Let’s start with statistics. The latest survey shows that 51% of Americans prefer to shop online in 2018. What is more, 96% of Americans have made an online purchase in their life, 80% in the past month.
It’s clear as a day: if your business doesn’t have a website, you are losing a bunch of customers. Do you have one, but don’t focus on its optimization at all? It’s almost the same as if it doesn’t exist. It’s a harsh truth: online business has its own rules, and you have to follow them if you want to keep your head above water.
In this post, I’m going to cover some best SEO practices to run your business online and be ahead of the competition.
Meta tags are signals that help the search engine understand what your page is about. It appears that one of the most common errors among e-commerce sites is duplicate content. Your Title and Description tags must be unique for every page on your site, even for pagination.
If you have identical tags on some of your pages, Google won’t know what page to show in SERP for one or another query.
If you’re not sure how to implement it, learn from your best competitors. Go to their site and check its meta tags. You can do it simply exploring their code. Type Shift+Ctrl+I on the page you want to check and then find Title and Description using Ctrl+F. Another way is to use SEO META in 1 CLICK Chrome extension. Here is what it looks like:
Check how they change descriptions for similar pages and come up with ideas on how to manage your own tags.
Here are few best SEO practices for meta tags:
We all know that keywords are crucial. It’s also one of the most important ranking factors. Google relies on them when choosing what page is the most relevant to the user’s query. Here are few steps to conduct keyword research:
Keywords are crucial, but it also important not to overdo it. Try to avoid keyword stuffing. Your optimization shouldn’t look like this:
Remember about friendly URLs. It’s the first thing Google and customers will see, so your links should be well-structured, simple, and clear. Like this:
URLs that contain random symbols and digits may seem unprofessional and alienate clients. Avoid using something like this:
Here are some rules you should keep in mind:
This latest study shows that 62% of smartphone users have made a purchase online using their mobile device in the last 6 months. It means that your website should be optimized for mobile phones.
Mobile friendly sites must have:
A blog is no longer an added bonus to your e-commerce store. Every large corporation has a blog, so it’s becoming a necessity now. Here is why:
I guess his “another one promotion tool” turns a lot of readers into their customers.
The Alt tag is an attribute in HTML code that describes the appearance and function of the image. It’s used in a variety of ways:
Here is what it looks like:
If you’re paying attention to user experience, you should create a proper structure and navigation for your website. Here is a good example:
You should have breadcrumbs for each category, subcategory and product page on your site. It helps a user find the right page faster and search crawler index your site and understand the content of the page.
Every single point of this list deserves a separate article, so it wasn’t my goal to describe each of them in full. My goal was to recall the best SEO practices so that you can check if every one of them is present on your website.
So check it out and remember that there are always a lot of new avenues for improvement!
Make your logo clickable to take people back to the homepage. Get logo design ideas here.