E-Commerce Website SEO Tips For The Upcoming Holiday Season

Optimize Your Site For Mobile:

Having a mobile-friendly E-Commerce site is very important because the desktop version can be very difficult for users to navigate on a mobile device. Mobile now accounts for about 50% of all E-Commerce traffic, so it’s important that users that are browsing your website on their mobile devices have the best experience possible. It’s also possible to lose your ranking if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices. Back in April 21, 2015, Google began expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal, also known as Mobilegeddon.

Make Sure Your Site is User-Friendly:

Making sure that your site is functional for potential customers is very important. The last thing you want is for holiday shoppers to land on your homepage and quickly head for the exit. If your E-Commerce site is slow to load, or has a lot of broken links and 404 errors, you can expect to have a high bounce rate and very few sales. Poor site functionality and user experience can also affect your organic rankings. Google tries to provide users with the best experience possible, and if your website is not doing that, you can expect your organic rankings to sink faster than the titanic.

Product Descriptions:

E-Commerce websites usually have a lot of duplicate product descriptions; try to add unique descriptions to your products and not the generic manufacture ones that are most likely on thousands of other E-Commerce websites. By using relevant and accurate product descriptions, you’ll greatly increase your page’s chances of ranking higher in the SERPs.

Schema Markup:

Very few websites are using schema.org markup. However, schema is perfect for E-Commerce websites. You can use it to tell search engines more about your products, prices, images, reviews, ratings and limited-time offers. E-Commerce websites that use schema will out perform websites that don’t. If you’re looking to make an impact this holiday season, schema.org markup could really make a difference.

Optimizing Product Images

Optimizing product images is another way to get the most out of your E-Commerce website this holiday season. Remember, search engines can’t see images the way that we can.

Image Files:

When naming image files, use words that accurately describe the image. Instead of img324, use a keyword or phrase that is associated with the product, such as MacBook Pro.

Alt Text:

The alt text helps search engines understand what the image is about. As a best practice, try to use at least one keyword in the alt text. However, be careful to not overload it with keywords.

Image Size:

Image files that are too large can slow down your E-Commerce site and affect your organic rankings. Long page load times can cause you to lose sales and potential customers who will turn to your competitors instead. The online retail giant Amazon has calculated that a page load slow-down of just one second could potentially cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year. It might not cost you millions or billions, but could potentially cost you thousands of dollars in lost sales this holiday season.

Duplicate Content Issues

E-Commerce websites are known for duplicate content issues because they tend to have a lot of pages that are exactly the same or very similar.

What You Can Do to Combat Duplicate Content Issues:

• Utilize the rel=canonical tag to tell Google which web page is the original page
• Use robots.txt to block areas that create duplicate content from archives, tags and category pages.
• Add nofollow attributes to links that point to areas of duplicate content.

Product Reviews

If you want to get people to buy your products, you need to know what influences their buying decisions. According to a survey that was carried out by Constant Contact, 90% of consumers said that online reviews had an impact on their buying decisions. Positive reviews about your company, products and services can influence consumers to make a purchase on your website. However, if the reviews are negative, they are less likely to make a purchase.

It’s important that you provide the best service and website experience possible so that users can leave positive reviews on your site. Websites with positive reviews tend rank higher in the SERPs. If you don’t have any reviews, try to encourage your customers to share their experiences with your website.