6 Pillars of SEO for online stores: Tips for reaching the top spots on Google – Learn the best SEO practices to optimize your e-commerce.
Internet search engines are part of
consumers' shopping journeys. They mainly use Google to research products,
compare prices, read customer reviews and, of course, find websites to make a
purchase. This is why SEO for online stores is so important.
With good optimization strategies,
your online store pages can reach the top of the search engine. This means more
visitors to your store, more potential customers browsing your products and
more chances of closing deals. Furthermore, positioning at the top of Google is
a sign that your store is a reference in the market.
To help you optimize your e-commerce,
with the best SEO practices, we've brought you some tips based on the 6
pillars:
- Audit and Strategic Planning
- Technical SEO
- Content
- UX
- Authority and Popularity
- Monitoring
Perform
a website audit
Start an SEO project for online
stores with an e-commerce audit. This is the time to analyze your pages and
check how your online store is doing in the search engine rankings and
attracting organic traffic to the website.
The result of the audit must be a
diagnosis of the online store in relation to user experience, content quality,
on-page factors, backlink profile, competitive analysis, technical errors,
among other elements of an SEO strategy. From the audit, it is possible to
plan.
Plan
SEO for your online store
Planning structures the entire SEO
project for online stores. Strategies gain better guidance, with the definition
of priorities, and are more likely to generate consistent and sustainable
results.
In SEO planning, it's time to define
all the project's strategies, KPIs , tactics and metrics, based on your
business's SEO objectives. Define where you want to go — become the main e-commerce
in your niche, for example. From there, establish the paths to get there.
Ensure
robots have access to the website
Technical SEO is one of the pillars
of search engine optimization. It is a basic SEO task, as one of its functions
is to allow Google robots to access pages to index them. And it is only with
indexing that your pages can appear in search results.
To ensure Googlebot access to your
e-commerce, check that there are no page crawl errors in the Google Search
Console reports. Also ensure that the “no index” tag or the robots.txt file is
not preventing the robot from accessing the pages.
Additionally, organize pages
appropriately into a sitemap and submit via Google Search Console. This way,
Googlebot will know which e-commerce pages it should go through.
Ensure
security and speed
Security and speed are other
important aspects of technical SEO, which are essential for user experience and
ranking on Google.
The security of user data, essential
in times of LGPD, must be guaranteed with the use of an SSL certificate and the
use of the HTTPS protocol, which uses encryption. In addition to protecting
data, these security signals also convey confidence in user purchases.
Loading speed, in turn, depends on
optimizations in:
- Images (compression and use of state-of-the-art
images);
- Codes (file unification and elimination of unnecessary
characters);
- E-commerce platform (server response time).
Do
Keyword Research
Content production, another
pillar of SEO for ecommerce, starts with keyword research. This task must
identify terms that represent good opportunities for the online store, in
relation to organic traffic and competitiveness on the SERP.
In general, you can work with more
competitive terms, which are more difficult to rank, but have greater traffic
potential. Less competitive terms are more likely to reach the top spots, but
tend to attract fewer visitors.
When identifying priority keywords,
use them to define content production guidelines for the e-commerce blog. Then,
work these terms into the pages, in strategic positions such as the title, the
URL, the beginning of the text, among other places.
Develop
Topic Authority
Topical Authority is an important
trend in SEO. When creating content for your e-commerce blog, try to develop
your authority on topics that your company dominates, instead of focusing on
just one or another keyword.
If your company sells pet products,
for example, cover topics like canine illnesses or training tips. On each
topic, you can develop a pillar article on the topic and other satellite
articles that strengthen that main post. This way, both Google and users
understand that you are a reference on this topic.
Pay
attention to Page Experience factors
In May 2021, a series of search
results ranking factors came into force, which Google called Page Experience.
They refer to evaluating the quality of user experience or UX, which is another
of the pillars of SEO.
Page Experience involves the following
elements:
- Core Web Vitals (loading speed, user response
speed and visual stability of the page);
- Mobile-friendly (compatibility with mobile devices);
- Safe browsing;
- HTTPS (security protocol);
- No Intrusive Interstitials (use of non-intrusive
interstitials).
Keep an eye on these Page Experience
signals that are essential for Google. In addition to pleasing the eyes of the
search engine, optimizing these factors offers a better experience to your
visitors, which tends to result in more trust for the buyer and more sales for
e-commerce.
Organize
information architecture
To qualify the UX of your page, it
is also important to optimize the information architecture of the
online store. The organization of e-commerce content is essential for the robot
to understand your website and for the user to easily find what they want.
In SEO for e-commerce, information
architecture refers to the organization of content into categories and
subcategories, in a logical and coherent way. A furniture e-commerce, for
example, can organize its structure by dividing the products into areas of the
house (living room, kitchen, bedroom, etc.), in addition to having blog,
institutional, FAQ pages, among others.
Invest
in Digital PR for virtual stores
In SEO for online stores, also look
beyond your website. It is no coincidence that this strategy is called off page
SEO, that is, outside your pages. There are opportunities to strengthen your
authority by gaining backlinks from other sites of authority, quality and
reliability.
However, Google doesn't want you to
buy these links. This should happen naturally, because the market likes your
products and content and recognizes your store as a reference. So, the ideal is
to invest in Digital PR, which consists of public relations strategies in the
digital environment.
You can develop a positive
relationship with other relevant websites through social media, in addition to
sending releases with news about your business. This way, e-commerce can gain
relevant links and demonstrate its authority to Google.
Create
linkable assets for category and product pages
To increase your chances of
receiving links from other sites, think of your content as linkable assets.
This is content of extreme quality and attractiveness, which is more likely to
receive external links, such as info graphics, e-books and more in-depth blog
posts.
In these linkable assets, you can
include links to the most important e-commerce pages, such as the best-selling
products or most searched categories.
Thus, linkable assets act as
intermediaries for the pages that you really want to value and that generate
conversions for your business.
Track
metrics and set the right KPIs
Monitoring is the last pillar of
SEO. You need to monitor the progress of the project to know if you are on the
right track and how you can improve results.
To do this, keep an eye on the SEO
metrics and success indicators that you defined in the planning. The metrics to
track are the following:
- Page positioning;
- Domain Authority and Page Authority;
- Backlink gain and profile;
- Organic traffic;
- Organic traffic conversion rate;
- Organic traffic transactions;
- Revenue from organic traffic.
Create
reports to monitor performance
Finally, keep your SEO work reports
up to date. Keep the history of optimizations and results to evaluate
performance over time, as well as identify which strategies are giving the most
return.
To build reports, you can rely on
data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, tools such as Semrush and
Moz and even Google Data Studio, which helps in creating dashboards.