The success of your e-commerce site depends directly on your referencing in search engines, Google in the lead. To gain visibility and increase your sales, here are 5 points of vigilance to properly reference your e-commerce website!
E-commerce has been growing steadily over the years. In France, the turnover achieved by the e-commerce economy reached 112 billion euros in 2020. This represents an increase of 8.5% compared to 2019.
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In just one year, 17,000 new e-commerce sites have been created. The competition is increasingly tough and it is crucial to be visible to buyers.
You will have understood: the success of your e-commerce store depends directly on its referencing in search engines.
So how can you do it? How can you improve the natural referencing (SEO) of your e-commerce store? Here are 5 tips to follow!
1 – Make sure your e-commerce site is fast and responsive
To optimize the user experience (often called UX for User eXperience) on your e-commerce site, you must respect two crucial points:
First, make sure that your pages load as fast as possible.
The longer it takes for the page to load, the more visitors and potential customers you will lose. They will not take the time to wait for the content to load completely and will leave your online store.
To check the page load speed of your e-commerce site, you can use free tools like GTmetrix or Google’s PageSpeed Insight.
Next, you need to make sure your site is responsive. This term means that it will automatically adapt to the resolution and type of device used to view your pages. This is especially important for smartphones, which have very different screen sizes than computers, and which are mostly used in portrait format for web browsing.
Contrary to what happened for years, Google’s algorithm now refers websites based mainly on mobile versions and not their desktop version.
The robots now crawl web pages by simulating a navigation on smartphone. They will check if the site is mobile-friendly by assigning scores on its mobile accessibility. Buttons or links that are too close to each other, elements that are too heavy (photos, videos, animations…) or content that is too small or displays poorly will all be negative signals that impact the SEO of your e-commerce site.
The technical quality and therefore the SEO of your site also depends on the way it has been designed. The choice of CMS (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal…) will influence the technologies and features that you can integrate or not on your site as well as its scalability.
It is important to study in advance the different solutions available to you, their advantages and disadvantages. Especially when it comes to e-commerce sites for which the question of the payment management platform is obviously crucial. Some platforms like IONOS even offer to take care of all these aspects to facilitate the creation of your online store.
2 – Streamline the navigation of your e-commerce site
The navigation on your site is a crucial point and not only for the natural referencing. The quality of the navigation will directly affect your sales.
You have probably been regularly confronted with shopping cart abandonment? To limit the number of shopping cart abandonments on your e-commerce site, you must offer your visitors a simple, fluid and user-friendly navigation. Don’t forget: every click that separates your customer from the order validation reduces your chances to close the sale.
For the good referencing of a website, the architecture is a central element. Your pages must be well connected and well organized. It is a good practice that each page of a website should not be more than 3 clicks away from the home page.
By ensuring that your navigation is optimal, you will give an excellent signal to Google regarding your SEO!
3 – Go link hunting
A well-referenced e-commerce site is first and foremost a popular e-commerce site. For Google, the popularity of a website is mainly measured from the number and quality of links pointing to this site.
To get links to your e-commerce store, you can contact bloggers/influencers in your field of activity to ask them to write an article about your store directly on their website.
You can also establish partnerships with websites in your field of activity or complementary e-commerce stores. Finally, within the limits of reason and taking care to check the quality beforehand, you can register your e-commerce store in directories.
These links will not only allow you to improve the natural referencing of your e-commerce store but also to attract more qualified traffic and thus develop your sales. We give you more tips to work on your netlinking on this dedicated article!
4 – Create (good) content
The key to good SEO of an e-commerce site is the quality of its content. You will have to create a maximum of content to position a maximum of pages of your e-commerce site in search engines.
Attention, it is not about creating low-end content simply to place your keywords. You must write content with high added value.
A content with high added value is a content that brings something to your consumers and prospects. To do this, make sure that the content you create for your site fulfills at least one of these purposes: inform, educate, solve, entertain.
In addition, remember to optimize the content of your product sheets. Especially avoid copying and pasting descriptions and images provided by your supplier!
Google and search engines hate duplicated content, which is not relevant enough. If you copy word for word the descriptions provided by your supplier to fill the pages of your e-commerce site, you can be sure that you will have the same content as dozens or even hundreds of other platforms that sell similar products!
Finally, if you publish very high quality content, you have a great chance to see it quoted on other websites and therefore to gain new links essential to good SEO, as seen in the previous point.
5 – Analyze your traffic and the behavior of your visitors
Improving your referencing is not done in one go. It is a continuous work. That’s why you need data to make decisions and implement effective actions.
For this, use Google Analytics and Google Search Console, two free tools that will provide you with enough data to optimize your website’s SEO.
Google Analytics will provide you with information about your visitors’ behavior: number of visitors, time spent on the site, number of pages viewed, most visited product sheets, bounce rate, acquisition channels…
With Google Search Console, you will have data about your performance in search engines, and therefore a visibility on your referencing. You will find the keywords that bring you the most traffic, the search volume of the queries on which you are positioned and the number of visits they bring you.
Thanks to this, you will be able to detect opportunities of queries really typed by users on which you position yourself thanks to quality content. You will also identify the keywords on which your e-commerce site is not well enough referenced and will be able to set up actions to improve your referencing.
Do not forget that the referencing of an e-commerce site is a long term work.
You will not see your number of visits explode overnight nor immediate results on your turnover. However, you can be sure that all the SEO actions taken today will have a considerable impact on your business in the long run!