Having a functional website these days just isn’t enough. It’s the same as merely existing, and that won’t earn you much. Getting more traffic takes more than a pretty landing page. There are a lot of things to consider and implement to guarantee that organic traffic comes your way.
For startup and eCommerce businesses, it takes more than weekly updates on Instagram and a nice website. To truly improve your online presence and gain the organic traffic you deserve, it’s time to introduce the magic of SEO.
Search Engine Optimization used to be something complicated. To understand SEO, you would need to sleuth the web and learn intricate terms just to be able to get a rough idea of what it is. These days, SEO can be understood in layman’s terms, and there’s no excuse for you not to learn about it.
We get it. SEO can be difficult to understand. You might be wondering how you can apply SEO to your eCommerce business. To make it a bit easier, we’ve searched high and low through the Interweb and gathered these five SEO tips to boost your eCommerce business you can implement today.
1. No Duplicate Content
Most retailers that sell products from companies that produce them use product descriptions from the said companies. Although this is a great way to reduce workload from crafting individual product descriptions, it’s not exactly great for your eCommerce business’ SEO.
Duplicate content on a few pages is okay, but imagine dozens of retailers using the same product description. This can be an SEO nightmare for you because the changes in algorithms for search engines have caused more sites to be penalized for duplicating product copy.
To play it on the safe side and reduce the chances of your ranking going down, you should create new and unique product descriptions. This is time-consuming and tedious, but it will help you in the long run. Not to mention, it’ll help you stand out from the sea of competitors.
2. Make Interesting Product Descriptions
Product descriptions can be a blur. If you’ve been on Amazon or other eCommerce websites, you might notice lengthy descriptions paired with blocks of text. The occasional bullet points help, but boring product descriptions can be a chore to read, especially if they have complicated vocabulary and are too promotional.
The reality is, readers love clear, engaging, and digestible product copy. A bit of humor can also go a long way. Going out of your way and adding your touch to product descriptions can make the overall experience of navigating through your site much better.
Also, who doesn’t love reading some quirky product descriptions? Take this chance to be creative and craft some fun and creative product descriptions to enhance your visitors’ experience on your site.
3. Make Navigation Easier
There’s nothing more frustrating than going on a website and being confused about where to go. This may be due to the lack of a navigation bar or too much clutter on the site. So, focus on making your site’s navigation easy.
Make sure your product pages and other important pages you’d like to highlight are available on your homepage. This won’t just help your visitors navigate through your site. It will also help bots crawl your site. The key is to have a good structure so your visitors won’t have a hard time finding what they need.
Also, you could add a page where visitors can contact you if needed. Sometimes, an email address search can be a bit too much to ask for. A simple contact form or contact page is more than enough to provide your visitors with a means of interaction.
4. Say Goodbye to Broken Links
By now, you’ve probably realized that the focus is on a great visitor experience. Another tip you can implement is to get rid of any broken links on your site. For those who don’t know what broken links are, it’s when clicking on a specific page lead to a “Page 404 Not Found”.
If you’ve experienced this, then you’ll know how frustrating it can be to stumble upon a 404 page. To avoid this, have regular crawls on your site to help detect any issues. You can do this by using Google Search Console to help you crawl your site and find any problems.
5. Sound More Human
Search Engine Optimization seems like it’s solely doing everything in your power to optimize your site for search engines. You might think that writing content for search engines is a good idea. However, you should always keep in mind that SEO is ultimately about helping others find what they’re looking for in the most efficient way possible.
Some information is hidden in the crevices of the web, and it’s a shame if it never gets discovered by anyone else. With SEO, this information can be found by readers like you and me.
If you were to optimize your site with search engines in mind and create paragraphs of text with keywords that make little sense, it might help your ranking slightly. However, your visitors will leave your site feeling baffled.
So, when working on your copy for your eCommerce business, remember to sound human. After all, your visitors aren’t robots and would be more than happy to read and navigate through a site made by actual people.
Wrapping Up
SEO used to be a complicated subject to comprehend. Thanks to the Internet and the ubiquity of experts in SEO, Search Engine Optimization resources are easy to find and learn nowadays. There are many places to go if you’re looking to learn about anything SEO-related, from SEO facts to articles and even podcasts.
Although technical aspects of SEO require effort and skill, the tips we mentioned above are great primers for those looking to improve their eCommerce businesses through SEO.
Now that you have a rough idea of what you can do to boost your business’s SEO, it’s time to take action and start your SEO journey.
Ebnu Sudarso is the Co-founder of Milkwhale, an internationally acknowledged infographic production agency. Graphic design and writing has always been a passion. Over the years at Milkwhale, the company has created and published numerous infographics and great visuals.
