Performing search engine optimization for an ecommerce website can get difficult at times as ecommerce websites are product based not content based. Content is the primary driving factor of any SEO campaign! Therefore, if you own an online store or if you plan to start one, you must invest time in creating valuable and brief content for your website. It is also important to power your website with a great design, easy and fast functionality and a powerful website structure for ensuring good user experience.
If your ecommerce store does not have a good ranking in Google, consider the factors mentioned below:
Improper On-Page Optimization Of The Website
You might be having various product and category pages on your website. Make sure that you have done on-page optimization for all the pages. Define the meta tags like title, keywords and description appropriately. All the off-page SEO techniques will work only if the on-page optimization is done perfectly for the website. The maximum character limit for meta title and description is 160 characters, create impressive and informative descriptions within the character limit and work on on-page optimization for all the pages.
Lack Of Important Product Details
Product information mentioned on your website helps to differentiate your website from your competitors who are offering the same product types in the search engine results. But that’s not the only use of product descriptions! Product descriptions are also for educating people about the product offered, its features and benefits. Quite frequently you will come across product descriptions that are too short and do not add any value. Google also likes a website that is useful for the viewers and adding informative product descriptions will provide the right information to your viewers and thereby it will help your search engine rankings we well.
A well designed product page should include the following attributes:
- A unique product description ranging from 150-200+ characters
- Video about the use of the product (if applicable)
- Minimum of three good quality images of the product
- User reviews about the product – both good and bad along with product rating
- Product-specific features or details mentioned in pointers
No SSL Certificate
Now-a-days everyone knows about the benefit of having an SSL certificate. If you have an SSL certificate installed on your website, good! But if you don’t have one, get it right away! An SSL certificate encrypts the critical information present on your website. When an SSL certificate is installed on a web server, the padlock and ‘HTTPS’ protocol is activated and this allows secure connections from a web server to any browser. Today, HTTPS has become a relevant search engine ranking factor as Google favors the ecommerce websites secured with an SSL certificate. If you install an SSL certificate and configure it for your website, browsers like Chrome and Firefox show a green light; this indicates that the website is safe to browse. In absence of an SSL certificate, browsers might show a security warning to your website visitors that indicates that this website is not safe to browse. Therefore, if you don’t have an SSL certificate installed on your website yet, you are losing out on your search engine rankings and on your competition as well.
Poor Page Load Times
Google expects your website to load quickly so that it is useful for your viewers and customers. If your website pages take a long time to load, you stand a chance of getting penalized by Google. In order to achieve faster page load times, it is important to host your website on powerful servers and sign up for a suitable web hosting package that provides sufficient resources for all the functions of your website. If your website has a huge amount of customer activity on a daily basis and if you experience some sudden traffic spikes; then the best way to ensure a fast loading website is to opt for cloud hosting. The cloud environment will take care of the traffic on your website and it will ensure that your ecommerce website is fast and functioning smoothly. With cloud hosting, you can configure automatic vertical or horizontal resource scaling for website uptime and faster performance.
Apart from backing your website up with a powerful web hosting server, you can also implement the following steps in order to ensure faster page load times:
- Leveraging browser caching
- Optimizing the images on your website
- Enabling gzip compression
Your Website Might Not Be Indexed By Google
If you have recently launched your online store website and if it is not showing up in the Google search results; then chances are that Google has not indexed your website yet.
How to find out if your website is indexed by Google or not?
You can find that out by executing the following command in Google search : site:yourwebsitename.com (do not use ‘www’ and ‘/’)
After executing the command mentioned above, if you see your website at the top of the search results, then there is nothing to worry about, this means that your website is indexed! Usually, a complete list of all your web pages will be displayed with the site command.
In case your website is not showing up at the top of the search results, then it is a clear indication that Google has not indexed your website yet.
How to get your website indexed with Google?
Google will automatically find and index your website with time but this can take a few weeks. Also, if something is wrong with your website, your website will not be indexed and you will not know about it until a good amount of time has passed. The best solution to this is to add your website to the ‘Google Search Console’ (earlier this platform was known as ‘Google Webmaster Tools’) and submit your website’s sitemap as well. Submission of the website sitemap will let Google know the website pages that you want to see in the search results. Google will also notify you if there are any technical errors on your website because of which your website or some pages on your website cannot get indexed.
Conclusion:
An ecommerce website has to face many challenges to get to the top position in the search engine results but if you take care of the basic important factors, then your path is going to be easier. There are a wide range of things that can be implemented in order to improve the search engine visibility and you can do it all without the need of any SEO company. The idea is to understand your website in a better way and you will know what works for it.
