic sales you will get.

Basic SEO for eCommerce is great to get started, but if you want to reach more customers and sales, you need to start using more advanced SEO practices. As one of the UK’s longest-running SEO Marketing Agencies, we know a thing or two about SEO, and here are a few advanced pointers we think you need to know

Here are a few more advanced SEO for eCommerce tips you may not have thought about.

Link Admin: Internal Links, Backlinks, Permalinks, and Broken Links

While keywords in SEO are key, there is a lot more to it than that. Rankings in search engines are also impacted by your links, including backlinks and permalinks. You should be spending time to ensure your links are not only in working order but of high quality as well.

Here are the basics you should be checking:

1. Check for Errors

Broken links make it difficult for search engines to crawl the site and provide a poor user experience. Also removing links to redirect pages cleans up the site, once more making it easier for search engines to crawl and understand the content on your site.

2. Develop an Internal Link Strategy

There are many ways of organising links on your site, however, the main aim is to provide a pathway through the site for a user to follow. However, every page holds value and by grouping pages of a similar theme, you can pass on a bit of this value to its surrounding pages.

For example, a site on beekeeping might create a hub page on making honey, then create pages on the topics of: What is Honey? How is Honey made? Where does the best honey come from? What affects the flavour of honey? If all these pages were linked to the original page about making honey, this could increase the ranking potential of the hub page.

3. Develop an External Link Strategy

Many search engines place importance on authority. This means other people think that your site and its content are factually correct and are saying something of value. To determine this, search engines look at the number of links back to this page and the overall quality of the sites linked. by creating backlinks to sites that carry a good level of authority, you can increase the authority score of your site, increasing the likelihood of gaining better ranking positions.

4. Set Permalinks

Some websites use databases to build a website, using dynamic content and templates. By setting permalinks to be something readable by a human you can influence your SEO, as the URL string can help inform search engines about the expected content on the site. this also provides a better user experience as a visitor to the site can easily identify the content of a page.

Stop Fighting Against Yourself: Cannibalising Keywords

Are you cannibalising your own success without realising it? Keyword cannibalisation is when you are optimising more than one piece of content using the same focus keyword.

What does this mean? You are competing against yourself on Google and all the other search engines out there. Instead of destroying your hard work, instead, you can try to improve already published content or aim for a different variation of your targeted keyword.

Mastering the SEO for eCommerce Game for Landing Pages for Products and Services

Now to dive deep into the nexus of SEO & landing page design.

If you are using your website to generate sales, it’s essential to build SEO-optimised landing pages. Instead of having your potential customers land on your homepage and click off, optimise your pages so they land directly on your product pages.

Each landing page should be focused on one topic, keeping the page easy to understand from an optimisation perspective. In this example, it means one page per product.

For more advanced SEO landing page tips, here’s the cutting-edge blend of art and science:

1. Keyword Kingdom: Beyond just primary keywords, harness LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) terms for rich, relevant content that search engines love.
2. Ultra-Responsive Design: Ensure cross-device compatibility to ensure that a user who finds you on their phone, can continue their interaction on a desktop or tablet. Going for Mobile-first design? Absolutely! But don’t forget about the experience on tablets & desktops, where conversions still thrive.
3. Intuitive UX/UI: Beyond aesthetics, your layout should smoothly guide the user towards the conversion goal. Balance form and function!
4. Speed & Performance: Google rewards speed. Prioritise minimalistic designs that use optimised or next-gen images, and reduced code/load, and consider AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for lightning-fast load times.
5. Engaging Media: Use high-quality, original visuals and videos. It’s not just eye candy; it boosts dwell time – a silent SEO metric champion.
6. Meta Mastery: Optimise meta titles, descriptions, and URLs. It’s your first handshake with the searcher; make it count!
7. 7️. Trust Signals: Sprinkle testimonials, certifications, and trust badges. SEO isn’t just algorithms; it’s about assuring real humans.

Need More Help?

This is just the start of a deep dive into technical SEO and how it can improve your rankings, and therefore your organic sales. If you want more help, we give SEO health checks to eCommerce sites to see how your SEO content stacks up. Get in touch with us to discover how you could elevate your SEO ranking with an expert SEO agency in the UK.