If having an online eCommerce store that sells goods is your goal then it is essential and necessary to have an excellent search engine optimization strategy that will enable you to see your products to your target audience.
After setting up your eCommerce store, you have to be able to reach out and become visible to your target audience this is where SEO comes in.
Today, I want to write about the overlooked eCommerce tips that will boost your eCommerce website traffic.
Let’s begin.
Secure Your eCommerce Website With SSL Certificate
It is relevant and important that you secure your website with HTTPS encryption. HTTPS encryption will let customers trust your website more because they know full well that with HTTPS encryption their details are secured and protected from third parties and hackers.
Customers would not like to buy from e-commerce websites that are not secured because they will not feel comfortable entering their credit card information in order for them not to expose their card details to hackers.
Google takes down e-commerce websites with HTTPS encryption and also uses HTTPS encryption as a ranking factor, which makes it more important than ever to have a secured website.
Creating a Blog Page
90% of marketing is done through writing and when we are talking about SEO for eCommerce websites we are talking about creating valuable content for your target audience through content with the help of relevant keywords.
Write content that gives your website visitors value, since you have an eCommerce website you can write about your products and their benefits e.t.c.
Write blog articles that will give value and be useful to your customers. You must have a content goal; a content goal will help ensure a good flow and strong structure to your article.
There are many topics you can write about that will be extremely useful to your customers, lot of eCommerce shoppers are having problems with how to solve their various issues, and you can write content about how they go solve those problems.
One of the easiest and good way to start is to find frequently asked questions that customers often have about the various products you are selling and then you can provide an answer to them in detail.
For example; if you are in to eCommerce business and you sell a drilling machine, you might choose to write a blog post about the “types of drilling machines”
Having a shopping guide is another useful blog idea you can use for your eCommerce website.
If you sell a wide range of products that makes it different for your customers to differentiate, you can write an article that will help your customers in their decision-making by letting them the product that is best suited to their lifestyle.
For example; an online retailer that sells various phones might write a guide post about “The best phone for you”
Although you have to write great content to inform your customers on why they should be interested in buying from you, you shouldn’t focus on writing articles that are exclusively for selling your products.
You are building a trustworthy relationship by educating your customers through your content.
For example; if you have a site selling skateboards, you could write a blog titled “How to learn skating in three days”
Another brilliant option for writing an article is to write about developments and new trends in your business industry.
Write it in an interesting manner that will make it relevant to your customers.
You can choose any topic for your blog post and write on it as far as the blog content is perfectly written and informative.
It will help your site gain more visibility, bring in more customers and deepen the customer's understanding of what your site is all about.
This will increase your website conversion rate.
NB: The more in-depth and educative your content is, the better your chance of making sales.
Why you should have an e-commerce blog
Most e-commerce websites don’t see blog posts as an essential way of getting traffic to their website that’s why a lot of them waste money on PPC (Pay-per-click) advertisement without getting their desired result.
Having a blog page on your e-commerce website is worth it as it helps you to deliver entertaining and educational information to potential buyers.
A blog article is an effective SEO strategy for several reasons;
A well-crafted, SEO blog post can drive tons of traffic to your website, this means that you are missing a lot of online visitors if you decide not to have an SEO strategy in your e-commerce business.
Have you thought about video?
Although blog posts will boost your ranking, adding a video to your page is also a way to make your content visually appealing and attractive to demand your visitor’s attention.
The great thing about e-commerce websites is that they are perfectly suited for videos, and some of the most useful videos you can create to gain your customer's attention do not need high production value.
You can do a lot of videos like product unboxing videos, how-to-videos, product demonstration videos E.tc.
These videos will be helpful to your potential audience as they will find them incredibly helpful, and people also search for videos related to some products before they make their buying decision.
People also find it easier to digest information that is presented in a video than scrolling through a lot of text.
According to Forbes, viewers will likely retain 95% of a message when it’s provided to them via a video, whereas only 10% can be retained when reading it as a text.
It will be better if you can do some short to-the-point videos about some of your products.
Make use of video creation software like vimeo to make videos that will increase your user understanding and engagement with your products.
Your product videos are likely to give you an edge over your competitors that are not adding videos to theirs.
Crafting effective CTAs
Call-to-actions otherwise known as CTAs is one of the most important parts of getting conversion for your e-commerce website, they seem simple to some people yet an effective call-to-action button that drives conversion requires a huge dedication of thought.
The main purpose of the CTA button is to encourage your customers to take action after visiting a page on your site.
For eCommerce websites, the CTA button is often placed to purchase a product from the store and it can also be to sign up for a newsletter that will provide customers with details on the latest products in store.
Examples of CTAs on e-commerce sites are buttons saying “Buy Now”, “Add to cart”, and “Add to wish list”
Designing a CTA button also requires careful consideration, starting from the color of the button to the exact text that will make you achieve your desired result.
You should consider choosing a simple color if you want to choose your CTA color, it's best practice to choose a color that is simple but visually striking.
Most brands choose RED or you can choose colors based on your brand image but your CTA text and button must clearly stand out from all other text on your page.
You might also want to do A/B testing to test multiple colors and pick the one that has a higher conversion rate.
Keep the CTA text brief and straightforward.
Making use of commanding words like “Buy Now”, Order Now” will help you create a sense of urgency.
You can also motivate your customers with a more positive language; this will require you to be creative. “Order Yours Today”.
Sound really exciting and it also gives the customers a positive impression to focus on the product and its benefits more than the “Buy Now” copy (Which will likely make customers think more of a transaction that will make them part away with their money).
The same thing goes to the “Start Your Free Trial” copy which is more engaging than simply a “Sign-up” copy.
Another example is if you have a web form or survey you will like your customers to fill for you, “Get started” or “let’s begin” are more enticing than “Start Now”
You should also consider using the first person point of view instead of using the second person in order to make users feel they are in control rather than being asked to perform a task. “Start My Process” is more effective and enticing than “ Start Your Process”
Structured data for e-commerce sites
Structured data's purpose is to tell the search engine what your page is all about, this helps the search engine to accurately categorize your page and return it in the relevant search results to the users.
For example, by examining structured data, the search engine bot is able to differentiate between two e-commerce pages.
It means that a search engine bot’s can differentiate between an e-commerce page that is selling a laptop and a page on a technology news website that only discusses laptops but does not sell them.
Before the search engine can do this, you will need to add the required microdata to the page HTML code.
For an e-commerce website, the microdata is likely to include tags such as “product name”, “offers”, “aggregate rating” and “price”.
Product page markup is done by Schema.org frameworks as well as other pages on the website.
Adding microdata to each of your product pages allows Google to display relevant information about your products in the rich snippet on the search engine result pages.
Appearing in rich snippets will make the results appear more appealing to customers.
Using the right analytics tools
The use of the right analytics tool such as Google analytics will provide important information and statistics on all the actions that are performed on your website.
Information such as, where your customers are coming from, how they get to your website, the number of pages they visited before making a purchase, the percentage of website visits that resulted in a purchase, and product overview and sales performance.
Google Analytics will also tell you about the number of products per transaction and it will also calculate the average value of a session.
The data you get from google analytics will help you to tailor your marketing.
For example; you can get to know more about the product that sells the most, and get insight into the advertisement and marketing effort of your e-commerce website that pays off the most.
If your website has numerous visitors and yet has a few amounts of completed purchases, then your website might need a better UX/UI design that will lead customers to your product pages to take the required action.
Google Analytics can also tell you about the source of your traffic – if it is organic, direct through the URL, or from your sponsored paid ad.