SEO and e-commerce: 20 tips to avoid being penalized by Google
The SEO of an e-commerce site is essential to gain visibility, increase traffic and boost your conversion rate. An SEO-optimized online store appears in the top Google search results, and customers find it more easily.
Here are the top 20 e-commerce techniques and SEO tips to help you position your products and optimize your natural referencing as an e-tailer.
Relevant keywords to gain a competitive edge over your e-commerce rivals
1. Target the keywords your customers are looking for
Keywords are the foundation of an e-commerce site's SEO. Without them, there are no visits, and therefore no sales. Keywords provide useful information about your online products and services, both to Google and to your customers. The keywords you need to work on are the search terms that translate the intent of your potential customers, i.e. the SEO queries most frequently used by Internet users in your sector of activity.
2. Don't target just one keyword
The more products you have online, the more possible expressions are entered into search engines. So think about exploiting as many long-tail keywords as possible, and try to position yourself on several user queries to multiply your chances of being well referenced.
3. Spy on your competitors' sites
Analyzing the traffic of competing websites is a good way of improving your e-commerce SEO. You need to find out what your competitors are doing best on their merchant sites, so that you can exploit them to the advantage of your positioning and SEO strategy.
4. Equip yourself with a good targeting and monitoring tool
The Google AdWords Keyword Planner is effective for finding relevant keywords en masse, but to better target your SEO actions, you'll need a more precise tool.
A number of solutions offering SEO packages are proving effective for your SEO techniques. Take Ranxplorer, for example, which enables you to detect your best-positioned competitors on the basis of a semantic approach to your site, and explore their SEO strategy. With this kind of tool, you get a real customized SEO audit and a list of priority keywords to gain traffic.
Unique, high-quality product sheets for optimized e-commerce referencing
5. Avoid copying and pasting product descriptions
Google strives to offer pages with unique and relevant content, and does not tolerate duplicate content. So avoid copying and pasting product descriptions from your suppliers. Make sure you write them in a relevant way, with real semantic value based on the keywords of your SEO strategy.
6. Don't duplicate your own e-commerce content
Duplicate content within the same e-commerce site is also problematic for search engines. If several of your store's product pages reuse the same text (or part of it), Google will only index one page and ignore the others.
7. Don't write product pages that are too short
If your descriptions and product pages contain too little text, they simply won't be indexed. It's estimated that a minimum of 300 words is needed for Google to consider an e-commerce page interesting.
8. Use information management software
PIM software stands for "Product Information Management". In other words, a solution that makes it easier to manage your catalogs across all sales channels, without duplicating content.
One of the most advanced product data repositories is Afineo, which makes it easy to personalize and differentiate the content of your product pages for each new distribution channel. To put it simply, you have a single description for your different marketplaces: one for Prestashop, one for Cdiscount, one for Amazon, one for Fnac, and so on. There are no limits, and you can count on an effective SEO strategy with no duplication!
SEO best practices to optimize your online store's search engine optimization
9. Allow customer reviews and comments
Customer reviews and comments rank particularly well in search engines. They also make it easier for your customers to make decisions. 70% of Internet users often look for product reviews before making a purchase.
10. Exploit Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets are additional information (such as ratings or reviews) that enrich your product descriptions within Google search results. They are highly effective for optimizing your e-commerce SEO and increasing your click-through rate.
11. Optimize your SEO metadata
The metadata included in title and meta-description tags is crucial to improving your search engine rankings. Make sure you feed them with your tail and head of tail keywords. The same goes for your images, via alt attributes, title and description, to gain visibility and traffic via Google Images.
12. Take care of your URL structure
The URLs of your product sheets play a major role in e-commerce SEO. Your web addresses must be well structured and contain the right keywords to indicate to visitors and search engines the theme of each page. If one of your products is classified in more than one category, make sure there are no multiple URLs. Google also considers this as duplicate content when positioning your products in the results.
13. Prioritize your pages with canonical URLs
The canonical URL, symbolized by the canonical tag, tells Google which pages in your online store should be given priority positioning, in the case of very similar content, to favor your flagship products.
14. Balancing indexing with pagination and sitemap
Use pagination for your product pages: it's important to enable Google to crawl your site easily and index your products. Similarly, the use of a sitemap file (sitemap.xml file) guarantees better indexing and ranking.
15. Optimize the customer journey
Optimize your e-commerce site by making it easier for customers to use your site, and improving the user experience. Positive signals like these also come back to Google's ears for your e-commerce ranking and visibility.
16. Banish dead ends and errors
If a product has to disappear from your site for good, put in its place a redirect (301) to a similar product or at least its category. This will help you avoid 404 error pages, which search engines consider to be signs of poor quality . Similarly, record pages that should not be indexed in your website's robots.txt file.
17. Optimize your site's loading speed
Google has made it clear that site loading speed is now an extremely important ranking criterion if you want to be at the top of the search results.
18. Take mobile browsing into account
For good natural search engine optimization of the mobile version of your e-commerce site, think about making your store perfectly searchable on all devices, whether tablets or smartphones. Technical improvements are often necessary, and Google penalizes non-optimized online stores in the rankings.
19. Master internal linking
The overall structure of your site and the ecosystem of links between your product pages are very important for your SEO. Good internal linking not only helps to guide visitors, but also informs search engines about the relevance and organization of your e-commerce content.
20. Think external links
External links to your online store increase your authority and user confidence. They also improve your site's position in search results.
How to get the most out of your e-commerce SEO?
For optimized e-commerce SEO, you need relevant, competitive keywords and an effective SEO strategy. To best manage all aspects of positioning techniques, think SEO packages and equip yourself with complementary SEO tools.
Good PIM software for managing your content, and a strategic competitor monitoring solution help e-tailers to gain traffic and visibility, manage duplicate content and monitor the competition for better positioning in their market.
Article translated from French